The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II

“Volume II’s outliers make clear the most important point of contention in our return to theory: anti-dualism and what this means for human agency as well as for our understandings of the political and the economic, which also might be to say, of the historical. For this reason, all of us should read … The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II.” (Sharon O’Dair, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 69, 2014)

"For a bracing survey of theoretical developments in the field something one would need if she or he had been absorbed in some particular project for five or ten years without minding the critical discourse of the moment nothing is more economical than the second volume of The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, edited by Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar, and Bryan Reynolds, the successor to a similar book edited by Cefalu and Reynolds in 2010. The challenge of such a collection, of course, is that the contributors must produce an essay of literary analysis while discussing the theory it adapts, without reifying the latter too much or lapsing into predictability (because after all, 'theory' in a title like this usually means 'theory with which the reader is already familiar'). I am glad to report that the thirteen chapters here mostly avoid these dangers, led by Julia Reinhard Lupton's luminous essay that brings 'affordance theory, scenography, and architecture and urbanism' into conversation with 'the spaces traveled and tested by Shakespearean drama' (p. 146) and Drew Daniel's turn to Empedocles as an alternative model to the Lucretian Renaissance described in much recent work." Roland Greene, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900