William
J. Kennedy 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
the Pastoral (Univeristy Press of New England, 1983), recipient
of the MLA's Marraro Prize, traces the rise of the 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, fifth ed. 2003), and
has contributed articles on the history of rhetoric and literary
theory to journals and critical collections. He has received fellowships
from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundations. His
current book-length project focuses on figurations of economic exchange
and transaction in early modern European poetry.
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