Worldmaking takes many forms in early modern literature and thus challenges any single interpretive approach. The essays in this collection investigate the material stuff of the world in Spenser, Cary, and Marlowe; the sociable bonds of authorship, sexuality, and sovereignty in Shakespeare and others; and the universal status of spirit, gender, and empire in the worlds of Vaughan, Donne, and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rajasthani princess. Together, these essays make the case that to address what it takes to make a world in the early modern period requires the kinds of thinking exemplified by theory.

Marcie Frank is Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.

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Jonathan Goldberg is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Emory University. His most recent books include Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility (Duke, 2016), The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (Fordham, 2009), and the co-edited volume This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature (Fordham, 2016).

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Karen Newman is Owen Walker ’33 Professor of Humanities and Professor of
Comparative Literature and English at Brown University.

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This provocative and wide-ranging collection of essays is a tribute to Jonathan Goldberg... it is a fitting mirror and celebration of Goldberg's own influential body of scholarship.

Modern Philology

From Spenser’s toxic slime to Persian story theater, with way-stations that include Marlovian foot-stools, Horatian friendship, and Paracelsian ecology, this sparkling and timely collection of essays visits a dazzling range of world-making aspirations in Renaissance and early modern literature.---—Julia Reinhard Lupton, The University of California, Irvine,

In essays ranging from the Faerie Queene to contemporary performances of Urdu erotic tales, from Marlowe’s footstools to cognitive theory, the essays take up the productively vexed nature of distinctions of gender and sexuality, and the porousness of the divide between matter and spirit, friend and enemy, animate and inanimate.

Renaissance Quarterly