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Article Excerpt
Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance by Jeff Dolven. U. of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 288. $29.
In Jeff Dolven's admittance, there is some "perversity" in the "central claim" of his book that the "growing crisis of confidence in the humanist program" in the late sixteenth century was manifested in romances and how they "experiment with alternatives" (10). This approach runs counter to criticism which regards romances as a genre in which the smallest recognizable cliches are repeated in this genre across different periods of literary history. Is romance, then, period-specific or timeless? The argument of Dolven's book tilts towards the former, even if it does not ask that question, and it comes short of making such a claim. This study promotes romance as a progressive genre of literature because it offered a competing model of instruction to institutionalized learning, through exemplary narratives and rhetoric, and by stylizing the phenomena, such as experience, example and method, which were constituent of the pedagogical theory and practice. Some of these topics are not new, but they are approached and examined from a new...
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