A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia

Download or read book A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia written by Anna Weamys and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994-11-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna Weamys's A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia is a woman's contribution to one of the dominant genres of her sex's readership in the seventeenth century: the heroic romance. Part of the considerable power and appeal of this work is its reduction of the heroic romance to a smaller scale. In its shorter length and its comparatively direct style, it avoids the fustian and bloat of the form. At the same time, it elaborates on the genre's stronger points--its playfulness and fantasy, its explorations of the nuances of sensibility--while not sacrificing its capacity for political statement. Weamys's Arcadia is an interesting and accessible story that, while it pairs well with Sidney, can stand on its own or be paired with other writers of romance like Shakespeare or Spenser. The first appearance of the text since the seventeenth century, this volume includes both a modernized and an old-spelling edition of the text.