In Untold Futures, J. K. Barret locates models for recovering the variety of futures imagined within some of our most foundational literature. These poems, plays, and prose fictions reveal how Renaissance writers embraced uncertain potential to think about their own present moment and their own place in time. The history of the future that Barret reconstructs looks beyond futures implicitly dismissed as impossible or aftertimes defined by inevitability and fixed perspective. Chapters on Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline, and John Milton's Paradise Lost trace instead a persistent interest in an indeterminate, earthly future evident in literary constructions that foreground anticipation and expectation. Barret argues that the temporal perspectives embedded in these literary texts unsettle some of our most familiar points of reference for the period by highlighting an emerging cultural self-consciousness capable of registering earthly futures predicated on the continued sameness of time rather than radical ruptures in it. Rather than mapping a particular future, these writers generate imaginative access to a range of futures. Barret makes a strong case for the role of language itself in emerging conceptualizations of temporality.
"A smart and daring work of scholarship that speaks to some of the most pressing issues in the study of sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature today. Barret's argument ties together a novel critique of periodization with a sophisticated recuperation of the aesthetic, and her style of argumentation realizes an alternative critical model to the historicism that has long held sway over the fiel
Shakespeare Quarterly
"Untold Futures offers persuasive close analysis of the literary techniques and devices through which Barret suggests these writers were constantly 'capturing, pacing, arranging and reimagining linear time'.... [T]he future is destabilized, overdetermined, and ultimately, 'reliably, even permanently, ephemeral' in Untold Futures. This book succeeds in making us question not only the fixity of futu
Renaissance Quarterly
"The book is a shot in the arm for critics wondering about the direction literary scholarship will take in the years and decades to come. Fortunately, Barret makes a strong case that the future is wide open."
