“Jeff Dolven provides a compelling account of the intimate but vexed relationship between romance and education. Many excellent studies of the defiant Elizabethans have arisen in the past twenty years, but none more fresh and unexpected, from moment to moment and chapter to chapter, than Dolven’s. Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance provides a worthy capstone to the new historicist readings of the erudite, driven, and playful Elizabethans and a new foundation for studies of the forms through which they tested the culture of learning.”<Heather James, University of Southern California>

Heather James, University of Southern California

“A fine study...Gracious and economic in both style and argument, this is a work of impeccable scholarship.”

Katharine Clarke | Times Literary Supplement

“Grounded in wide-ranging scholarship, the book presents theories of humanist education and reading practices, providing a rich appreciation of Renaissance romances by John Lyly, Philip Sydney, and Edmund Spenser. . . . The discussion of the complex ways the methods of humanist ’schoolmasters’ inform these romance narratives is compelling, forceful, and ’instructional.’”

Choice

“Dolven’s wickedly intelligent and often surprisingly affecting study joins a body of work . . . addressing the literary fallout of the humanist classroom. . . . This beautifully written book affords a copia of local insights that both teach and delight, even as they invite one to reconsider at a very profound level the aims and methods of pedagogy.”

Clare R. Kinney | Renaissance Quarterly

“Dolven’s book makes my ’must-read’ list for anyone interested in romance.”

Catherine Gimelli Martin | Studies in English Literature

“Both in its scope and in its relevance to the study of Renaissance romance, Scenes of Instruction is an impressive piece of scholarship that offers both a thorough historical account of its subject and a critical scheme that, appropriately, teaches learning in object and method.”

Ian Hoch | Comitatus

“Dolven investigates what it meant for a book to teach. . . . In scrutinizing this pivotal moment in the ancient, intimate contest between art and education, [his book] offers a new view of one of the most unconsidered--yet fundamental--problems in literary crtiticism: poetry’s power to please and instruct.”

Cahiers Elisabethian

“A deeply engaging study that advances an important account of Renaissance romance.”

David Glimp | Clio

“Dolven’s elegant and wonderfully illuminating new book is one of a number of recent studies that seek to read sixteenth-century literature in relation to the educational project of Renaissance humanism. . . . A brilliant explication of the gnawing counter-narratives that are eating away at the heart of Renaissance romance.”

Alex Davis | Arthuriana

“Dolven is a very perceptive reader and a very fine writer of academic prose, a critic who has important ideas to share about canonical texts and the cultural background that produced them.”

Goran Stanivukovic | Philological Quarterly

“This book should be given to every doctoral candidate in English as a model of style. Dolven is himself a poet of some distinction and this shows itself in the subtlety and intelligence of his readings. . . . In his impressive book, prolonged excursus, sensuous ilingering, and strategic, pedagogically attuned reduction all happily cohabit.”

Elizabeth Hanson | Journal of British Studies

“Dolven provides Renaissance literary criticism at its best, forcing readers to reexamine beliefs and assumptions about literature’s relationship to thinking and to the ideology of thought.”

Mark Rankin | Sixteenth Century Journal