“[A]n important statement in a growing critical conversation. . . .” — Lynn Enterline , Spenser Newsletter
“Even with its ambitious title, this book presents and illuminates yet more than is promised. Marshall Grossman incisively examines how the literary culture of Renaissance England proposed questions of identity (or selfhood) and then set about to answer them.” — Stephen M. Buhler , Seventeenth-Century News
“Marshall Grossman’s new work lives up to its Miltonic title through a brilliant examination of the emergence of modern subjectivity in English Renaissance poetic narrative and the determining effects this narration has for contemporary literary theory. . . . [L]iterary critics and historians concerned with the complex relations of language and material history will benefit enormously from Grossman’s powerful methodology, which historicizes rhetorical form in consistently original and often shockingly brilliant ways. Indeed, there are moments in the book, particularly the two essays on Marvell and Milton, where familiar texts are made new again through challenging and insightful readings. Perhaps most importantly, Grossman’s work leaves a reader feeling that literary history matters a great deal at a time when new forms of technology demand original modes of thinking. In this respect, Grossman’s book is not only brilliant, but it is timely in a way that few works of contemporary literary criticism can claim.” — Gary Kuchar , Sixteenth Century Journal
“This statement, with its bold articulation of details in the text to large conceptual formulations, has been won from a vigourous and exemplary self-questioning. Also won from that questioning is real and original thought about literary history. That is very rare.” — Gordon Teskey , Journal of English and German Philology
“With uncommon grace and precision, this book demonstrates the critical force and historical pertinence of formal categories of analysis, and it reveals through a focused lens the profound and lingering impact of Augustinian allegory on the shape of subsequent narrative knowledge and experience of history registered in the English literary canon.” — Lowell Gallagher , Modern Philology
"The Story of All Things makes a major contribution to the literary history of the English Renaissance and to the theory of modernity and the modern subject. Grossman takes up what are surely the most compelling and widely discussed questions in literary studies today. . . with an elegance that makes the book as beautiful as it is important, as pleasurable to read as it is necessary to be read." — David Lee Miller, University of Kentucky
"Compelling, provocative, original, and often brilliant." — Laura Lunger Knoppers, Pennsylvania State University