What is a self? Greenblatt argues that the 16th century saw the awakening of modern self-consciousness, the ability to fashion an identity out of the culture and politics of one's society. In a series of brilliant readings, Greenblatt shows how identity is constructed in the work of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and other Renaissance writers. A classic piece of literary criticism, and the origins of the New Historicist school of thought, Renaissance Self-Fashioning remains a critical and challenging text for readers of Renaissance literature.

Liam Haydon was educated at Queen?s University Belfast and the University of Manchester, where he wrote a PhD on Milton's Paradise Lost. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Centre for the Political Economies of International Commerce at the University of Kent. His work focuses on the cultural history of the seventeenth century, exploring the connections between the corporation, economic ideology, and literature.