Blanks, Print, Space, and Void in English Renaissance Literature

Know about the book -

Blanks, Print, Space, and Void in English Renaissance Literature is written by Jonathan Sawday and published by Oxford University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0192845640 (ISBN 10) and 9780192845641 (ISBN 13).

"This book is an inquiry into blank or empty spaces in primarily English printed books in the period c. 1500 - c. 1700, as well as in Renaissance culture more generally. The book concentrates on the "substrate" -- the background of any printed work - which is often held to be empty or blank space. These spaces are also considered as "gaps" (where text or images are constructed as missing, lost, withheld, or perhaps never devised in the first place). The topics discussed include: space and silence; emptiness and absence; the vacuum; "race" and racial identity; blackness and whiteness, together with lightness, darkness, and sightlessness; cartography and emptiness; the effect of typography on reading practices; the social spaces of the page; gendered surfaces; hierarchies of information; books of memory; pages constructed as "waste" or "vacant;" blank forms and bureaucracy; political and devotional spaces; censorship; endings; fragments; terminations; and mortality. The book pays close attention to the writings of many of the familiar figures in English Renaissance literary culture - Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, and Milton. But the book also discusses the work of numerous women writers from the period, including Aphra Behn, Ann Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Lady Jane Gray, Lucy Hutchinson, Æmelia Lanyer, Arbella Stuart, Isabella Whitney, and Lady Mary Wroth, as well as introducing readers to many lesser-known figures and writings of the period"