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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Kate De RyckerORCiD
This is the final published version of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by University of Chicago Press, 2019.
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This essay considers the way in which one of the key literary events of the 1590s– the Harvey-Nashe pamphlet war– was structured around the function of a controversial author, Pietro Aretino. This literary quarrel was important not only in defining the more aggressive, satirical tone of late Elizabethan literature, but specifically because it marked a key development in the nature of authorial identity. For Elizabethan writers, Aretino had initially been known as the prototypical professional author, having garnered fame through the publication of his writing. However, by the 1590s he had become a symbol of Italianate vice in the minds of most English commentators. This essay suggests that this transformation of Aretino’s posthumous reputation was enacted by a process of ‘vanished mediation’ both during his own career, and after his death in 1556, and will argue that in an eulogy to Aretino from The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) Nashe was acutely aware of the ways in which Aretino’s literary history had been re-written. This attentiveness to the intervention of later commentators would go on to inform Nashe’s uneasiness, expressed most fully in Have with you to Saffron-Walden (1596), with the reliability of print to preserve his own literary fame.
Author(s): De Rycker K
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: English Literary Renaissance
Year: 2019
Volume: 49
Issue: 2
Pages: 145-171
Print publication date: 11/04/2019
Acceptance date: 15/08/2017
Date deposited: 15/09/2017
ISSN (print): 0013-8312
ISSN (electronic): 1475-6757
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1086/702634
DOI: 10.1086/702634
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