Madeleine Doran

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Madeleine Doran (1905-1996) was an American literary critic and poet who taught at the University of Wisconsin. Doran's work combined historical and formalist impulses. Her most famous work, Endeavors of Art, analyzed Medieval and Renaissance aesthetic treatises as a route to understanding the dramaturgy of Elizabethan playwrights. Endeavors of Art is also important academically as it helped to define the two major types of Elizabethan Tragedy, Italianate and Domestic. Endeavors of Art, as Doran explains, "is an attempt to reconstruct some part of the context of ideas, assumptions, and predispositions about literary art in which Shakespeare and his fellow English dramatists, at the height of their country's Renaissance, must have worked, and to suggest ways in which these things may have helped shape their art." ^[1]