About the Author

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including Tyrant, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story that Created Us, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize); Shakespeare's Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. He has edited seven collections of criticism, including Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, for both Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England and The Swerve, the Sapegno Prize, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Wilbur Cross Medal from the Yale University Graduate School, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Arcadia—Accademia Letteraria Italiana. Carol T. Christ (Ph.D. Yale) is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and President of Smith College. She is the author of The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity and Victorian Poetry and Victorian and Modern Poetics and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of The Mill on the Floss and, with John Jordan, Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination. She is the recipient of an NEH Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Alfred David (Ph.D. Harvard) is Professor of English Emeritus at Indiana University. He is the author of The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer’s Poetry, and editor of the "Romaunt of the Rose" in The Riverside Chaucer and, with George B. Pace, "Chaucer’s Minor Poems I" in The Variorum Chaucer. He is the recipient of a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship and Guggenheim and Fulbright Research fellowships and past president of the New Chaucer Society. Barbara K. Lewalski (Ph.D. Chicago) is William R. Kenan Professor of English and of History and Literature at Harvard University. She is the recipient of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric and the Explicator Prize for Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise. Her other books include Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, Writing Women in Jacobean England, Milton: A Critical Biography, and The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght (editor). Lewalski is the recipient of Guggenheim and NEH Senior fellowships and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Honored Scholar of the Milton Society. Lawrence Lipking (Ph.D. Cornell) is Professor of English and Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University. He received the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Prize for The Life of the Poet. He is also the author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England; Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition; and Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author and editor of High Romantic Argument. Lipking is the recipient of Guggenheim, ACLS, Newberry Library, Wilson International Center for Scholars, and NEH Senior fellowships and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. George M. Logan (Ph.D. Harvard) is a Senior Fellow of Massey College in the University of Toronto and the James Cappon Professor of English Emeritus at Queen’s University, Canada, where he was head of the English Department for nine years and an award-winning teacher. He is the author of The Meaning of More’s Utopia and principal editor of the Cambridge edition of Utopia (Latin and English), editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Utopia (3rd edition), More’s History of King Richard the Third, and The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More, and coeditor, with Gordon Teskey, of Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance; he has also written a history of the Indiana University School of Music. Deidre Shauna Lynch (Ph.D. Stanford), The Romantic Period, is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature and Professor of English at Harvard University. Her books include Loving Literature: A Cultural History, the prize-winning The Economy of Character, and (as co-editor) Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees and Cultural Institutions of the Novel. She has edited Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Persuasion and the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and has won multiple teaching awards. Katharine Eisaman Maus (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins), The Early Seventeenth Century, is James Branch Cabell Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Being and Having in Shakespeare, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, and Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind; editor of a volume of Renaissance tragedies; and coeditor of The Norton Shakespeare, English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, and a collection of criticism on seventeenth-century English poetry. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Leverhulme, NEH, and ACLS fellowships, and the Roland Bainton Prize for Inwardness and Theater. James Noggle (Ph.D. UC Berkeley), The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, is Professor of English at Wellesley College. He is the author of The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists and The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing, and is completing a book called Unfelt Affect: Insensible Movements in Eighteenth-Century Literature. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society. Jahan Ramazani (Ph.D. Yale and M.Phil. Oxford), The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, is Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, previously the Mayo NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor. He is the author of Transnational Poetics, which won the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and of Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime. He is coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ramazani is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, and the William Riley Parker Prize of the Modern Language Association. Catherine Robson (Ph.D. UC Berkeley), The Victorian Age, is Professor of English at New York University and Academic Director of NYU London; she is also a faculty member of the Dickens Project. She is the author of Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman and Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, and has received fellowships from the NEH, the Guggenheim Foundation, the University of California, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and ACLS. James Simpson (Ph.D. Cambridge), The Middle Ages, is Douglas P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University and former Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. An Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he is the author of Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text; Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry; Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547; Volume 2 of The Oxford English Literary History; Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents; and Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition. With Brian Cummings, he edited Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, and with Sarah Peverley John Hardyng’s Chronicle. His Reynard the Fox: A New Translation appeared in 2015. Jon Stallworthy (M.A. and B.Litt. Oxford) is Senior Research Fellow at Wolfson College of Oxford University, where he is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature. He is also former John Wendell Anderson Professor at Cornell, where he taught after a career at Oxford University Press. His biography of Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His biography of Louis MacNeice won the Southern Arts Literary Prize. He is also the author of Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems and Singing School: The Making of a Poet, and editor of the definitive edition of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, The Complete Poems and Fragments; The Penguin Book of Love Poetry; The Oxford Book of War Poetry; and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Stallworthy has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. Jack Stillinger (Ph.D. Harvard) is Center for Advanced Study Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Illinois. He is the author of The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats’s Poems, The Texts of Keats’s Poems, the standard edition of The Poems of John Keats; Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius; Coleridge and Textual Instability; and Reading "The Eve of St. Agnes." He is the recipient of Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellowships and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. M. H. Abrams (1912—2015) was Class of 1916 Professor of English, Emeritus at Cornell University. He received the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Prize for The Mirror and the Lamp and the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize for Natural Supernaturalism. He is also the author of The Milk of Paradise, A Glossary of Literary Terms, The Correspondent Breeze, and Doing Things with Texts. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Postwar fellowships, the Award in Humanistic Studies from the Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984), the Distinguished Scholar Award by the Keats-Shelley Society (1987), and the Award for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1990). In 1999 The Mirror and the Lamp was ranked twenty-fifth among the Modern Library's "100 best nonfiction books written in English during the twentieth century."