Background
Andrew Hadfield was born on April 25, 1962 in Kendal, Cumbria, England, United Kingdom. He was a son of David Arthur Hadfield, a college lecturer, and Kathleen Hilary Hadfield.
University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom
In 1984 Andrew Hadfield received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Leeds.
University of Ulster at Coleraine, Coleraine, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
In 1988 Andrew Hadfield obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Ulster at Coleraine.
(In this volume of essays a group of historians and litera...)
In this volume of essays a group of historians and literary critics debate the representation of early modern Ireland by English Renaissance authors. The contributions deal both with modes of representation - aesthetic, geographic, literary, political, visual - and with the biographies of representative individuals. Thus historical commentary and textual analysis go hand-in-hand with biography and chronology. The essays are interdisciplinary, combining traditional methods of literary and historical enquiry with a range of new theoretical approaches to texts and their authors. There are discussions of the work of major writers including John Bale, Gabriel Harvey, Barnaby Googe, Edmund Spenser, John Milton and Geoffrey Keating in the context of Irish politics from the Reformation to the Restoration.
https://www.amazon.com/Representing-Ireland-Literature-Conflict-1534-1660/dp/0521416345/?tag=2022091-20
1993
(Strangers to that Land is a critical anthology of English...)
Strangers to that Land is a critical anthology of English, Scottish and Welsh colonists' and travelers' accounts of Ireland and the Irish from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, from the Reformation to the Famine. The anthology consists exclusively of eyewitness descriptions of Ireland given by writers using English who had never been to Ireland before and were seeing the country for the first time. Each extract, where necessary, is set in context and briefly explained. The result is a vivid, continuous record of Ireland as defined and judged by the British over a period of four centuries.
https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-That-Land-Andrew-Hadfield/dp/0861403509/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(For many years C. S. Lewis's dismissal of the sixteenth c...)
For many years C. S. Lewis's dismissal of the sixteenth century as a 'drab age' influenced literary scholars. Andrew Hadfield offers a challenging reinterpretation, through study of the work of some of the century's most important writers, including Skelton, Bale, Sidney, Spenser, Baldwin and the Earl of Surrey. He argues that all were involved in the establishment of a vernacular literary tradition as a crucial component of English identity, yet also wished to use the category of 'literature' to create a public space for critical political debate. Conventional assumptions - that pre-modern and modern history are neatly separated by the Renaissance, and that literary history is best studied as an autonomous narrative - are called into question: this book is a study of literary texts, but also a contribution to theories and histories of politics, national identity and culture.
https://www.amazon.com/Literature-Politics-National-Identity-Reformation/dp/0521118859/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(Spenser's Irish Experience is the first sustained critica...)
Spenser's Irish Experience is the first sustained critical work to argue that Edmund Spenser's perception and fragmented representation of Ireland shadows the whole narrative of his major work, The Faerie Queene. The poem has often been read in specifically English contexts but, as Hadfield argues, demands to be read in terms of England's expanding colonial hegemony within the British Isles and the ensuing fear that such national ambition would actually lead to the destruction of England's post-Reformation legacy. Where A View of the Present State of Ireland attempts to provide a violent political solution to England's Irish problem, The Faerie Queene exposes the apocalyptic fear that there may be no solution at all. The book contains an analysis of Spenser's life on the Munster plantation, readings of the political rhetoric and antiquarian discourse of A View of the Present State of Ireland, and three chapters which argue the case that the apparently Anglocentric allegory of The Faerie Queene reveals a land gradually - but clearly - transformed into its Irish "Other."
https://www.amazon.com/Edmund-Spensers-Irish-Experience-Salvage/dp/0198183453/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(What was the purpose of representing foreign lands for wr...)
What was the purpose of representing foreign lands for writers in the English Renaissance? This innovative and wide-ranging study argues that writers often used their works as vehicles to reflect on the state of contemporary English politics, particularly their own lack of representation in public institutions. Sometimes such analyses took the form of displaced allegories, whereby writers contrasted the advantages enjoyed, or disadvantages suffered, by foreign subjects with the political conditions of Tudor and Stuart England. Elsewhere, more often in explicitly colonial writings, authors meditated on the problems of government when faced with the possibly violent creation of a new society. If Venice was commonly held up as a beacon of republican liberty which England would do well to imitate, the fear of tyrannical Catholic Spain was ever present - inspiring and haunting much of the colonial literature from 1580 onwards. This stimulating book examines fictional and non-fictional writings, illustrating both the close connections between the two made by early modern readers and the problems involved in the usual assumption that we can make sense of the past with the categories available to us. Hadfield explores in his work representations of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Far East, selecting pertinent examples rather than attempting to embrace a total coverage. He also offers fresh readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe, More, Lyly, Hakluyt, Harriot, Nashe, and others.
https://www.amazon.com/Literature-Colonial-Writing-Renaissance-1545-1625/dp/0199233659/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(The question of ethics has dominated recent developments ...)
The question of ethics has dominated recent developments within the humanities. This volume brings together the most recent theories of ethics and reading and applies them to a wide variety of literary texts. Ethical and literary issues explored by the contributors include biography, sensibility, national identity, feminism, postcolonialism, religion, subjectivity and stylistics. Literary authors and philosophers/theorists discussed range from Shakespeare and Mary Shelley to Michele Roberts and Salman Rushdie, and from Kant and Coleridge to Derrida and Levinas.
https://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Literature-Dominic-Rainsford/dp/1349273635/?tag=2022091-20
1999
(The volume charts the intricacies of English Renaissance ...)
The volume charts the intricacies of English Renaissance literature, taking in a variety of themes including women, gender and the question of homosexuality; the stage; printing and censorship; humanism and education and rhetoric. Attention is also drawn to current debates in Renaissance criticism such as New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, thus the book provides students with an unparalleled foundation for further study.
https://www.amazon.com/English-Renaissance-1500-1620-Blackwell-Literature/dp/0631220240/?tag=2022091-20
2000
(Haunted by the dance of death, these plays contain powerf...)
Haunted by the dance of death, these plays contain powerful critiques of existing inequalities. A common theme throughout is the powerful woman who is more than a match for the men who try to silence her.
https://www.amazon.com/Jacobean-Tragedies-Wordsworth-Classics-Literature/dp/1840221062/?tag=2022091-20
2000
(In this accessible and rigorous introduction to Spenser, ...)
In this accessible and rigorous introduction to Spenser, fourteen specially-commissioned essays provide all the essential information required to appreciate and understand Spenser's rewarding and challenging work. The Companion guides the reader through Spenser's poetry and prose, and provides extensive commentary on his life, the historical and religious context in which he wrote, his wide reading in Classical, European and English poetry, his sexual politics and use of language. A chronology and further reading lists make this volume indispensable for any student of Spenser.
https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Companion-Spenser-Companions-Literature/dp/0521641993/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(Censorship is one of the key controversies debated by Ren...)
Censorship is one of the key controversies debated by Renaissance historians and literary critics. Commentators are divided on a number of questions. Was there once a concerted plan to censor all material hostile to the status quo? Or did authorities only intervene in periods of acute crisis? Did they actually read the material referred to them? This is the first collection that brings together the key figures in the field and includes essays by Richard Burt, Janet Clare, Cyndia Clegg, Richard Dutton, Richard McCabe and Annabel Patterson.
https://www.amazon.com/Literature-Censorship-Renaissance-England-Hadfield/dp/0333794109/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is an accessible and uni...)
Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is an accessible and unique anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, selected to represent the world-picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers in England. It includes not just the narratives of discovery of the New World but also accounts of cultures already well known through trade links, such as Turkey and the Moluccan islands, and of places that featured just as significantly in the early modern English imagination: from Ireland to Russia and the Far East, from Calais to India and Africa, from France and Italy to the West Indies. Ranging from Raleigh's account of the Amazons and Captain John Smith's story of Pocahontas to Coryat's cheerful encounter with a Venetian courtesan and Florio's translation of Montaigne's famous "Of the Cannibals," the volume also includes helpful headnotes, a substantial introduction, chronology, full bibliography, and seventeen original illustrations.
https://www.amazon.com/Amazons-Savages-Machiavels-1550-1630-Anthology/dp/0198711867/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(Shakespeare, Spencer and the Matter of Britain examines t...)
Shakespeare, Spencer and the Matter of Britain examines the work of two of the most important English Renaissance authors in terms of the cultural, social and political contexts of early modern Britain. Andrew Hadfield demonstrates that the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the plays of William Shakespeare demand to be read in terms of an expanding Elizabethan and Jacobean culture in which a dominant English identity had to come to terms with the Irish, Scots and Welsh who were now also subjects of the crown.
https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Spenser-Britain-Literature-History/dp/1349431915
2004
(Shakespeare, like many of his contemporaries, was concern...)
Shakespeare, like many of his contemporaries, was concerned with the question of the succession and the legitimacy of the monarch. From the early plays through the histories to Hamlet, Shakespeare's work is haunted by the problem of political legitimacy. Shakespeare and Reniassance Politics examines his works as political events and interventions, and explores the literature of the Renaissance and its relation to fundamental political issues.
https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Renaissance-Politics-Arden-Companions/dp/1903436176/?tag=2022091-20
2004
(Andrew Hadfield reveals for the first time exactly how Sh...)
Andrew Hadfield reveals for the first time exactly how Shakespeare was influenced by contemporary strands in political thought critical of the English crown. Although he was often seen as a conservative political thinker characterized by an over-riding fear of the 'mob', Hadfield argues that Shakespeare's writing actually emerged out of an intellectual milieu fascinated by republican ideas. From the 1590s onwards, he explored republican themes in his poetry and plays: political assassination, elected government, alternative constitutions, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the problem of power without responsibility.
https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Republicanism-Andrew-Hadfield-2008-06-08/dp/B01FIWXY8E/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(Volume III: The Irish Book in English, 1550-1800 contains...)
Volume III: The Irish Book in English, 1550-1800 contains a series of groundbreaking essays that seek to explain the fortunes of printed word from the early Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century.
https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-History-Irish-Book-1550-1800/dp/0199247056/?tag=2022091-20
2006
(In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the...)
In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' - writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen - than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work?
https://www.amazon.com/Edmund-Spenser-Life-Andrew-Hadfield/dp/0199591024
2012
(The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Earl...)
The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.
https://www.amazon.com/Ashgate-Research-Companion-Popular-Culture/dp/1409436845/?tag=2022091-20
2014
(The intellectual culture of the English country house is ...)
The intellectual culture of the English country house is a ground-breaking collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars, which uncovers the vibrant intellectual life of early modern provincial England. The essays explore architectural planning; libraries and book collecting; landscape gardening; interior design; the history of science and scientific experimentation; and the collection of portraits and paintings. The volume demonstrate the significance of the English country house (e.g. Knole House, Castle Howard, Penshurst Place) and its place within larger local cultures that it helped to create and shape. It provides a substantial overview of the country house culture of early modern England and the complicated relationship between the provinces and the national, the country and the city, in a period of rapid social, intellectual and economic transformation.
https://www.amazon.com/intellectual-culture-English-country-1500-1700/dp/1526127121/?tag=2022091-20
2015
(This is the first essay collection on A Mirror for Magist...)
This is the first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the age of Shakespeare. The Mirror is here analysed by major scholars, who discuss its meaning and significance, and assess the extent of its influence as a series of tragic stories showing powerful princes and governors brought low by fate and enemy action. Scholars debate the challenging and radical nature of the Mirror's politics, its significance as a work of material culture, its relationship to oral culture as print was becoming ever more important, and the complicated evolution of its diverse texts. Other chapters discuss the importance of the book as the first major work that represented Roman history for a literary audience, the sly humour contained in the tragedies and their influence on major writers such as Spenser and Shakespeare.
https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Magistrates-Context-Literature-Politics/dp/1107104351/?tag=2022091-20
2016
(Parental profligacy and the dishonesty of his guardian me...)
Parental profligacy and the dishonesty of his guardian meant that when Edmund Spencer came of age in 1732 he inherited only a fragment of the estates that his great-great-grandfather, the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, had amassed in Ireland. To keep himself and his family in a manner appropriate to their status Spencer had to find an income. His plan to publish the collected works of his ancestor foundered on the unrest caused by the 1745 Jacobite rebellion; posts in the army and the revenue proved just as elusive. In this collection of 120 letters, written to relatives in Wales, we follow his sometimes desperate hunt for preferment in Dublin and elsewhere, making full use of an extended network of patronage which includes, rather surprisingly, a number of Jacobite sympathisers. Along the way he paints a vivid picture of everyday life in eighteenth century rural Ireland, deploring bad harvests, making fun of extravagant spending at elections, dispensing alarming medical advice as well as passing on news about deaths and marriages, and gossip about elopements. This annotated edition of Spencer's letters will be of interest to both scholars and general readers eager to learn more about life in Georgian Ireland.
https://www.amazon.com/Gentry-Life-Georgian-Ireland-1711-1790/dp/1781883572/?tag=2022091-20
2017
(Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of...)
Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion.
https://www.amazon.com/Lying-Early-Modern-English-Culture/dp/0198789467/?tag=2022091-20
2017
Andrew Hadfield was born on April 25, 1962 in Kendal, Cumbria, England, United Kingdom. He was a son of David Arthur Hadfield, a college lecturer, and Kathleen Hilary Hadfield.
In 1984 Andrew Hadfield received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Leeds. In 1988 he obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Ulster at Coleraine.
From 1989 to 1992 Andrew Hadfield was a British Academy post-doctoral fellow in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Leeds, School of English. From 1992 to 1996 he was a lecturer at the University of Wales, a senior lecturer in English from 1996 to 1998, an acting head of department from 1998 to 1999, and was appointed a personal chair in 1998. In 1996 Hadfield became an external examiner at Middlesex University. In 2000 Andrew became an external examiner at the University of Sussex.
(What was the purpose of representing foreign lands for wr...)
1998(Parental profligacy and the dishonesty of his guardian me...)
2017(The volume charts the intricacies of English Renaissance ...)
2000(Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is an accessible and uni...)
2001(Strangers to that Land is a critical anthology of English...)
1994(In this accessible and rigorous introduction to Spenser, ...)
2001(Spenser's Irish Experience is the first sustained critica...)
1997(The intellectual culture of the English country house is ...)
2015(Volume III: The Irish Book in English, 1550-1800 contains...)
2006(Shakespeare, Spencer and the Matter of Britain examines t...)
2004(Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of...)
2017(The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Earl...)
2014(Andrew Hadfield reveals for the first time exactly how Sh...)
2005(In this volume of essays a group of historians and litera...)
1993(This is the first essay collection on A Mirror for Magist...)
2016(In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the...)
2012(Shakespeare, like many of his contemporaries, was concern...)
2004(Censorship is one of the key controversies debated by Ren...)
2001(Haunted by the dance of death, these plays contain powerf...)
2000(The question of ethics has dominated recent developments ...)
1999(For many years C. S. Lewis's dismissal of the sixteenth c...)
1994Andrew Hadfield descibes himself as a lapsed Congregationalist.
Andrew Hadfield is a former member of Labour Party.
On June 28, 1986 Andrew Hadfield married Alison Sarah Yarnold, a primary school teacher. They have three children: Lucy, Patrick, Maud.