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Stephen Greenblatt
History & Commentary
Stephen Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author whose expertise includes new historicism, Renaissance culture, and Shakespeare studies.
Biography
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author born in 1943. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. His scholarship encompasses Renaissance studies, Shakespeare studies, and the study of culture. He is one of the founders of new historicism, an approach he also calls “cultural poetics.”
Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of English Literature, to which he also contributes. He co-founded the literary-cultural journal Representations. His books include Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare, and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. The latter received the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
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Books by Stephen Greenblatt
The swerve
The Swerve recounts the rediscovery and copying of a manuscript of Lucretius’s ancient philosophical poem On the Nature of Things. It traces how the poem’s ideas about matter, gods, and religious fear helped shape Renaissance culture and later thought.