MSA's Charles C. Whitney wins third annual Dietz Prize for "Early Responses to Renaissance Drama"
The Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Prize, established in 2005 by Rice University in memory of Professor Dietz, is awarded annually for the best book published in Early Modern studies. Out of a very strong field of 200 qualifying publications, the judges for 2008 eventually selected Early Responses to Renaissance Drama, written by Professor Charles C. Whitney and published by Cambridge University Press.
As the judges say in their report, Whitney’s book, the first full-length investigation of early responses to English Renaissance drama, is “a remarkable book.” Seeking out evidence of audience reactions in everything from commonplace books to casual allusions in correspondence, Whitney has extracted, “from what on the surface appear to be a jumble of fragmentary allusions, a richly nuanced account of the contemporary experience of playgoing in Early Modern England.”
The judges of this year’s Dietz Prize were Catherine Gimelli Martin, Dunavant Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis, Peter G. Platt, professor of English at Barnard College in New York, and Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor in the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. SEL, a quarterly journal published by Rice University that covers English literature from 1500 to 1900, administers the award on behalf of the Dean of Humanities and the Department of English at Rice.
For more about the book, visit its Cambridge University Press page by clicking HERE.