Robert Stillman, a professor in the English Department at UT Knoxville, has published his fourth book, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism. This ambitious study examines the literary, religious, and political history of early modern Europe in order to understand the poetry and poetics of Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, published in 1595, is one of the key early attempts in English to defend and explain the power of literary art, and Stillman’s argument about the intellectual sources of Sidney’s perspective is an important contribution to British literary and cultural history. His book has recently been nominated for the Sixteenth Century Society’s Roland H. Bainton Prize for the best study on early modern literature published in 2008.
Selected Publications
Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Ashgate, 2008).
Spectacle and Public Performance in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Brill Academic Publishers, 2006).
The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins (Bucknell University Press, 1995).
Sidney’s Poetic Justice: The Old Arcadia, Its Eclogues, and Renaissance Pastoral Traditions (Bucknell University Press, 1986).