True Relations

"This is a richly provocative book packed with stimulating insights, a work from which every early modernist can learn. Dolan's subject is as much the methodology of historians as it is the mentalities of historical subjects. She is a reassuring guide to issues that have vexed historians for the last thirty years." (American Historical Review) "[E]very scholar of early modern England ought to read this book. Dolan deftly cuts through the muddle that allows all of us, literary critics and historians, to acknowledge the limitations of our sources with one side of our mouths, while on the other side proceeding to read them however most suits our needs." (Shakespeare Studies) "At a time when the value of literature-and literary analysis-is a matter of public debate, True Relations is a carefully constructed and ultimately persuasive argument for the importance of literary critical methods." (Modern Philology) "A thoughtful and provocative essay on method as much as it is a set of readings of early modern texts. . . . Dolan's insistence that there are significant correspondences between the scholarly endeavours of historically minded critics (and critically minded historians) and the reading practices of their early modern subjects is a beguiling idea. True Relations is the kind of book that will make all its readers reflect on their own methods and responsibilities as practitioners of academic disciplines." (Review of English Studies) "Frances Dolan exhibits a heightened literary, historiographical, and methodological selfconsciousness, and invites other scholars to share and enjoy it. True Relations explores the ways historical actors in the early modern era presented information, in text or testimony, and how readers four centuries later render or interpret that material as evidence. It is concerned, suggestively and sometimes brilliantly, with the relatedness of relations, and the bases for supposing a story to be true." (Journal of British Studies) "True Relations pairs a methodological inquiry with historical analysis of specific case histories connecting fact to fiction in the early modern period. No other book to date has traced the particular way that scholars of the early modern period devise a practice of reading once they affirm the axiom that the 'real' is constructed. Dolan offers an unusually lucid and crisp tour of the social stakes involved in reading strategies and evidentiary standards." (Wendy Wall, Northwestern University)