Description: Marshall Grossman analyzes the influence of major cultural developments, as well as significant events in the lives of Renaissance poets, to show how specific narratives characterize distinctive conceptions of the self in relation to historical action. This far-reaching study of the development of subjectivity in response to historical change will interest students and scholars of literature, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and Renaissance history.
Review Quotes: "The Story of All Things makes a major contribution to the literary history of the English Renaissance and to the theory of modernity and the modern subject. Grossman takes up what are surely the most compelling and widely discussed questions in literary studies today. . . with an elegance that makes the book as beautiful as it is important, as pleasurable to read as it is necessary to be read."--David Lee Miller, University of Kentucky