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WILLIAM KENNEDY bill kennedy

William J. Kennedy, Professor, teaches the history of European literature and literary criticism from antiquity to the early modern period. His interests focus on Italian, French, English, and German texts from Dante to Milton. His Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature (Yale University Press, 1978) studies interactions of genre, style, and mode in lyric, epic, and prose narrative. His Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (University Press of New England, 1983), recipient of the MLA's Marraro Prize, traces the rise of modern pastoral from ancient models. His Authorizing Petrarch (Cornell University Press, 1994) explores the canonizing imitations of that poet's work throughout Europe. His most recent book is The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). He has co-edited a rhetoric textbook, Writing in the Disciplines (Prentice-Hall, sixth ed. 2007), and has contributed over forty articles on the history of rhetoric and literary theory to various journals and critical collections. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Liguria Foundations and has been elected to serve in 2008-10 as President of the Renaissance Society of America. His current book-length project focuses on figurations of economic exchange and transaction in early modern European poetry.

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