In Untold Futures, J. K. Barret provides a fluent account of a fascinating topic. The question of temporality and its relationship to Renaissance literature is compelling, and Barret writes engagingly, providing illuminating, supple, and sophisticated readings of a variety of texts.
Jesse M. Lander, University of Notre Dame, author of Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in ... Read moreEarly Modern England Untold Futures is one of those rare books that will make an entire field view familiar material in a new and profound light. In prose that is at once agile and rigorous, J. K. Barret shrewdly reminds us that this period named the Renaissance is not just involved in the rediscovery of classical antiquity, but also in the effort to imagine possibilities for the future.
Michael Schoenfeldt, John Knott Professor of English Literature, University of Michigan, author of Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England Untold Futures is marvelous, both erudite and clever, and also contains beautiful writing. It offers an important new perspective on early modern historiography. Diverging from nearly all other studies of Renaissance conceptions of time, J. K. Barret uncovers a persistent interest in the earthly future (with all of its uncertainties) in some of the most important texts in the canon of Renaissance literature.
Jenny C. Mann, Cornell University, author of Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England Barret does a fine job articulating technical and historically sited arguments in accessible language, and she avoids contemporary theoretical jargon in favor of broad engagement with a refreshingly diverse range of scholarly approaches.
Choice
A thought-provoking, insightful, and carefully crafted book.
Journal of British Studies
The book is a shot in the arm for critics wondering about the direction literary scholarship will take in the years and decades to come. Fortunately, Barret makes a strong case that the future is wide open.
Comitatus
Barret's way of thinking and challenging the habitual perceptions of time are groundbreaking.
The Sixteenth Century Journal
One of the many things that makes this book impressive is the fact that Barret is not just a skilled intellectual and literary historian, but also an expert close-reader. She manages to weave big ideas through the complex particularities of literary language without losing any of the latter's nuance or energy.
Studies in English Literature
Thought-provoking, insightful, and carefully crafted.... At the heart of Untold Futures, then, is a challenge to familiar teleologies. Calvinist election, secularist science, the humanist recovery of antiquity: all are in play as these authors pose alternative conceptions of future time, but none of these developments explains early modern temporal consciousness as these literary works envision it. Barret instead credits literature itself for constructing new modes of temporality.
Journal of British History
A smart and daring work of scholarship that speaks to some of the most pressing issues in the study of sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature today. Barret's argument ties together a novel critique of periodization with a sophisticated recuperation of the aesthetic, and her style of argumentation realizes an alternative critical model to the historicism that has long held sway over the field. Untold Futures should be read by anybody for whom the 'literary' in literary history still makes a difference, and should be required to be read by everybody for whom it does not.
Shakespeare Quarterly
Untold Futures offers persuasive close analysis of the literary techniques and devices through which Barret suggests these writers were constantly 'capturing, pacing, arranging and reimagining linear time'.... [T]he future is destabilized, overdetermined, and ultimately, 'reliably, even permanently, ephemeral' in Untold Futures. This book succeeds in making us question not only the fixity of future times, but the very terms we use to describe this period in history itself.
Renaissance Quarterly
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