Generic Innovation in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

[headline]Offers a new account of generic innovation in the drama of Early Modern England Traditional accounts of the development of the early modern stage describe a movement from crude and formless plays written in clunky or antiquated language to the blank verse drama of the later 1580s, which in turn leads to the theatre's apotheosis in the advent of Shakespeare. Discarding this teleological narrative and taking methodological cues from Pierre Bourdieu and Mikhail Bakhtin, Edward Gieskes strives to understand generic change in terms of particular moments of change, rather than in terms of a narrative whose ending is already known. Examining a series of moments where the generic system appears to have shifted, Edward Gieskes seeks to uncover how genre functioned in early modern theatre across multiple genres and to understand change and innovation in terms of competition within the dramatic field. [bio]Edward Gieskes is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. His publications include Representing the Professions. (2006) and Writing Robert Greene: New Essays on England's First Notorious Professional Writer. (with Kirk Melnikoff, 2008).