Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600 Books

Book SynopsisRobert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde first appeared in 1886. Readers at the time commented on three major influences at work on the text: Darwinism, the Bible, and Platonism. With the passage of time commentators have tended to focus on either the Darwinian or the biblical implications surrounding Hyde, and the Platonic implications have been more or less overlooked. For a full understanding of Hyde all three must be considered; and they must all be considered together. This book locates Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edward Hyde within the history of ideas. It examines a range of texts from earlier literature involving apes or ape-like creatures, thereby revealing a tradition which explores and questions the origins of mankind – theological, philosophical, and scientific – in an attempt to account for the presence of our lower impulses. The chosen texts show that, as knowledge of the natural world increases through exploration and scientific learning, earlier ways of looking at the world have accommodated new ideas by absorbing the new and incorporating it into the old mythological framework. The author demonstrates how this tradition feeds naturally into Stevenson’s text, providing a Darwinian–biblical–Platonic context within which to examine Hyde.Table of ContentsContents: Platonic Evolution, Spenser, More, Milton, Donne – Quo Vadis, Maiah Yahoo? – The Wild Man, the Noble Savage, and the Child of Nature – Of Apes and Peacocks – Charles Kingsley: The Missing Link – Hyde the Wild Man – The Darwinian Hyde – Hyde, Milton, and the Bible – The Platonic Hyde – Olalla and Hyde: Kinship with the Dust.

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Book SynopsisThis collection of essays, written by scholars from all over Europe, explores the cultural meanings of women leaving home. Although all the chapters analyse writings in English, the volume aims to put the narrative element of home-leaving into a European context by investigating travel in various directions: from England to somewhere abroad, from the (former) colonies to the (former) imperial centre or simply within a psychic space. The female figures discussed in the volume leave home for various reasons – to go into exile, to challenge orthodox conceptions of femininity, to travel for pleasure or out of curiosity – but ultimately each of them has to face questions of the definitions of home, belonging and otherness. Consequently, the essays in this collection focus on how the cross-cultural encounters implicated in discourses of race, gender, nation and religion affect female identity. The ‘protagonists’ of these narratives range from mythical heroines to early modern Protestant refugees to fictitious and historical figures from the past 200 years. The discussion throughout is informed by contemporary theories of gender, literary and cultural studies.Table of ContentsContents: Patsy Stoneman/Angela Leighton: General Editors’ Preface – Nóra Séllei: Introduction: She’s Leaving Home – Gudrun-Axeli Knapp: Race, Class, Gender: Reclaiming Baggage in Fast Travelling Theories – Gabriele Griffin: Figuring Home: Identity and Belonging in the Work of Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain – Julia Salmerón: ‘Yes, I’m goin to Europe to make a mint’: The Painful Journey of Saartjie Baartman and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus – Irén E. Annus: The Unheroine: The Figure of the Spinster in Doris Lessing’s ‘The Trinket Box’ – Nóra Séllei: Travelling Agency: Female Subjectivity in Narratives of Home-Leaving and in Foreign Parts – Valerie Sanders: Writing Elopement: Secrecy and Sensation – Andrew Monnickendam: Running away from Home, Business is the Only Answer: Deconstructing the Love-Plot in Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen (1890) – Tamás Bényei: Heroes and Home-Makers: Tropes of Travelling in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry – Anna Kérchy: Feminist Psychogeography and Jeanette Winterson’s Passions – Ann Hoag: Remapping Home: Gender and Nation in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon – Annamaria Lamarra: Leaving Home and Living Through War – Andrea P. Balogh: ‘Home Sweet Home’: Eavan Boland and the Trope of Exile at the Intersection of Nation, Class and Gender – Eilish Rooney: Leaving Home and Staying Put: Intersectional Narratives from Northern Ireland’s Transition – Milada Franková: Leto Had to Leave Home: Across Europe from Mythology to the Third Millennium – June Waudby: Anne Locke: Exile, Protest and Propaganda – Erin Henriksen: ‘Two Quaker Housewives’ and Their Books: Cross-Cultural Encounters and Local Reading Communities in Early Modern Europe – Eleonora Federici: Flying Away from Home: Amy Johnson.

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Book SynopsisGeoffrey Hill is one of the most significant poets currently at work in the English language. The essays gathered in this book present a number of new contexts in which to explore a wide range of his writings, from the poems he wrote as an undergraduate to the recent volumes A Treatise of Civil Power (2007) and Collected Critical Writings (2008). Connections are made between the early and the later poetry, and between the poetry and the criticism, and archival materials are considered along with the published texts. The essays also make comparisons across disciplines, discussing Hill’s work in relation to theology, philosophy and intellectual history, to literature from other languages, and to the other arts. In doing so, they cast fresh light upon Hill’s dense, original and sometimes challenging writings, opening them up in new ways for all readers of his work.Table of ContentsContents: Steven Matthews: Hill’s Uncollected Oxford Poems – Piers Pennington: The Manuscripts and Composition of ‘Genesis’ – Charles Lock: Beside the Point: A Diligence of Accidentals – Kathryn Murphy: Hill’s Conversions – Michael Molan: Milton and Eliot in the Work of Geoffrey Hill – Matthew Sperling: Hill and Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought – Marcus Waithe: Hill, Ruskin, and Intrinsic Value – Sheridan Burnside: The ‘Tenebrae’ Poems of Paul Celan and Geoffrey Hill – Matthew Paskins: Hill and Gillian Rose – Hugh Haughton: ‘Music’s Invocation’: Music and History in Geoffrey Hill – Kenneth Haynes: ‘Perplexed Persistence’: The Criticism of Geoffrey Hill – Geoffrey Hill: from Odi Barbare, XXI-XXII.

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Book SynopsisIn the early modern period, there have been a vigorous debate in the public arena on the nature of women and their place in society. For instance, most women had been excluded from inheritance. The author of this work is shedding light on how the notion of inheritance intrudes into the literature produced by women of the period. She analyses the tropes of inheritance and appropriation as they are evidenced in the works of women from the upper strata of society – women such as Mary (Sidney) Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, and Lady Mary Wroth, both scions of the renowned Sidney family – and also those produced by those from lower down in the social spectrum, such as Aemilia Lanyer and Isabella Whitney.Table of ContentsContents: Aemilia Lanyer: The Description of Cooke-ham - The Dedications - Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum – Isabella Whitney: The Copy of a Letter - A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posy – Mary (Sidney) Herbert: Even now that Care - To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney - The Psalmes – Mary Wroth: From Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: A Crowne of Sonnetts dedicated to Love - The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania.

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Book SynopsisGazing in Useless Wonder focuses on utopias as self-referential texts that literally have to constitute themselves as imaginary or intentional entities before they can work as vehicles for socio-political ideas. Foregrounding the construction of utopian fictions defines both the perspective and the differentiation of the analytically significant elements, so that the traditionally dominant topics such as the nature and origins of the ideologies behind the construction of the ideal model are taken into account only insofar as they contribute to the aesthetic effect of the utopian construct as a whole. The organising principle of the early modern utopia involves two different modes of presentation: the narrative frame and the ekphrastic description of the ideal state, each possessing an aesthetic function realised according to different principles, with the ideal image constructed in accordance with the dominant aesthetic norms of the period pertaining to the visual arts, such as harmony, symmetry, alleged perfection, and timelessness. Despite variations, especially in the thematic-ideological domain, the dominant genre pattern that emerged as a result of the simplification of the complex semantics of Thomas More’s Utopia in the early modern period is taken here as forming a single synchrony in the history of utopian fiction-making.Trade Review«Artur Blaim’s ‘Gazing in Useless Wonder’ is absolutely essential reading for anyone trying to understand this period and its utopian texts. This book is important because it includes discussion of many neglected texts such as ‘Siuqila’ (1580), ‘The Capacity and Extent of Human Understanding ’ (1745), ‘The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman’ (1778), ‘The Admirable Travels of Messieurs Thomas Jenkins and David Lowellin Through the Unknown Tracts of Africa’ (1783), and ‘A True and Faithful Account of Veritas ’ (1790) as well as the better known texts. Blaim’s treatment of these early texts is the most systematic analysis available of the ways in which utopian narratives are structured and carry their message.» (Lyman Tower Sargent, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, author of ‘Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction ’(2010)) «This is the most detailed, original and sophisticated study of early modern and eighteenth-century British literary utopias to be published in many years, and offers an excellent introduction to a large number of texts and traditions, as well as the methodological and theoretical debates surrounding their interpretation.» (Gregory Claeys, Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, editor of ‘The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature ’(2010))Table of ContentsContents: Thomas More’s De optimo reipublicae statu deque noua insula Vtopia and the Emergence of Utopian Fictions – The Margins of Utopia – Utopian Spaces and Places – Utopian Institutions, Utopian People – Dystopian/Negative Worlds: The Paradigm Reversed.

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Book SynopsisIn 1938 tyranny attained unprecedented power: the Nazis annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, the Soviet purge reached its peak and the persecution of the Jews escalated into the horror of Kristallnacht. Nabokov frequently engaged with the subject of totalitarianism, but in 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, he responded to the political situation with an intensity unmatched at any other time in his career, writing three stories, a play and a novel, each warning of the danger of leaving tyranny unopposed. Offering fresh insights into all of Nabokov’s works of 1938, this book focuses on a major new reading of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, revealing that Nabokov’s seemingly non-political novel contains a hidden subtext of espionage and totalitarian tyranny. Drawing on the popular British authors he admired as a boy, Nabokov weaves a covert narrative reminiscent of a Sherlock Holmes story, in which Sebastian Knight, a latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel, uncovers a world of Wellsian scientific misadventure that foreshadows the Holocaust. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight emerges as an antitotalitarian masterpiece, in which the «absolute solution» is both a dire prediction of the future and Nabokov’s artistic answer to the problem of the time.Table of ContentsContents: January, and Chapter 5 of The Gift – January to March, and the Genesis of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – April to May, and «Tyrants Destroyed» – May to September, and The Waltz Invention – October, and «The Visit to the Museum» – November, and «Lik» – December, and the Writing of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – Re-reading The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: The Covert Level Uncovered – Decrypting The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: Notes and Commentary.

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Book SynopsisThis book provides a cognitive analysis of the poetry of George Herbert (1593- 1633). From Herbert’s own thinking, recorded in his prose treatises, can be deduced that his poems should serve a specific function: teaching self-knowledge to his readers. Self-knowledge is a necessary skill, to be applied in one’s strife for ‘temperance’: the regulation of body, house, church, mind, and community. To Herbert, the meaning of his poems is subservient to this function: poetry should aid his readers to temper their lives. The cognitive framework applied here can serve to explain this function. Following Merlin Donald’s theory of cognitive evolution, art serves the purpose of mimetic meta-cognition: a specific cognitive strategy at the disposal of a county priest. Moreover, a cognitive framework can serve to explain why the Herbert-tradition has paid so little attention to this artistic function; this tradition operates within specific confines, the same confines that Herbert sought to compensate with his poetry and his thinking.

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Book SynopsisThis fourth volume of essays under the title The Shaping of English Poetry consolidates the work of the previous three volumes on the great subjects of English literature in the Medieval and Renaissance periods. The Norman Conquest of England built upon the rich foundation of Anglo-Saxon England but did not destroy it; thus the present volume begins with the commemoration of English heroism in The Battle of Maldon. In the late twelfth century we encounter in Chrétien de Troyes's seminal romance Le Chevalier de la Charrete a new kind of hero in Lancelot, abject and obedient before his mistress, although Chrétien himself is not an uncritical admirer of the sanctity of adulterous love. Hence the importance of Dante's exposition of love in Purgatorio, XVIII, which forms a background to the essays here on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Parliament of Fowls. The volume concludes with essays on Chaucer's Knight's, Monk's and Nun's Priest's Tales, which form part of a long-term project to interpret the Canterbury Tales as a unified whole and not merely a series of fragments awaiting revision on Chaucer's death.Table of ContentsCONTENTS: The Battle of Maldon: The Commemoration of an Heroic Sacrifice – The Conflict of Love and Chivalry in Le Chevalier de la Charrete – The Movement of Love in the Interior Senses and in the Intellect: An Explanation of Purgatorio, XVIII.22–24 – The Goodness of Sir Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – Nature and the Bird-Debate in the Parliament of Fowls – Chaucer’s Tellers and Tales and the Design of the Canterbury Tales – The Campaigns of Chaucer’s Knight – Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale: The Book of the Duke – The Grand Design of the Monk’s Tale – The Function of Rhetoric in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale.

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Book SynopsisThis collection offers a range of interdisciplinary viewpoints on the occupation of space and theories of place in Britain and Ireland throughout the medieval and early modern periods. It considers space in both its physical and abstract sense, exploring literature, history, art, manuscript studies, religion, geography and archaeology. The buildings and ruins still occupying our urban and rural spaces bridge the gap between the medieval and the modern; manuscripts and objects hold keys to unlocking the secrets of the past. Focusing on the varied uses of space enriches our understanding of the material culture of the medieval and early modern period. The essays collected here offer astute observations on this theme and generate new insights into areas such as social interaction, cultural memory, sacred space and ideas of time and community.Table of ContentsContents: Gregory Hulsman/Caoimhe Whelan: Preface – Clare Fletcher: The Wife of Bath in the Saddle: A Rereading of ‘Upon an amblere esily she sat’ (General Prologue, I 469) – Edel Mulcahy: ‘He purveyyd hym bothe scryp and pyke and made hym a palmer lyke’: The Role of Pilgrim Clothing in Medieval Narratives – Emma Martin: Portraits of Envy: The Green Clothed Monster in Late Medieval Material and Literary Culture – Johanna M. E. Green: Textuality in Transition: Digital Manuscripts as Cultural Artefacts – Diane Scott: Filling the Void: The Development of Punctuation in a Silent Reading Culture – Joel Grossman: Games at Court: Space in Early Tudor Manuscripts – Margaret Tedford: ‘Enta geweorc’: Locating Memory in Landscape in Anglo-Saxon Poetry – Duncan L. Berryman: Welcome to the Occupation: Patterns in the Management of the Fourteenth-Century English Landscape – Sonya Cronin: ‘Spaces of Retir’d Integritie’: The Relocation of Home in the Royalist Poetry of Katherine Philips – Stephen Hand: ‘Them which possess the places erected by our ancestors’: Sacred Space and Conflict in Ireland (1603–1633) – Lyndsey Smith: The Tactile Account of Anglo-Saxon Ivory (550–1066): Image, Status, Materiality and Economics – Richard Wragg: A Civic Relationship: The Guild Book of the Barbers and Surgeons of York as an Expression of Professional Status and City Authority.

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Book SynopsisThis book explores from a new perspective the adaptations of Shakespeare in the Restoration, and how they contributed to the rise of the cult of the National Poet in an age where his reputation was not yet consolidated. Adaptations are fully independent cultural items, whose paratexts play a crucial role in the development of Bardolatry; their study initially follows seminal works of Bakhtin and Genette, but the main theoretical background is anthropology, with the groundbreaking theories of Mary Douglas.The many voices that feature the paratexts of the adaptations and the other texts, such as those of John Dryden, Thomas Betterton, William Davenant, Nahum Tate, John Dennis, and many others, create a composite choir where the emerging sacrality of the cult of the Bard was just one of the tunes, in an age when Shakespeare has not yet become Shakespeare.Table of ContentsContents: Bardolatry – Paratext – Adaption – Linguistics and Anthropolgy: Mikhail Bakhtin and Mary Douglas – Paratext I: The Peritext – Paratext II: The Epitext.

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Book SynopsisPremière édition bilingue anglo-française de l’œuvre de John Wilmot, comte de Rochester (1647-1680), l’ouvrage qui offre un appareil critique a pour objectif de faire connaître le poète au public français tout en poursuivant l’entreprise de la réhabilitation du « méchant comte » commencée outre-Manche il y a un demi-siècle. Une longue introduction insiste sur l’environnement littéraire et philosophique du poète où les sources du mouvement européen du libertinage de pensée prennent toute leur place. Florence Lautel-Ribstein propose en outre une réflexion approfondie sur l’approche traductive de textes parfois très complexes en raison de leur caractère poétique, de leur dimension ontologique ou de leur registre parodique. Plus de quatre-vingt textes lyriques, satiriques, philosophiques ainsi qu’une tragédie forment le corpus rochesterien à la paternité quasi certaine. Ils sont présentés ici avec leur traduction en regard. Chaque œuvre est accompagnée de l’historique de la publication de ses premières versions manuscrites ou imprimées, de notes textuelles et explicatives abondantes, ainsi que d’un commentaire qui, dans certains cas, est le premier du genre. L’introduction ainsi que les notices, notes et commentaires de cette édition sont rédigés en français. The introduction to this edition, as well as the annotations and commentaries, are written in French.Table of ContentsContenu : Introduction générale à l’édition – Tableau chronologique de la période 1645-1685 – Chronologie de la vie de John Wilmot, comte de Rochester – Biographie du poète – Historique des éditions de l’œuvre – Etablissement du canon rochesterien – Historique des traductions de l’œuvre - Vers une ontologie du traduire – Introduction aux notices, notes et commentaires – Poésie : Dialogues d’amour - Elégies d’amour - Chansons d’amour - Chansons libertines et petites satires - Longues satires - Libelles et invectives - Traductions - Vers adressés à des personnages royaux – Théâtre : Prologues et épilogues - Fragments de pièces de théâtre – Tragédie – Brochure du Docteur Alexandre Bendo – Glossaire – Bibliographie – Index.

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Book SynopsisThis book throws new light on the complexity and variety of practices which may be defined as ‘theatrical’ in a broad sense in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama. The volume deals first with the mainstream of dramatic production, starting from the anti-theatrical debate which characterized the whole period and increased in intensity as it went on. Here Shakespeare and Ben Jonson come on stage with their rejoinders to this issue. At the same time, while the universities were offering a kind of theatre workshop importing Latin and Italian models, popular performances were being staged in non-theatrical spaces. Tournaments, and their aristocratic codes, are explored as well as more popular and ‘marginal’ spectacles – such as those of conny-catching improvisers, jugglers, gypsy dancers and fortune-tellers, clowns and prophetesses.Table of ContentsContents: Paola Pugliatti: Introduction – Alessandro Serpieri: Abuse and Use of the Theatre: Shakespeare and the Puritans – Susan Payne: Staging Marginality: Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair – Claudia Corti: Civic Disorder and Theatrical Order: Representations of Popular Rebellions in London at the End of the Sixteenth Century – Mario Domenichelli: Tournaments as Triumphal Shows in Shakespeare’s Time – Fernando Cioni: Stages at the University of Cambridge in Tudor England – Paola Pugliatti: Greene’s Vision: The Conny-Catching Pamphlets and the Commedia dell’Arte – Keir Elam: ‘Enter Clowne’: The Travels of the English Comic Performer, from Offstage to Centre Stage to Text – Donatella Pallotti: Shows of Holiness: Women’s Prophetic Performance and its Perception in Early Modern England – Paola Pugliatti: A Lost Lore: The Activity of Gypsies as Performers on the Stage of Elizabethan-Jacobean Street Theatre – Nicoletta Caputo: Entertainers ‘on the Vagabond Fringe’: Jugglers in Tudor and Stuart England.

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Book SynopsisShakespeare’s plays present the dynamics of personal relationships in a way that is direct and unambiguous, and with unparalleled forcefulness. This book concentrates on three of Shakespeare’s last plays, King Lear, Pericles and The Tempest, allowing them to demonstrate the underlying dynamic of theatre as it is embodied within the work of a master craftsman. The three plays are widely dissimilar from one another at the surface level, yet they all concentrate on a particular relationship – that between fathers and daughters – working outwards from the centre of human experience and using the fundamental relational paradigm as it is enshrined in theatre, especially Shakespeare’s. As a professional actor as well as an academic, the author combines an actor’s understanding with psychodynamics and literary criticism.Table of ContentsContents: Three Scenarios – Theatre and Relationship – Space for Meeting – Catharsis and Sharing – Dramatic Irony – The Perilous Journey – Fathers and Daughters – Theatre and Spirituality – Ghastly Mirth – Ritual and Existential Change.

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Book SynopsisKeith Brown’s literary essays, published at intervals over the course of a long career, are marked by their engaging flair and independence from intellectual fashion. They often explore aspects of the interaction of craftsmanship and ideas that are unnoticed or ignored in the mainstream of critical debate. However, the full potential of his approach only emerges when these essays are taken together. A notable concern of Brown’s critical method is to uncover the latent organising principles – naturally as various as the author’s intentions – that lie beneath the surface of any worthwhile extended literary work. His ‘sightings’ reveal the actual contours of literary landscapes seen dimly before.Trade Review«... Brown is an ardent critical detective, working on analogies with music, painting, architecture and cartography, in order to discover the hidden template within a work. ... ‘Sightings’ is a valuable celebration of an honorable career.» (Philip Davis, The Times Literary Supplement)Table of ContentsContents: Moral Quality versus Moral Content – ‘Form and Cause Conjoin’d’: Hamlet and Shakespeare’s Workshop – Polonius, and Fortinbras: and Hamlet? – Hamlet’s Place on the Map – Construction and Significance in Shakespearean Drama – Shakespeare’s Master Piece? – ‘More light, more light!’ – Visualising Hobbes – A Short Course of the Belles Lettres for Keatsians? – Art for Ernest’s Sake – An Offering to the Goddess: Mrs. Dalloway on Mount Caburn – Welsh Red Indians: D. H. Lawrence and St. Mawr – Dealing with Durrell.

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Book SynopsisThis book contrasts the portrayal of kings and kingship in the drama of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-81), concentrating on the ways in which both dramatists use the individual complexities of their kingly characters to address the intellectual and moral dilemmas of the ideological backgrounds that helped to create them. Against the background of seventeenth-century Europe, when religious and political reformation was leading to reconstructions of concepts of authority and personal and national identity, these two dramatists of early modern England and Spain use the increasingly theatrical facades of absolutist power to explore the internal drama of individual psychology and the kinship of flawed humanity.Table of ContentsContents: England and Spain: Reformations of Power – The Drama Within: Staging Kingship – Searching for Authority: King Richard II and El príncipe constante – The King’s Soul: King Henry VIII and La cisma de Ingalaterra – From Kingship to Kinship: The Tempest and La vida es sueño – The Internal Theatre: Kingship Among Subjects.

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Book SynopsisThis volume contains a selection of essays presented at the 8th International Milton Symposium, «Milton, Rights and Liberties», which was held in Grenoble, France, 7-11 June 2005. It was the first time ever that such a major event was organized in France, hence the volume’s title. Moreover, Milton’s writings influenced key figures of the French Revolution. The essays presented in this volume were written by emerging as well as confirmed Milton scholars from around the world. Topics range from Romanticism (Milton and Wordsworth) to a psychoanalytic reading of Milton, from the iconography of the garden in Paradise Lost to the prosody of Samson Agonistes, from Derridean readings of Milton to Milton’s presence in Brazil and China. Another volume of essays entitled Milton, Rights and Liberties was published in 2007.Table of ContentsContents: Hugh Wilson: Milton and Wordsworth: Reflections on «L’Allegro», «Il Penseroso», and «Tintern Abbey» – Jean Pironon: The Five Senses as Origin of Milton’s Poetic Idiom in the University Exercises and the Minor Poems (1626-1637) – Trevor Laurence Jockims: Pastoral Lost and Regained in «Lycidas» – David V. Urban: Talents and Laborers: Parabolic Tension in Milton’s Sonnet 19 – Matthew Jordan: The Bourgeois Utopianism of Milton’s Anti-Prelatical Tracts – James Rovira: Milton’s Ontology of Books and Areopagitica – Antti Tahvanainen: The Role of Rhetoric in the Political Thought of John Milton – Kemmer Anderson: Those Tenured Tyrants: How Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates Influenced Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence – Danièle Frison : Droits et Libertés dans The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates de John Milton – Yuko Kanakubo Noro: On Milton’s Proposal for a «Communitas Libera» Reconsidered - from Defensio Prima, through The Readie and Easie Way, to Paradise Lost – Georgi Vasilev : Philosophie et figures dualistes dans les pamphlets de John Milton – Matt Dolloff: Urania, Antidote to Tyranny – T. Ross Leasure: Spenser’s Diabolical Orator and Milton’s «Man of Hell» – Martin Dawes: Adam’s Co-creation of Eve: Taking Liberties with Milton’s Ironic God – Virginie Ortega-Tillier : Qualités plastiques de l’évocation poétique & caractéristiques des illustrations du Paradis perdu de Milton – Luis Fernando Ferreira Sá: Notes on a Postcolonial Fall in Milton’s Paradise – Charlotte Clutterbuck: The Sinner’s View of God in the Invocations and Book III of Paradise Lost – Margaret Justice Dean: Martyrdom Reconsidered: Adam’s Profit from Abdiel’s Example – Antonella Piazza: Milton and Galileo: The Astronomical Diet of Paradise Lost – Daniele Borgogni: «Real or Allegoric I Discern Not»: Paradise Regained and the Problem of Representation in Early Modern England – Suvi Mäkelä: «[E]xiled from light»: Beauty, the Senses and Freedom in Samson Agonistes – Sherry Lutz Zivley/Chase Hamblin: The Prosody of Samson Agonistes – Nicole Berry : John Milton, ou l’aigle blessé – Miriam Andrade Mansur: Milton and Derrida: Deconstructing Milton’s Paradise Lost Through a «Darkness Visible» Perspective – Marie-Dominique Garnier: From Dagon to Deleuze and Derrida: Samson Agonistes and Particle Poetics – Luis Fernando Ferreira Sá: Enjoined By Fate: Private and Public Miltons in a Nineteenth-Century Portuguese Play – Chia-Yin Huang: The Miltonic Personality: Milton as a Model of Liberty in China.

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Book SynopsisThis collection of critical essays and interviews gives an overview of the various kinds of medial manifestations which Shakespeare’s work has been transferred into over the centuries: into a theatrical performance, a printed text, a painting, an opera, an audio book, a film, a radio or television drama, a website. On the whole this overview also provides a history of the general development of Shakespearean media. Practitioners as well as scholars focus on the strengths and weaknesses, the possibilities and limitations of each medium with regard to the representation of Shakespeare’s work.Table of ContentsContents: Duncan Salkeld: Shakespeare staging Shakespeare – Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier: «Tis the curse of service»: The Royal Shakespeare Company – «You can’t ignore the fact that you’re choosing to speak in a five-beat line»: An interview with Samuel West – Graham Holderness: Textual Shakespeare – Carol Banks: Picturing Shakespeare’s plays – Christoph Clausen: Shakespeare in opera – Maire Steadman: Audio Shakespeare - «I’ve written the occasional line»: An interview with Russell Jackson – Sabine Schülting: «We can’t hear a word!» - Shakespeare in silent film – Jörg Helbig: Cinematic intertextuality in contemporary Shakespeare films – Manfred Pfister: «If music be the food of comedy»: Screen music in recent film versions of Shakespearean comedy – «Hopefully, the films will be seen again and remembered»: An interview with Sir Derek Jacobi – H. R. Coursen: Shakespeare on television – Hardy M. Cook: Shakespeare on the internet.

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Book SynopsisThis study explores the somewhat neglected area of dramatic genres of early English religious lyric and illuminates the functions of dialogue as an instrument of devotion and cognition in the context of medieval culture. The book focuses on short poems in dialogue form, semi-dialogic prayers and dramatic monologues, and alleged dialogic configurations of the lyrics, stressing their potential for performance. Devotional dialogues, as between Jesus and Mary, are shown to have the form of mutual begging, in accordance with the central medieval ritual of supplication. Dialogue as heteroglossia provides the basis for readings of selected prayers from Cædmon to Lydgate, highlighting a variety of cultural transactions involved in addressing heaven. Tracing the ways the poems overcome the limits of language in search of transcendent communication leads to insights into vernacular poetics and theology inherent in early English religious verse.Table of ContentsContents: Lyric Dialogues – Lyric Diptychs – Hymns – Prayers – Antiphons – Performance – Cultural Transactions – Architectural Imagery – Liturgy – Metaphysics of Communication – English Vernacular – Foreign Words – Musical Imagery – Ocular Speech – Christian and Marian Devotion – Imaginative Poetics and Theology – Godric – Herebert – Grimestone – Lydgate – Chaucer.

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Book SynopsisThis book offers a richly illustrated analysis and interpretation of the major concepts of love, fortune and death in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s earliest love tragedy. Taking into consideration social, political and economic developments as well as philosophical, aesthetic and religious discourses around 1600, the contextual approach does not only grant insights into the play’s topics and characters but also sheds a light on the reciprocal influences of society and theatre in early modern England. The study is concluded by a discussion of Romantic love and its application to the dramatic text.Table of ContentsContents: The concept of love – The concept of fortune – The concept of death – «What’s in a name?» – The concept of Romantic love.

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Book SynopsisThe book outlines the semiotic universe of Jacobean drama, examining both canonical tragedies by Thomas Middleton, John Webster and less known dramas such as Anonymous Lust’s Dominion, Markham and Sampson’s Herod and Antipater or Thierry and Theodoret by Beaumont and Fletcher.Trade ReviewThis is an innovative study, well argumented and convincing in its application of semiotic methodology. Justyna Galant is well aware of the vast critical heritage of Jacobean revenge plays, and yet she manages to present new readings that are impressive both in the quality of the analytical tools applied and in the depth of her insights and synthesis. Even when discussing plays that have relatively frequently been the object of critical studies, Galant manages to shed fresh light on the ways in which meanings are created. (Jerzy Limon, University of Gdańsk) Justyna Galant’s book is a thoughtful literary analysis of eleven Jacobean tragedies whose high level of hermeneutic detail allows possible dramaturgical applications, i.e. can be used as a reading device in structuring the meaning of texts translated into theatrical performances. The originality of this study lies in its focused analysis of the world-creating operations of alternative realities by means of verbal and dramatic procedures that serve the intentions of their authors. (José Eduardo Reis, University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro)Table of ContentsContents: Jacobean tragedy – Semiotics and drama – Thomas Middeton – John Webster – John Marston – Markham and Sampson – Beaumont and Fletcher – Lust's Dominion – Jurij Lotman – Mikhail Bakhtin.

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Book SynopsisThis volume contains sixteen essays of literary criticism, comparative literature and interdisciplinary studies by Polish, German, Welsh, French and American scholars. It features a voyage through the sea of evil from the beginning of time to the present, from the creation of the world (Hughes) to contemporary terrorism (Wajdi Mouawad). It examines all genres of literature, from Shakespeare to Hopkins and Roethke, to Dickens and Orzeszkowa, Faulkner and McCarthy, Baldwin and Burdekin. The Gesamtkunst which evil has inspired in this volume includes the Victorian Protestant novel and children’s literature, hypertext (M. Joyce, Moulthrop) and metafiction (Coetzee, Munch) as well as music, philosophy, stylistics (Tolkien) and the visual arts (Tintoretto, Munch).Table of ContentsContents: Anna Pietrzykowska-Motyka: «Read Thine Own Evil»: Exploring the Faces of Evil in King Lear – Monika Mazurek: Awful Disclosures, or, Evil in Disguise: The Convent in the Victorian Protestant Novel – Jan Rybicki: «To What Serves Mortal Beauty» in «The Windhover» – Przemysław Michalski: The Problem of Violence in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke – Jutta Göller/Karl Heinz Göller (†): How Evil Came into the World: Ted Hughes’s «Apple Tragedy»: A Satirical Antithesis to the Biblical Myth of Creation – Aleksandra Budrewicz-Beratan: Social Evil in Eliza Orzeszkowa and Charles Dickens – Laurence Davies: Evil Communications in Burdekin and Baldwin – Grażyna M. T. Branny: The Unspoken and the Unspeakable: Evil and Intertextuality in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark – Marek Pawlicki: Reading Evil, Writing Evil in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and The Master of Petersburg – Dominik Becher: The Disappearance of Evil?: The Anti-Villain as Identification Figure for Young Readers – Wojciech Majka: Subjectivity and Beyond: Ethics and the Question of Good and Evil – Małgorzata Pawłowska: Diabolus in Musica – J. Gill Holland: Fictions and Metafictions of Evil: The Case of Edvard Munch, Artist and Author – Joanna Podhorodecka: Reviving «Dead» Metaphors: Images of Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings – Emilia Branny-Jankowska: Demons of Technology: The Computer, the Society and Evil in Michael Joyce’s afternoon and Stuart Moulthrop’s Hegirascope – Anne Luyat: Terra Infidel: Tintoretto’s The Annunciation in Wajdi Mouawad’s Ciels.

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Book SynopsisThis collection unites 21 papers mainly presented at the 21st IAUPE (International Association of University Professors of English) Conference held at the Valetta Campus of the University of Malta in mid-July 2010. Most periods of world-wide literature in English from Anglo-Saxon to the present day were represented as well as many aspects of language and linguistics. One section «Writers and the Mediterranean» was of particular local interest.Table of ContentsContents: Ian Kirby: Preface – J. R. Hall: Supplementary Evidence and the Manuscript Text of Beowulf: A Survey of Sources – Manfred Malzahn: The Barnaby Googe Experiment: Readings and Misreadings – Richard A. McCabe: Plato, Poetic ‘Praxis’, and Renaissance Censorship – Mary Morrissey: Paul’s Cross: Context, Occasion, Significance – James R. Siemon: Mark(et)ing Differences on the Early Modern Stage: Malta’s Slave Market and London’s Exchange – Ann Thompson/John O. Thompson: Standing for and Standing in for: Metonymy in Henry V – Vera Nünning: Voicing Criticism in Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women: Narrative Attempts at Claiming Authority – Christoph Bode: Constructions of Identity in Romanticism: The Case of William Wordsworth – Danuta Fjellestad: The Pictorial Turn in the Contemporary Novel – Sergio Perosa: Byron and Latin-Levantine Europe – Klaus Stierstorfer: Who Owns Britain? S. T. Coleridge and the National Trust – William Baker: Fresh Light on Christina Rossetti and George Herbert – Paul A. Bové: Historical Humanist, American Style – Val Cunningham: The Aw(e)ful Spread of Literary Theory – Jürgen Schlaeger: The Play and Place of Literary Theory – Mary Jane Edwards: Analyzing the Annotations: Theories and Practices of Explanatory Notes – John Leonard: Adam’s Two Dreams: Keats on Milton – Jane Goldman: «The hush of the Mediterranean lipping the sand»: the libertarian and libidinal politics of Virginia Woolf’s Mediterranean discourse – Christopher Innes: Staging the Mediterranean: Developing Views in English Drama – Harold Kaylor: Chaucer, His Boethius, and the Narrator of His Troilus – William V. Davis: «Begin, and cease, and then again begin»: Rereading Matthew Arnold’s «Dover Beach».

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Book SynopsisThis volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Medieval English Studies Symposium held in Poznań, Poland, in November 2011. The papers cover a wide range of approaches to the issue of medieval literature, language and art.Table of ContentsContents: Laura Wright: On historical dictionaries and language boundaries: Evidence from medieval mixed-language business writing – Magdalena Bator: Boil vs. seethe in Middle English – Minako Nakayasu: Chaucer’s historical present: A discourse-pragmatic perspective – Marietta Rusinek: Medieval French borrowings in the English «cakes» vocabulary: A historical semantic analysis – Ad Putter: The predictable and the unpredictable: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the metres of Middle English romance – Bartłomiej Błaszkiewicz: On some representations of Mary Magdalene in Middle English literature – Barbara Kowalik: «We make our wealth our god and turn our souls to paupers»: Images of poverty and prosperity in Robert Henryson’s Fables – Hans Sauer/Veronika Traidl: Beowulf and Beowulf films, or: Fathers, sons, and monsters – Andrzej Wicher: The fairy needlewoman Emaré - A study of the Middle English romance Emaré in the context of the tale of magic.

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Book SynopsisThis study deals with the aesthetic manifestations of one of the world’s most fiercely iconophobic and anti-aesthetic religious cultures: Calvinism. It establishes the category of the Calvinesque as an aesthetic of extreme violence against the human body. In close readings of theological documents, literary texts and dramatic speeches, the book examines the extent to which language, literary imagination and theology permeate and condition each other. The book aims at providing new perspectives on literary stylistics after the religious turn in the humanities. By emphasising the pervasive impact of Protestant theology on secular Western culture and by radically questioning some of the narratives that have been crucial to Western (Protestant) identity, this study opens up historical perspectives to contemporary debates about the impact of Calvinism on political discourses, violent entertainment, disciplinary culture and an Anglo-American humanitarian «pornography of pain».Table of ContentsContents: Iconoclasm, Calvin, and Word-painting – Anti-Theatricality and the Imagination of Violence – Protestant Martyrdom – «The Calvinesque»: Literary and Dramatic Language – Psalm Translation after the Reformation – Calvinism, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama – The Rhetoric of Prophecy – The Iconography of God’s Punishment: «Braining» – Calvinism and Histories of Violence in Europe: Karen Halttunen, Philip Gorski, Charles Taylor, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias.

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Book SynopsisNicholas Breton (1545/55-1626?) was one of the most prolific writers of the Early Modern period and left behind a vast œuvre that is, however, largely neglected today. Breton addresses instrumental questions of his time, especially those of man’s identity. This study concentrates on a selection of Breton’s political texts in which Breton contrasts the Self against the Other. These texts not only stigmatise the Other as the undesired, the unknown and the indecipherable, but also construct a patriotic and uniform English identity to be imitated by all Englishmen and Englishwomen: the English Self.Table of ContentsContents: New Historicism – Cultural Studies – Human Nature – Intellect – Political and Cultural Identity – Anti-capitalistic Tendencies – Self and Other.

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Book SynopsisThis Festschrift honours the dedicated book historian and medievalist Gabriele Müller-Oberhäuser. Her wide-ranging scholarly expertise has encouraged and influenced many adepts of the book. The essays in this volume reflect the variety of her interests: The contributions range from Chaucer’s Fürstenspiegel to the value of books in comedy, from the material book to the magical book in religious and literary cultures, from collaborative efforts in manuscript production to the relations of distributors of books across national and ideological boundaries, from the relations between the makers of books to the relation of readers to their books. Covering a period from the Middle Ages to the present, the volume concludes with a look at the future of book history as a field of study.Table of ContentsContents: Birgit Hötker-Bolte: List of Publications by Gabriele Müller-Oberhäuser – Ulrike Graßnick: «This litel tretys»: Chaucer’s Mirror for Princes The Tale of Melibee – Eva Schaten: Books as Objects of Magic in the Late Middle Ages – Matti Peikola: Signing the Diabolical Pact: Aspects of Supernatural Written Communication in Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, 1692-1693 – Torsten Wieschen: Forms of Addressing the Educated Reader in Early Printed Paratexts – Sarah Ströer: Juvenile Sunday Reading in Nineteenth-Century England – Sandra Simon: Authors, Publishers, and the Literary Agent: An Ideal Literary Trinity? – Simon Rosenberg: Book Value Categories in Television Comedy Shows – Anne Hudson: A Tale of Two Odos: The Development of a Lollard Authority – Jessica Hardenberger: Patterns of Collaboration among the Makers of the Auchinleck Manuscript (National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ MS 19.2.1) – Marga Munkelt: A Mute(d) King: Emotions Inferred in Shakespeare’s Edward III – Paul Hoftijzer: Leiden-German Book-Trade Relations in the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Jacob Marcus – Janika Bischof: The Printed Acta Synodi Nationalis Dordrechti as a Networking Tool – Mirjam Christmann: Huguenot Material in London after the Edict of Fontainebleau: The Vaillant Family – Hermann Josef Real: Swift as Bookman: Reader, Collector, and Donor – Uta Schleiermacher: Class-Related Aspects of Reading in Victorian Autobiographies: Molly Hughes, A London Child of the 1870s, and Hannah Mitchell, The Hard Way Up – Corinna Norrick-Rühl: Marketing Socialism? Sales Strategies for rororo rotfuchs, a Left-Wing Children’s Paperback Series in the 1970s – Adriaan van der Weel: Book Studies and the Sociology of Text Technologies.

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Book SynopsisThis book of essays on poetic speech, viewed in a literary-critical, theological and philosophical light, explores the connections and disconnections between vulnerable human words, so often burdened with doubt and pain, and the ultimate kenosis of the divine Word on the Cross. An introductory discussion of language and prayer is followed by reflections linking poetry with religious experience and theology, especially apophatic, and questioning the ability of language to reach out beyond itself. The central section foregrounds the motif of the suffering flesh, while the final section, including essays on seventeenth-century English metaphysical poetry and several of the great poets of the twentieth century, is devoted to the sounds and rhythms which give a poem its own kind of «body».Trade Review«The volume, unified around a clearly defined topic but treating it from a great variety of perspectives, is a valuable and inspiring contribution to the study of intersections of poetry, philosophy, and religion.» (Barbara Kowalik, Studia Bobolanum 4/2015)Table of ContentsContents: Tadeusz Sławek: The Tremulous Word: On Language in Prayer – Jennifer Reek: Word into Flesh / Flesh into Word: The Making of an Incarnational Textuality – Bernard Sawicki OSB: The Dogmatic Definition of the Council of Chalcedon (451) of Two Natures in the Person of Jesus Christ as a Criterion of the Incarnational Character of Poetry – Marcin Polkowski: «That true word … shal be felt withall». The Incarnation of the Word in Sibilline Oracles as a Theme of Renaissance Poetry and Iconography – Stefano Maria Casella: Eugenio Montale, «The Poor Nestorian at a Loss» – Jamie Callison: Celestial Music Unheard: T. S. Eliot, «Marina» and the Via Negativa – Mirosława Modrzewska: Robert Burns’s «Jarring Thoughts»: Carnivalesque Metaphorisations of Existentialist Spirituality – Olga Włodarczyk-Elsbach: The Embodied «I», the Suffering «I» in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins – Katarzyna Dudek: World as the Icon of the Word: Sacramental Imagination in R. S. Thomas’s Nature Poems – Przemysław Michalski: Lacerating Logos. The Divinity of R. S. Thomas’s Mythic Poems - A Reckless Experimenter or a Selfless Saviour? – Jacek Gutorow: Words Against Words. Four Quartets and the Failure of Poetry – David Malcolm: Feet in Eden?: Some Aspects of Technique in Religious Verse - Edwin Muir, Jon Silkin, and Anne Stevenson – Martin Potter: Incarnation and Embodiment in The Poetry and Theoretical Writings of David Jones – Mary Elisabeth Regina Esser: «One feels its action moving in the blood»: Arrhythmia as the Art of Reality in Wallace Stevens’s «Esthétique du Mal» – Klaudia Łączyńska: Word-As-Flesh Made Artefact: Andrew Marvell’s Poetic Moulding Of The Word.

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