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Article: Time's Purples Masquers: Stars and the Afterlife in Renaissance English Literature.(Review)
- Article from:
- Renaissance Quarterly
- Article date:
- December 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 The Renaissance Society of America. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Alastair Fowler. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. viii + 171 pp. $52. ISBN: n.a.
Alastair Fowler's erudite new book explores Renaissance concepts of fame and immortality. Countering the narratives of rupture and discontinuity which underpin much New Historicist scholarship and seeking to emphasize the importance of religion in Renaissance culture, Fowler contends that "it cannot be appropriate to describe the Renaissance as a secular movement, or as a decentralization" (9). By examining Renaissance writers' preoccupation with stellification - an individual's posthumous translation to the stars - Fowler seeks to demonstrate that "far from 'displacing' religion, ...