Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800 Books
Stanford University Press Strange Fits of Passion Epistemologies of Emotion
Book SynopsisThis book contends that when late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century writers sought to explain the origins of emotions, they often discovered that their feelings may not really have been their own.Trade Review"It stirred feelings of admiration, gratitude, and wonder in this reviewer. It is well conceived, well researched, well argued, and well written, with good readings and plausible interpretations of a fresh assortment of texts." -- Eighteenth-Century Fiction"Superbly researched and conceptualized, Strange Fits of Passion is cogently argued, beautifully written, altogether an original, important contribution to late-eighteenth-century studies and romanticism." -- Susan Wolfson * Princeton University *"Pinch's excellent book ... is an admirably clear and incisive study." -- Studies in English LiteratureTable of ContentsContents 1 2 3 4 5
£22.79
Stanford University Press The Absence of Grace Sprezzatura and Suspicion in
Book SynopsisThis is a study of male fantasy, representation anxiety, and narratorial authority in two 16th-century books, Baldassare Castiglione's "Il libro del Cortegiano" (1528) and "Giovanni Della Casas Galateo" (1558).Trade Review"[The Absence of Grace] is based on extremely careful readings of the two texts, and Berger displays his familiarity with the works while including enough citations to orient the reader. This book will be most useful to students of readings and texts in the Renaissance, and it also offers a valuable perspective on the literary production of court society in early modern Europe as a whole." -- Sixteenth Century Journal"This book not only fulfills the long-standing need for a comprehensive study in English of della Casa's short but powerful treatise, but it will also undoubtedly have an impact on criticism of Castiglione and of the Italian court culture similar to that of classics such as Wayne Rebhorn's Courtly Performances, J.R. Woodhouse's Balesar Castiglione: A Reassessment of 'The Courtier,' and Robert Hanning and David Rosand's edition of the influential set of essays etitled Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture. . . . [A] praiseworthy methodological achievement." -- South Atlantic Review"This brilliant book presents a carefully argued set of theses about Castiglione's Il libro del Cortegiano and Della Casa's Il Galateo that should have a significant impact not only on scholarship about these two books and the courtesy book tradition of the Renaissance, but on scholarship about the Renaissance in general." -- Wayne A. Rebhorn * University of Texas, Austin *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction Part I. Falling from Grace: Sprezzatura, Suspicion and the Perils of Mastication: 1. Sprezzatura and the absence of grace 2. Count Ricciardo's tiny defect 3. Galateo and the civilizing process: a short history of table manners Part II. Losing Control: The Woman Question in The Book of the Courtier: 4. A perfect gentleman: performing gynephobia in Urbino 5. A perfect lady: Pygmalion and his 'creatura' Part III. Missing Hercules: Unreliable Narrators in The Book of the Courtier and Galateo: 6. Internal distance: at home and abroad with Castiglione's author 7. Narratorial sour grapes: reading Galateo Notes Bibliography Index.
£21.59
Stanford University Press THE GOTHIC TEXT
Book SynopsisCombining a new genealogy for the gothic novel with original research into gothic contexts in German idealist thought and romantic psychology, The Gothic Text offers lively readings of British and Continental novels pointing back toward the Enlightenment and ahead toward Freud.Trade Review"The story [Brown] tells converts the quirks and games of gothic fantasies into a dark and universal truth about the mysteries of human nature." -- Studies in Romanticism"[The Gothic Text is] conveyed with such grace of style and such a range of reference here that every student of the Gothic and the Romantic and their relationship ought to take account of it from now on." -- European Romantic Review"[A] highly readable and concisely coherent book." -- Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts"Brown . . . takes a fresh approach to the gothic, leading the reader gingerly and often wittily toward the true meaning of the gothic sensibility from a broad European, rather than solely British, perspective." -- CHOICETable of ContentsTable of Contents for The Gothic Text Preface A Note on Sources 1. Three Theses on Gothic Fiction 2. Fantasia: Kant and the Demons of the Night PART I: ORIGINS: WALPOLE 3. The Birth of The Castle of Otranto 4. Excursus: Notes on the History of Psycho-Narration 5. Ghosts in the Flesh PART II: KANT AND THE GOTHIC 6. At the Limits of Kantian Philosophy 7. Kant's Disciples 8. Kant and the Doctors 9. Meditative Interlude PART III: PHILSOPHY OF THE GOTHIC NOVEL 10. The Wild Ass's Skin 11. The Devil's Elixirs 12. Melmoth the Wanderer 13. Caleb Williams PART IV: CONSEQUENCES 14. In Defense of ClichA(c): Radcliffe's Landscapes 15. Frankenstein: A Child's Tale 16. Postscript: Faust and the Gothic Notes Works Cited Index
£22.49
Stanford University Press Between Nations
Book SynopsisBetween Nations argues for a cross-cultural, cross-national approach to the history of the British Isles, making its case by tracing the heterogeneous influences on texts of three early modern English authors — Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marvell.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Imagining Britain: William Shakespeare's Henry V 2. Border crossings: Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland 3. British poetics: Andrew Marvell's 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland' and 'the loyal Scot' Coda Notes Bibliography Index.
£22.79
Stanford University Press Common Ground
Book SynopsisThe author reads four 18th-century satiric novels-Joseph Andrews, A Sentimental Journey, Humphrey Clinker, and Cecilia-from below, exploring how the gentle authors' experiences of the poor shape the novels both thematically and formally.Table of ContentsIntroduction: gentle and poor on common ground 1. What you seek is nowhere: the comic novel and lower-class literacy 2. A man who laughs is never dangerous: the gentleman's disposition in A Sentimental Journey 3. The satire of melancholia: Humphry Clinker and the agricultural revolution 4. This dream of fancied sorrow: female affectivity and the labouring poor in Frances Burney's Cecilia Conclusion: labour and satire at the century's end Notes Bibliography Index.
£21.59
Stanford University Press Ends of Enlightenment
Book SynopsisEnds of Enlightenment explores three realms of remarkable innovation in eighteenth-century Europe that remain active in today: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy.Trade Review"John Bender [is] a compelling critic of eighteenth-century British literature and culture. . . . Since [1987], Bender has published a number of important and groundbreaking essays, ranging widely and often brilliantly over various topics and disciplines. . . . John Bender's splendid and erudite collection of essays demonstrates . . . that one can remember the Enlightenment without longing for its return."Albert Rivero, Times Literary Supplement"Bender's evident personal passions and breadth as a humanist of ample curiosity come through clearly." -- Darrin M. McMahon * H-France Review of Books *"John Bender's writing on enlightenment culture has been a major inspiration for many years. Many of these essays are classics, and all repay close attention. Whether writing about anatomy or hypothesis, Hume's sentences or game theory in Laclos, Bender combines formal, socio-historical, and visual analysis into a unique wellspring for work in eighteenth-century studies. The collection is a real boon for the field and should be on the shelf of every one of its scholars." -- Jonathan Kramnick * Rutgers University *"For some critics, the genre of collected essays does not flatter: it highlights the repetition and limitations of their analytic procedures. For John Bender, however, it's a showcase for his remarkable mix of conceptual flexibility and archival precision. Bender at his best is our best index to the extraordinary efflorescence of eighteenth-century studies at the turn into the new millennium. His work has transformed our understanding of the emergence of the novel from fluctuating fields of 'fact' and 'fiction,' the fate and ongoing power of rhetoric within shifting social and communication systems, and the reconstituting of knowledge into its modern forms and organization. The understanding of Enlightenment that emerges from these essays—and from the cross-currents generated by their being published together—provides that historical moment with an unprecedented purchase on the present. Bender's oeuvre is—in its accuracy and usefulness—an essential handbook for those of us who care about the legacy of Enlightenment." -- Clifford Siskin
£22.79
Stanford University Press Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage
Book SynopsisFocusing on the Confucian transformation of Mulian opera, and especially on the interplay between the civilizing effect of ritual performance and the rise of gentrified mercantile lineages in sixteenth-century Huizhou prefecture, this book develops a radically novel interpretation of both Chinese popular culture and the Confucian tradition in late imperial China.Trade Review"With copious notes demonstrating extensive use of gazetteers, genealogies, local writings, and scripts, Guo's interdisciplinary excursion into the performing arts makes social history exciting to artists and historians, generalists and specialists alike" -- History: Reviews of New Books"Qitao Guo's most recent book is a fascinating study of the complex interplay between elite and popular and commercial and religious forces shaping the society of the Huizhou region in late imperial China..." -- China Review International"Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage offers much worth reading and digesting. It is an important study, and it will certainly influence future generations of students." -- Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies"...scholars of drama and popular culture will be as amply rewarded by this study as the social historians." -- Journal of Chinese ReligionsTable of ContentsTable of Contents for Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage List of Map, Figures, and Tables List of Abbreviations List of Reign Periods of the Ming and Qing Dynasties Acknowledgments Introduction Part One: The Setting 1. A Gentrified Kinship Society 2. Huizhou Merchants and mercantile Lineage Culture Part Two: The Script 3. The Mulian Legacy 4. The Confucian Transformation of the Mulian Tradition Part Three: The Performance 5. An Integrated Tradition: Mulian Scripts and Female Chastity 6. A Shared Culture: Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage Conclusion Appendix A: Extant Mulian Operatic Scripts Appendix B: Huizhou Ancestral Halls (ca. 1500-1644) Appendix C: Homophonic and Graphic Substitutions and Sardonic Characters in Mulian Scripts Notes Glossary Bibliography Index
£67.15
Stanford University Press The Fringes of Belief
Book SynopsisThe Fringes of Belief is the first literary study of freethinking and religious skepticism in the English Enlightenment.Trade Review"The sophisticated, learned, and self-consciously literary world of eighteenth-century religious controversy certainly included an intense engagement with the past and a familiarity with heterodox beliefs. By addressing these issues, Ms. Ellenzweig opens a valuable conversation." -- The Scriblerian"Sarah Ellenzweig's important book intriguingly, and successfully explor[es] the ways in which certain free-thinkers in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, while suspicious of the tenets of revealed religion, nevertheless defended the religious establishment as being the key to preserving order in society after the traumas of the Interregnum. . . [L]ively and intelligent." -- Jeremy Gregory * English Historical Review *"In The Fringes of Belief, Sarah Ellenzweig excavates a fascinating but generally overlooked intellectual tradition that combined political conservatism with radical skepticism. Challenging traditional categories with cogent insight, perceptive reading, and revised versions of intellectual history, Ellenzweig offers fresh and complex appreciations of Aphra Behn, the Earl of Rochester, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and others." -- Laura Rosenthal * University of Maryland *"The Fringes of Belief is one of those all-too-rare books that makes a sharp, original, and provocative argument in a clear and engaging way. Expressing dissatisfaction with the secularization narrative has become commonplace. But it is much harder to come up with alternatives—let alone a subtle, profoundly revisionist one like Ellenzweig's." -- Dror Wahrman * Indiana University *"At a moment of intense debate over the nature of the Enlightenment, Sarah Ellenzweig's The Fringes of Belief comes as an added reminder of just how complex and contrapuntal intellectual history can be . . . [T]his engaging study will be of interest to literary scholars, historians, and scholars of the Enlightenment more generally." -- Kenneth Sheppard * Histoire sociale / Social History *Table of ContentsContents Introduction Literary Culture, the Classical Past, and the Rise of Restoration Freethinking Part I: Libertine Precursors Chapter One Rochester, Blount, and the Faith of Unbelief Chapter Two Behn, Fontenelle, and the Cheats of Revealed Religion Part II: Skepticism and Piety Chapter Three Swift's Tale of a Tub and the Anthropology of Religion Chapter Four Suspending Disbelief: Swift, Credulity, and the Pious Fraud Conclusion Pope's "Essay on Man" and the Afterlife of English Freethinking Notes Bibliography Index
£55.80
Stanford University Press Exemplarity and Mediocrity
Book SynopsisExemplarity and Mediocrity explores the strategies modern German literature employed to increasingly attune itself to quotidian life—common heroes, everyday life, non-extraordinary events—while at the same time avoiding all notions of mediocre quality.Trade Review"An exceptionally fine inquiry into the origin and function of the category of the 'unexceptional' in modern German literature, Fleming's study grants insight into those figures and forces that have helped produce the images of averageness against which 'great' characters and events as well as 'minor' movements and literatures have been measured." -- Peter Fenves * Northwestern University *Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 The Prose of the World, 1 The Werther Complex, 000 Literature, Exemplarity, and Mediocrity, 000 From Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism, 000 Chapter One: Exemplarity and Mediocrity 000 Exorbitant or Not at All, 000 Living the "Mean" Life (Aristotle), 000 Ruling Mediocrity (Horace), 000 Exemplary Originality (Kant), 000 Exemplary Averageness (Kant / Schiller), 000 Higher Criticism: Appreciating Mediocrity (Kleist), 000 Chapter Two. Common Heroes: The Making of an Exemplary Audience 000 (Lessing on Bourgeois Tragedy) How to Avoid A Tragic Fate, 000 Exceptional vs. Completely Common Characters, 000 Compassion: The Common, Exemplary Passion, 000 Art without Admiration, or, the End of the Age of Great Men, 000 How Many Tears should the "Best Human" shed?, 000 "Even mediocre artists can be successful," 000 "The applause is already very suspicious to me," 000 Chapter Three. Mediocre Artists: The Aesthetic Education of the Dilettante (Goethe and Schiller) 000 The Stamp of the Dilettante, 000 The Rise of Dilettantism, 000 Art's Invitation, 000 Goethe, the Dilettante, 000 The Problem of Popularity, 000 School of the Dilettantes, 000 Wilhelm Dilettante, or, The Art of Renunciation, 000 The Eternal Return of the Dilettante, 000 Chapter Four. Average Life: The Art of Prosaic Reality (Grillparzer and Stifter) 000 The Museum of Spirit, 000 Grillparzer's Lives of the Non-Famous, 000 The Dissonant Whole, 000 The Sublimity of Regularity (Stifter), 000 Perceptions of the Unperceivable, 000 The Statistical Law, 000 How Gentle is the Law?, 000 The Art of Prosaic Reality, 000 Conclusion 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000
£55.80
Stanford University Press Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson
Book SynopsisActions and Objects, which treats the literature and philosophy of action during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, engages key past and current debates about consciousness, materialism, and mental causation.Trade Review"As a philosopher and cognitive scientist, I read Jonathan Kramnick's book Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson with mounting excitement. He makes a compelling case that Rochester's late-seventeenth-century erotic poetry—on such topics as unwelcome episodes of impotence or random sexual encounters in London's public parks—can and should be read as making innovative contributions to then flourishing debates about the nature of mind, the person and agency. What's more, Kramnick shows that these earlier debates continue to shape our engagement today with these same topics. If Kramnick is right, then contemporary philosophy of mind needs to take a new look at these old literatures. But there is a more far-reaching upshot: Kramnick describes a world where there were no sharp lines to be drawn between the work of theory and the work of the literary artist. Perhaps this too ought to serve as a model for us today? Maybe it is time for us to bridge the gap that separates the concerns and methods of science and those of literature in contemporary society. Kramnick's book is more than intellectual history. It actively engages with these important issues." -- Alva Noe, University of California * Berkeley" *"Excellent close readings. . . unassuming and understated prose. . . fresh approach. . . Its full contents will be picked over for some time." -- Heather Zias"[Kramnick's] book features incisive, surprising interpretations of texts that span the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century—as he puts it, between 'Hobbes and Hume' and 'Rochester and Richardson'. The close readings are the signature of the book (and particularly impressive are Kramnick's sensitive considerations of mind and action, internal and external, first-person and third-person narration in Clarissa), but its principal supposition is what makes it groundbreaking for the field." -- Devoney Looser * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *"The legacy of Descartes's mind-body problem looms in this careful examination of Restoration and 18th-century theories of the mind's relationship to physical actions . . . Kramnick calls attention to 'the largely unacknowledged role of external factors in the period's conception of mind.' He finds textual evidence that philosophers and writers of the period believed human physical actions were causally connected to the mind in a way analogous to cause-effect phenomena in the material universe . . . Recommended." -- C. J. Bell * CHOICE *"Actions and Objects will set the standard in its fields for a generation. It is a serious and learned book whose subtle arguments and core wisdom will work their way into the collective consciousness of eighteenth-century literary studies, of the history of the philosophy of action, and of philosophical literary studies more generally." -- Blakey Vermeule * Stanford University *"Kramnick synthesizes key Enlightenment philosophical debates with an admirable clarity and lively style that make Actions and Objects both enjoyable to read and eminently teachable . . . [E]xcellent." -- Sara Landreth"Jonathan Kramnick's Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson is a nuanced and wide-reaching account of consciousness, materialism, and agency in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy. . . While Kramnick focuses on certain mainstays of literary criticism—character, personhood, consciousness—he nevertheless offers novel accounts of these subjects. . . Kramnick makes a compelling case for reading Restoration and eighteenth-century texts alongside contemporary philosophy and the science of mind." -- Keiser * Configurations *"One of the virtues of this book is that it strives to keep this array of questions open as a field of problematization, rather than charting the increased consolidatioin of categories across the period in the way many genealogies have done. . . It is in moments like these—where Kramnick strives to show why hard questions of action and personhood are posed in literary rather than in philosophical forms—that his book seems most justified as a contribution to literary history." -- Daniel Jump * Restoration *Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson is a compelling account of 'the literature and philosophy of action,' taking up texts that explore actions relative to 'the problems around consciousness and mental causation.' Jonathan Kramnick is learned without show; he has the gift of making complex philosophical and theoretical issues both interesting and readily sortable. His lively tour involves texts from Hobbes, Rochester, and Locke to Pope, Haywood, Trotter, and Richardson. This is intellectual history and literary criticism at its best." -- J. Paul Hunter * University of Virginia *"[F]ine and informative . . . [Kramnick] succeeds in his major ambition to qualify, in important and interesting ways, the widely held view that during the long eighteenth century, selfhood and consciousness were conceived as immaterial things that existed within an interior space and that were untouched by the material, force and necessity of the world." -- William Walker * Eighteenth-Century Life *"[L]ucid . . . Actions and Objects is compelling and gracefully written . . . [This is not] a mere study of how writers reflect their contemporaries' theories of mind. Rather, Actions and Objects considers how literature and literary studies alike can put hard problems into practice, test them out, add to their complexities, and refashion them in new and intriguing ways." -- Crystal B. Lake * Eighteenth-Century Studies *"Actions and Objects offers a startlingly original conceptualization of the eighteenth-century canon. Working with grace, imagination and rigor, Kramnick exemplifies the best of old- and new-fashioned scholarship in showing us an era preoccupied with and embattled about the person as an object, a material thing made of moving parts, whose actions are subject to external forces and perhaps disconnected from inner awareness and intention. This book, long awaited, will reward any intelligent reader who is willing to think." -- Helen Deutsch, University of California * Los Angeles *
£25.19
Stanford University Press An Early Self
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The results of this analysis are truly extraordinary, and I do not hesitate to say that they have a potential for transforming our views of early modern (western) culture and the specific role played by literary texts and literary communication." -- Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht * Stanford University *
£55.80
Stanford University Press Sentimental Memorials
Book SynopsisDuring the later eighteenth century, changes in the meaning and status of literature left popular sentimental novels stranded on the margins of literary history. While critics no longer dismiss or ignore these works, recent reassessments have emphasized their interventions in various political and cultural debates rather than their literary significance. Sentimental Memorials, by contrast, argues that sentimental novels gave the women who wrote them a means of clarifying, protesting, and finally memorializing the historical conditions under which they wrote. As women writers successfully navigated the professional marketplace but struggled to position their works among more lasting literary monuments, their novels reflect on what the elevation of literature would mean for women's literary reputations. Drawing together the history of the novel, women's literary history, and book history, Melissa Sodeman revisits the critical frameworks through which we have understood the history of lTrade Review"Drawing together newly unearthed materials and fresh insights on literary history, British women's writings, sentimental fiction, and the history of the book, Sodeman's study compels us to grasp not only oft-misunderstood late eighteenth-century popular literature but also to better apprehend what came before and after it. This is a highly original book, as beautifully written as it is persuasively argued." -- Devoney Looser * Arizona State University *"Sodeman places the sentimental novels of Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson within the context of emerging mid- to late- 18th-century definitions of genius, originality, and the English literary canon. In so doing, she not only creates a more inclusive, nuanced version of literary history but makes bold claims about these often-denigrated writers' metacritical engagement with issues in contemporary historiography and canon formation." -- M. L. Robertson * CHOICE *"Sodeman makes a lyrical and persuasive argument for the way the popular, female-authored 'sentimental novels' of the late eighteenth century memorialized the conditions of their own production. Her argument will change the way we read sentimental fiction as well as the writers she invokes." -- Emily Hodgson Anderson * University of Southern California *"Sentimental Memorials is a beautifully written book; its quality of thought and contextual knowledge are both reassuring and exciting. It takes the ephemerality of sentimental fiction and discovers in it a concern for enduring reputation. It examines the uses of autobiographical detail in imaginative prose that depicts national and international concerns while at the same time conveying personal truths that have public meanings." -- Norma Clarke * Times Literary Supplement *"Melissa Sodeman's Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History boldly reconceptualizes women's sentimental fictions of the late eighteenth century as self-conscious acts of memorialization . . . Sodeman has found a way of making the most alienating aspects of Smith's works culturally and historically significant - it is the best kind of recovery because it fundamentally alters how we think about an entire genre." -- Daniel O'Quinn * Studies in English Literature *
£52.20
Stanford University Press Shakesplish
Book SynopsisFor all that we love and admire Shakespeare, he is not that easy to grasp. He may have written in Elizabethan English, but when we read him, we can''t help but understand his words, metaphors, and syntax in relation to our own. Until now, explaining the powers and pleasures of the Bard''s language has always meant returning it to its original linguistic and rhetorical contexts. Countless excellent studies situate his unusual gift for words in relation to the resources of the English of his day. They may mention the presumptions of modern readers, but their goal is to correct and invalidate any false impressions. Shakesplish is the first book devoted to our experience as modern readers of Early Modern English. Drawing on translation theory and linguistics, Paula Blank argues that for us, Shakespeare''s language is a hybrid English composed of errors in comprehensionand that such errors enable, rather than hinder, some of the pleasures we take in his language. Investigating howTrade Review"As Paula Blank argues, whether or not we are dipping into a 'No Fear' edition, we are always paraphrasing Shakespeare. Shamelessly fun to read, this original and timely book should have broad appeal." -- Julia Reinhard Lupton * University of California, Irvine *"In her worthy sequel to Broken English, Paula Blank meditates provocatively on the 'friction' induced by our distance from early modern English. Shakesplish confronts and celebrates that distance, giving voice to a past now revived for our era." -- Scott Newstok, Director, Pearce Shakespeare Endowment * Rhodes College *"This beautifully conceived book argues for a new and suggestive way of making Shakespeare our contemporary, at once familiar and exotic. Focusing on Shakespeare's language not as he might have intended it but as we understand it today, Paula Blank shows how what registers to a modern reader as the difficulty or strangeness of Shakespeare actually provokes singularly rich forms of cultural and personal self-discovery." -- Geoffrey Harpham, Kenan Institute for Ethics * Duke University *"We owe Paula Blank much thanks for bequeathing to us a book that I would not hesitate to describe as possessing the same traits she has analyzed for us—a book that is 'beautiful', 'funny', 'smart', and yes, even 'sexy': seductive, that is, in the elegant and articulate way in which it helps reveal to us our innermost desires about what Shakespeare's language should be." -- Iolanda Plescia * Memoria di Shakespeare *"Blank returns the reader to the act of luxuriating in the opulent richness of Shakespeare's language like no other scholar I have ever encountered. Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare's Language will be consulted for decades to come because of its indefatigable energy and exuberate erudition." -- William Reginald Rampone * Sixteenth Century Journal *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1"Shakespeare in Modern English" chapter abstractThis chapter lays the groundwork for approaching Shakespeare's English from the perspective of our own, drawing on translation theory, second-language acquisition theory, and performance studies. It destabilizes the argument over whether Shakespeare should or should not be translated into modern English by posing the theory that Shakespeare's English, in our reception of it, has become an "interlanguage," a uniquely modern hybrid. 2"Beautiful" chapter abstractThis chapter attempts to account for our continuing sense of Shakespeare's language as "beautiful" in an age in which the traditional aesthetic categories of "beautiful" and "sublime" have given way to new categories, such as "cute" or "interesting." Starting from the premise that, when it comes to Shakespeare, we are closer to eighteenth-century critics than twenty-first century ones, this chapter posits that our best chance of determining what it is that makes Shakespeare's language beautiful lies in considering what happens in the moment we make contact with his texts, the moment of our interlinguistic participation. Focusing on our experience of belatedness in relation to Shakespeare's Early Modern diction and syntax, this chapter examines various examples of Shakespeare's beautiful—and not so beautiful—language in order to determine the source of our aesthetic pleasure. 3"Sexy" chapter abstractThis chapter shows that Shakespeare's language is more openly sexual, when it is sexual, than our Modern English expectations have led us to believe. Early Modern English lacked "clinical" terms for male and female sexual organs and for the act of sexual intercourse itself. When Shakespeare uses terms like "sport" or "dally" for sex, he is speaking directly rather than euphemistically. This chapter argues that our interest in Shakespeare's sexual language actually reveals our ambivalence toward his original sexual frankness: We prefer sex in Shakespeare be hidden, so that we can find it out for ourselves. For us, Shakespeare's sexual language is, in itself, a metaphor for our idea of Shakespeare's text as coded, hiding some essential "truth." 4"Funny" chapter abstractThis chapter explores the "funny" and "unfunny" effects of Modern English on Shakespeare's comedy. Situating Shakespeare's jokes within the context of several dominant, enduring theories of humor in the Western tradition—including "superiority" theories, "arousal" or "release" theories, and "incongruity" theories—the chapter explains why and how it is that some of Shakespeare's comedy falls flat to contemporary ears while other instances have become more funny as a result of the gap between our English and Shakespeare's. 5"Smart" chapter abstractThis chapter examines Shakespeare's "intelligence effects," the ways in which his language gives us a sense of depth and acuity. Shakespeare did not use the word "intelligence" in the way that we do: in Early Modern English, the key terms were "wit" and "discourse of reason." Often, modern readers find Shakespeare's characters' "intelligent" because they demonstrate inwardness and self-consciousness; in the process, however, we miss their many failures of logic, which for Shakespeare's audience would have indicated a failure of reason. The chapter further argues that Shakespeare's poetic syntax makes him sound "smarter" to us. 6"Shakespeare as Modern English" chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on Modern English phrases that derive from Shakespeare's Early Modern English, but have been adapted to more recent forms of the vernacular, either in meaning or form. Modern English includes many idioms that originate in Shakespeare, such as "hoist with his own petard," "one fell swoop," and "primrose path." This chapter divides such idioms into three categories: those whose literal meaning is now obscure to us, those that we hear simply as Modern English, and those that sound antiquated and clichéd. Finally, the chapter returns to our modern obsession with identifying idioms as Shakespearean. Cited so often, in so many contexts, over so many centuries, these phrases have become their own particular suborder of language. They are far more ours than his, not Shakespeare but "Shakespeare."
£77.35
MP-NCA Uni of North Carolina Distance and Control in Don Quixote A Study in
Book SynopsisRuth el Saffar's study of novelistic technique in Don Quixote focuses on the interplay of characters, authors, and readers who populate the work.
£23.96
Northwestern University Press Literary Conclusions
Book SynopsisPresents a new theory of textual endings in eighteenth-century literature and thought. Analysing works by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist, Oliver Simons shows how the emergence of new kinds of literary endings around 1800 is inextricably linked to the history of philosophical and scientific concepts.Trade Review“This is a well written and forcefully argued study that succeeds in bringing out an important and heretofore unrecognized curve of literary-historical development across what must be regarded as the most significant phase of German cultural history. Simons’s command of the scholarship is exemplary, combining close textual analysis with a broad view of literary and intellectual history. The book’s contribution to current discussions in the scholarship—about the historical study of form and the place of the history of knowledge in literary historical study—is substantial.” —David E. Wellbery, editor-in-chief of A New History of German Literature“Simons operates on an elaborate and cutting-edge theoretical level. The readings in the book can be described as combining new formalist thinking with historical epistemology in the tradition of Foucault and the New Historicism. Simons’s book is innovative and exemplary at the same time, and this, in my view, is an enormous accomplishment.” —Rüdiger Campe, author of The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist""This thought-provoking book greatly enriches our understanding of a key juncture in literary history by drawing attention to the ways in which literary genres, patterns of emplotment, and syntactical structures follow, critique, and complicate forms of reasoning in an age that glorifies reason and despairs of it in turn."" —Márton Dornbach, author of The Saving Line: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Caesuras of Hope (Northwestern University Press, 2021)Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Thinking Through Conclusions 1. Lessing’s Form of Reason 2. Goethe and the Powers of Conclusion 3. Kleist’s Genres Literary Conclusions: From Urteilskraft to Schlusskraft Notes Bibliography Index
£84.15
Northwestern University Press Miltons Moving Bodies
Book Synopsis
£45.00
Northwestern University Press Toward a Premodern Posthumanism
Book Synopsis
£45.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Back to Nature
Book SynopsisRanging widely across scholarly disciplines, Back to Nature illuminates the response of seventeenth-century culture, especially English literature, to the way urbanization, capitalism, Protestantism, colonialism, Skepticism, empiricism, and new technologies conspired to alienate people from both the earth and reality itself.Trade Review"Back to Nature is demanding, at times dizzying, in its range and boldness, the all-encompassing and often surprising nature of its conjunctions. . . . Sections of the book amount to the most powerful and wide-ranging 'green' reading of early modern literature that has yet emerged." * Jonathan Bate, University of Warwick *"One of the most impressive works of scholarship I have encountered in three decades of reading such material. To observe the skill with which the author applies his extraordinary mind to the interrelations of similar but not obviously connected ideas is alternately thrilling and humbling." * Russ McDonald, University of North Carolina, Greensboro *"Productively wide-ranging, yet well focused in scope, Watson's book illuminates multiple issues of current interest in Renaissance studies, including representations of nature and reality, the quest for truth, the body, game hunting, colonialism, the new science, religion, and language in readings of canonical writers. . . . This book of the Renaissance struggle to reconcile desire for 'human mastery with love for the natural world' should be ready by all who teach Renaissance literature and by specialists in sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century literature." * Sixteenth Century Journal *
£27.90
University of Pennsylvania Press Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare
Book SynopsisJonathan Gil Harris challenges the way we conventionally understand physical objects. Turning to Renaissance theories of matter, he considers the profound untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's stage materials.Trade Review"It is difficult to do justice here to the extraordinarily wide range of critical and theoretical models that Harris draws on, or the ease with which he brings them together. . . . Harris's book is important . . . not only for its fine discussions of individual works but also for setting a yardstick for the work that early modernists might do in this area, and for the form that a 'turn to time' might take." * TLS *"Excitingly-and excitedly-written, energetic and widely suggestive. In restoring to the discussion of historical objects their resistance to temporal fixities, Harris's book does cultural historians a service." * Renaissance Quarterly *"A deep, intelligent, thought-provoking book on the ways in which physical objects both inhabit and transcend time. . . . This exciting book takes familiar texts and presents them in a new way." * Choice *"One of the most intellectually profound interventions into the field of Renaissance studies to appear in the last five to ten years. In challenging conventional understandings of historical time, Harris's book offers nothing less than a complete overhaul of current critical practice and persuades us to glimpse a scholarly future that is genuinely and excitingly new." * Renaissance Studies *"Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare is rigorously researched, well argued and skillfully written, and follows its own argument by using the past to suggest alternative ways of imaging both present and future. . . . Harris's book impresses with the depth and breadth of his knowledge, and the skill with which he brings together multiple branches of theoretical discourse to inform and advance his argument. . . . One of the more significant works of literary scholarship of recent years." * Parergon *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Urban Housefuls 2. Work in the Atlantic Service Economy 3. Family Credit and Shared Debts 4. Translating Money 5. Shopping Networks and Consumption as Collaboration 6. The Republic of Goods Conclusion Notes Index Acknowledgments
£22.79
University of Pennsylvania Press Owning William Shakespeare
Book SynopsisCopyright is by no means the only device for asserting ownership of a work. Some writers, including playwrights in the early modern period, did not even view print copyright as the most important of their authorial rights. A rich vein of recent scholarship has examined the interaction between royal monopolies, which have been identified with later notions of intrinsic authorial ownership, and the internal copy registration practices of the English book trades. Yet this dialogue was but one part of a still more complicated conversation in early modern England, James J. Marino argues; other customs and other sets of professional demands were at least as important, most strikingly in the exercise of the performance rights of plays.In Owning William Shakespeare James Marino explores the actors'' system of intellectual property as something fundamentally different from the property regimes exercised by the London printers or the royal monopolists. Focusing on Hamlet,Trade Review"Who, in the early modern period, laid claim to owning Shakespeare's plays? How did the property regimes of print and performance determine the nature of such claims? In tackling these questions, James J. Marino scores some palpable hits." * TLS *"Expertly blending literary criticism, performance theory, and historical analysis of intellectual property, Marino masterfully argues for the important role the Chamberlain's Men/King's Men played in vigorously maintaining their ownership in and the authenticity of Shakespeare's plays." * Choice *"A thematically dense, insightful book that will engage readers interested in the origins and evolutions of intellectual property law, of the business of early modern drama, and of textual transmissions and adaptations." * Early English Studies *"In this fascinating study, which brings together literary and textual studies, book and theatre history, the story of how Shakespeare's plays came to be created and known as his is told as a story of the King's Men and their property. Focusing on how intellectual property was created and maintained, Owning William Shakespeare makes important contributions to theatre and book history, puts paid to scholarship premised on the recovery of Shakespeare's authorial script, and argues for a radically revised understanding of early modern dramatic texts." * Review of English Studies *"Owning William Shakespeare tells the story of early modern drama as intellectual property. It does so with energy, urgency, passion, and originality: it points out details about book history and publication that have never been articulated before, redefining the field in important ways." * Tiffany Stern, University College, Oxford *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1. Secondhand Repertory: The Fall and Rise of Master W. Shakespeare Chapter 2. Sixty Years of Shrews Chapter 3. Hamlet, Part by Part Chapter 4. William Shakespeare's Sir John Oldcastle and the Globe's William Shakespeare Chapter 5. Restorations and Glorious Revolutions Notes Works Cited Index Acknowledgments
£25.19
University of Pennsylvania Press Rival Queens
Book SynopsisHistorians of British theater have often noted that the eighteenth century was an age not of the author but of the actor. In Rival Queens, Felicity Nussbaum argues that the period might more accurately be seen as the age of women in the theater, and more particularly as the age of the actress.Trade Review"Excellent." * TLS *"[Rival Queens] has vital ramifications not only for a renewed study of the eighteenth-century theater but also for our understandings of the performance of gender and, specifically, femininity across the period." * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *"A pleasure to read, with a deft balance of anecdote and theory, statistical data and narrative. Nussbaum, an acknowledged expert on gender and literature in the long eighteenth century, demonstrates her facility with eighteenth-century theater as well. The book will certainly appeal to feminists, theater historians, and scholars looking for nuanced histories of acting." * Theater Survey *"Skillfully interweaving analysis of a breadth of biographical source materials with literary analysis of plays and understandings of the economic context in which these women worked, the author offers a compelling argument for the ways in which theatrical economics disrupted simple stagings of femininity." * Theater Research International *Table of ContentsIntroduction: At Stage's Edge Chapter 1. The Economics of Celebrity Chapter 2. "Real, Beautiful Women": Rival Queens Chapter 3. Actresses' Memoirs: Exceptional Virtue Chapter 4. Actresses and Patrons: The Theatrical Contract Chapter 5. The Actress and Performative Property: Catherine Clive Chapter 6. The Actress, Travesty, and Nation: Margaret Woffington Chapter 7. The Actress and Material Femininity: Frances Abington Epilogue: Contracted Virtue Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£27.90
University of Pennsylvania Press Hamlet After Q1
Book SynopsisIn 1823 Sir Henry Bunbury discovered an early edition of Hamlet that radically differs from the known and celebrated version of the play. Zachary Lesser examines how this improbable discovery forced readers to reexamine accepted truths about Shakespeare as an author and the nature of Shakespeare's texts.Trade Review"Lesser's great achievement . . . is to show why textual bibliography matters. . . . This highly original book thrusts bibliography up from the footnotes and into the footlights, by showing in fascinating detail how the bibliographical algebra of Q1, Q2, and F has made a crucial contribution to the interpretation and performance of Hamlet." * Times Literary Supplement *"Lesser's engrossing book makes textual study alluring even to the nonpractitioner. . . . [He] puts lyrical energy into excavating old texts. . . . [His] study excites and edifies." * Choice *"Lesser's book . . . performs two valuable services: (i) exploring in detail the arguments of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century textual scholars working on Hamlet, and (ii) reexamining the Q1/Q2/F differences to come up with fresh explanations for them. . . . A substantial merit of Lesser's book is the minute detail with which he traces the genesis and evolution of these ideas as they were shaped by nineteenth-century scholarly competitiveness and the emergence of new facts and hypotheses. But more valuable still are Lesser's own contributions to the debates about the textual and theatrical relationships of Q1/Q2/F." * The Review of English Studies *"Zachary Lesser's fascinating book about Q1 Hamlet details what happened after the discovery of this black sheep in Shakespeare's textual family. The rich cast of characters here, including both bit players and eminent scholars, makes the story a Stoppard play waiting to be written." * Douglas Bruster, University of Texas at Austin *"An extraordinary work of interpretation and an extraordinary work of literary history." * Tiffany Stern, University of Oxford *Table of ContentsIntroduction. The Ur-Hamlet Chapter 1. As Originally Written by Shakespeare: Textual Bibliography and Textual Biography Chapter 2. Contrary Matters: The Power of the Gloss and the History of an Obscenity Chapter 3. Enter the Ghost in His Night Gowne: Behind Gertrude's Bed Chapter 4. Conscience Makes Cowards: The Disintegration and Reintegration of Shakespeare Conclusion. Q1 in the Library at Babel Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£25.19
University of Pennsylvania Press Fiction Without Humanity
Book SynopsisAlthough the Enlightenment is often associated with the emergence of human rights and humanitarian sensibility, humanity is an elusive category in the literary, philosophical, scientific, and political writings of the period. Fiction Without Humanity offers a literary history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century efforts to define the human. Focusing on the shifting terms in which human difference from animals, things, and machines was expressed, Lynn Festa argues that writers and artists treated humanity as an indefinite class, which needed to be called into being through literature and the arts. Drawing on an array of literary, scientific, artistic, and philosophical devices- the riddle, the fable, the microscope, the novel, and trompe l'oeil and still-life painting- Fiction Without Humanity focuses on experiments with the perspectives of nonhuman creatures and inanimate things. Rather than deriving species membership from sympathetic identification or likeness to a fixTrade Review"Fiction without Humanity is a dauntingly learned book, in which Lynn Festa deploys and contributes to such diverse fields as thing theory, animal studies, art history, the history of science, folklore, rhetoric and grammar, and Peircean semiotics."" * Eighteenth Century Fiction *"Fiction Without Humanity is a profound book that tenders as many pleasures as Pope or Swift as it dances between empirical minima (fleas, flies, personal pronouns, unmatched shoes) and concepts and questions that remain urgent today: Just what makes a thing count as human? How does literary form participate in this accounting? What, specifically, does literature do to, with, for us humans? Lynn Festa has written a posthumanist classic-albeit one that returns us to a new and more demanding humanity." * Jayne Lewis, author of Air's Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794 *"With its critical attention to such things as birds, insects, paintings, scientific engravings, riddles, fables, and Robinson Crusoe's island, Fiction Without Humanity offers an ambitious and persuasive account of the meaning of 'humanity'-and humanity's fictions-from radically other points of view. This book marks a bracing and mobilizing intervention in eighteenth-century eco-criticism as well as the environmental humanities more generally." * Helen Thompson, author of Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1. Bird's-Eye View Chapter 2. Lousy Bodies Chapter 3. Anthropomorphic Things Chapter 4. Flea, Fly, Fable Chapter 5. Crusoe's Island of Misfit Things Coda Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£25.19
University of Pennsylvania Press Miltons Burden of Interpretation Anniversary
Book Synopsis
£59.50
University of Pennsylvania Press Being Interior
Book SynopsisThe familiar classical France of splendor, formalism, and conquest had a hidden double, one ruled by the cultural imperative to be interior, to look inside oneself and to write about what one found. Being Interior explores how seventeenth-century readers and writers busied themselves with the pressing task of inventing a text commensurate with these newly opened subjective depths. Their practices laid the groundwork not only for the future success of autobiography as a genre but also for our entire modern culture of interiority.In tracing the emergence of autobiography as a privileged mediation between interior and exterior worlds, Nicholas D. Paige turns his attention where few have looked: to the wealth of material contained in religious writing of the period, much of it by women. Combining the evidence furnished by the material transmission of these works with a theoretical understanding of the contradictions built into subjectivity, Paige explains why categories like autobTrade Review"This is, quite simply, an important, memorable and profoundly original book." * Timothy J. Reiss, New York University *"A noteworthy contribution." * Choice *
£52.70
University of Pennsylvania Press American Georgics
Book SynopsisAmerican Georgics takes as its primary problem the question of the human place in nature. By extending our understanding of what counts as environmental literature back before Thoreau, Sweet shows that early texts, while not necessarily green in contemporary terms, can offer important insights into our relationship to the environment.Trade Review"Sweet offers a wide-ranging examination of the agricultural work of North American men and women as seen through the lens of literature. . . . Sweet's greatest achievement is his ability to integrate hundreds of years of discourse about the North American continent into a cohesive narrative of evolving perceptions of environment and humankind's role in shaping it." * American Literature *"Thoughtful, critically intelligent, and well-informed." * Lawrence Buell, Harvard University *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Economy and Environment in Sixteenth-Century Promotional Literature 2. "God Sells Us All Things for Our Labour": John Smith's Generall Historie 3. "Wonder-Working Providence" of the Market 4. "Admirable Oeconomy": Robert Beverley's Calculus of Compensation 5. Ideologies of Farming: Crevecoeur, Jefferson, Rush, and Brown 6. Cherokee "Improvements" and the Removal Debate 7. "Co-Workers with Nature": Cooper, Thoreau, and Marsh Notes Woks Cited Index Acknowledgments
£59.40
University of Pennsylvania Press Shakespeares Domestic Economies
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This is a truly excellent book on Shakespeare's treatment of domestic economies, that is, his attention to the domain of household management increasingly seen as the women's sphere in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England." * Jean Howard, author of The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England *"This exceptional study makes an important and most welcome contribution." * Ben Jonson Journal *"Korda draws on the best aspects of a variety of recent critical approaches while charting new territory of her own." * Choice *Table of ContentsNote on Spelling and Dates Prologue Chapter 1. Labors Lost Chapter 2. Dame Usury Chapter 3. Froes and Rebatos Chapter 4. Cries and Oysterwives Chapter 5. False Wares Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£52.20
University of Pennsylvania Press The Trouble with Ownership
Book SynopsisCopyright and intellectual property issues are intricately woven into any written work, but the precise nature of this relationship has plagued authors, printers, and booksellers for centuries. What does it mean to own the products of our intellectual labors in our own time? And what was the meaning three centuries ago, when copyright laws were first put into place?Jody Greene argues that while owning one''s book is critical to the development of modern notions of authorship, studies of authorial property rights have in fact lost sight of the most critical valence of owning in early modern England: that is, owning up to or taking responsibility for one''s work. Greene puts forth what she calls a paranoid theory of copyright, under which literary property rights are a means of state regulation to assign responsibility for printed works, to identify one person who will step forward and claim the work in exchange for the right to reap the benefits of the literary marketplace. BleTrade Review"Greene's book is marvelously smart and analytic, but not just a 'think' book spun out of a few months in the library. The research here is of the hard kind: primary sources, legislative records, court cases. Greene is a real scholar in the classic sense." * John Bender, Stanford University *"Greene's lucid and fluidly written study explores the shifting calculus of ownership as it is worked out in the emerging print culture, a government attempting to keep up in turbulent times, and a legal system predicated on rights arising from property in land and tangible assets." * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *"An excellent book, which covers new ground in the field of the struggle of the press and, most of all, of individual authors . . . in early modern England." * Modern Language Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction PART I. THE TROUBLE WITH OWNERSHIP 1. Authorship and the Regulation of the Press 2. The Trials of Ownership: Finding the Author in Court PART II. THE DANGEROUS FATE OF AUTHORS 3. Daniel Defoe, the Act of Anne, and the Obligations of Ownership 4. Revenge of the Straw Woman: Disowning The Dunciad 5. Hostis Humani Generis: Owning Polly Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£49.30
University of Pennsylvania Press A Sonnet from Carthage
Book SynopsisIn 1492, the Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija proclaimed that language has always been the companion of empire. Taking as his touchstone a suggestive sonnet that Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in 1535, this work examines how the companionship of language and empire played itself out more generally in the new poetry of 16th-century Europe.Trade Review"A tour de force in the practice of reading." * Hispanic Review *"A masterful reading of poetry in context. . . . Highly recommended." * Choice *
£31.50
University of Pennsylvania Press The Incarnate Text
Book SynopsisIn the course of the Reformation, artistic representation famously came under attack. Statues were destroyed, music and theater were forbidden, and poetry was denounced, all in the name of eradicating superstition and idolatry. The iconoclastic impulse that sparked these attacks, however, proved remarkably productive, generating a profusion of theological, polemical, and literary writing from Catholics and Protestants alike.Reformers like Luther had promised a return to the book, attacking Catholicism as a religion of images and icons. Becoming a religion of the book in the way that Reformers proposed, however, proved impossible: language is inescapably material; books are necessarily things, objects that are seen and touched. The antitheses at the heart of this opposition—word versus thing, text versus image—have had far-reaching effects on the modern world.James Kearney engages with recent work in the history of the book and the history of religion to invesTrade Review"Kearney's study is a brilliant account of the book in post-Reformation England. By thinking hard and imaginatively about what books were and what books did, about how they were imagined, produced, and used, Kearney provides us with a compelling and often surprising history of a world whose defining theological, epistemological, and psychological characteristics have combined to shape our own." * David Scott Kastan, Yale University *"The Incarnate Text represents the best of the new eclecticism that has been characterizing much of Renaissance studies in the last ten years. Kearney draws his models from a wide array of critical practices. At core, the project is securely rooted in an old tradition of intellectual history and close reading but energized by a series of strategies drawn from cultural materialism, deconstruction, discourses of the body, and history of the book." * Ritchie Kendall, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill *
£59.50
University of Pennsylvania Press Empires of Love
Book SynopsisDrawing on a wide range of Dutch, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish sources, Empires of Love shows how the encounter with Asia shaped the way early modern Europeans came to define their racial and sexual identities.Trade Review"Compelling and filled with rich textual and historical details, Empires of Love will alter the ways we read the cross-cultural and domestic production of both race and desire." * Emily Bartels, Rutgers University *"Carmen Nocentelli's book makes important contributions to the multiple fields it embraces, from colonial studies to gender politics to comparative literature. Scholars working in all of the national traditions presented in Empires of Love will find much to think about." * Josiah Blackmore, University of Toronto *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Quotations and Translations Introduction Chapter 1. Perverse Implantations Chapter 2. The Erotic Politics of Os Lusíadas Chapter 3. Discipline and Love: Linschoten and the Estado da Índia Chapter 4. Polygamy and the Arts of Reduction Chapter 5. The Ideology of Interracial Romance Chapter 6. English Whiteness and the End of Romance Notes Bibliography Index
£48.60
University of Pennsylvania Press True Relations
Book SynopsisExamining seventeenth-century crises of evidence and genres of evidence on which both literary critics and historians now depend, True Relations explores the notion that we apprehend truth through other people's relations of it and that those relations, and our own relation to them, are a function of social relationships in conflict.Trade Review"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 *Table of ContentsNote on Spelling Introduction PART I. CRISES OF EVIDENCE Chapter 1. True and Perfect Relations: Henry Garnet, Confessional Identity, and Figuration Chapter 2. Sham Stories and Credible Relations: Witchcraft and Narrative Conventions Chapter 3. A True and Faithful Account? The London Fire, Blame, and Partisan Proof PART II. GENRES OF EVIDENCE Chapter 4. First-Person Relations: Reading Depositions Chapter 5. The Rule of Relation: Domestic Advice Literature and Its Readers Chapter 6. Relational Truths: Dramatic Evidence, All Is True, and Double Falsehood Notes Index Acknowledgments
£52.70
University of Pennsylvania Press Of Bondage
Book SynopsisFocusing on dramatic literature's contribution to the developing narrative of possessed persons, Of Bondage deepens our understanding of creditor-debtor relations in the period and sheds new light on the conceptual conditions for the institutions of indentured servitude and African slavery.Trade Review"[Bailey] offers a compelling account of the role of debt in the early modern imaginary. . . . [Her] literary exegesis . . . raises important historical questions." * Sixteenth Century Journal *"Absorbing and beautifully written. Amanda Bailey thinks about debt as a bodily event at the center of political and moral issues raised by contract law, including the question of self-ownership." * Jonathan Gil Harris, George Washington University *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction: Bound Bodies and the Theater of Debt Chapter 1. Timon of Athens, Forms of Payback, and the Genre of Debt Chapter 2. Shylock and the Slaves: Owing and Owning in The Merchant of Venice Chapter 3. Michaelmas Term and the Problem of Satisfaction Chapter 4. Freedom, Bondage, and Redemption in The Custom of the Country Chapter 5. Prison Prose, the Pit, and the End of Tricks Epilogue: The Debtor and the Slave Notes Works Cited Index Acknowledgments
£48.60
University of Pennsylvania Press Barbarous Antiquity
Book SynopsisBarbarous Antiquity reorients early modern English poetry around England's mercantile and cultural exchanges with the Ottoman Empire, revealing how English poetry renegotiated its relationship to the classical past.Trade Review"Barbarous Antiquity extends our sense of Ovid's dual role as classical exemplar and outlier, and makes a substantial contribution by demonstrating how lyric and narrative poetry were as important to the English image of the Ottoman Mediterranean as drama and travel writing." * John Archer, New York University *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction: Trafficking with Antiquity: Trade, Poetry, and Remediation PART I. BARBARIAN INVASIONS Chapter 1. Strange Language: Imported Words in Jonson's Ars Poetica Chapter 2. Shaping Subtlety: Sugar in The Arte of English Poesie PART II. REDEEMING OVID Chapter 3. Publishing Pain: Zero in The Rape of Lucrece Chapter 4. Breeding Fame: Horses and Bulbs in Venus and Adonis PART III. REORIENTING ANTIQUITY Chapter 5. On Chapman Crossing Marlowe's Hellespont: Pearls, Dyes, and Ink in Hero and Leander Epilogue: The Peregrinations of Barbarous Antiquity Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£56.10
University of Pennsylvania Press Disknowledge
Book SynopsisKatherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of humanistic learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the benefits of relying on alchemy despite its recognized flaws.Trade Review"Rich, detailed, subtle and bold. . . . Eggert is fully alive to the duplicity of alchemy and its claims." * Times Literary Supplement *"Eggert approaches her esoteric subjects with deep learning, masterful analysis, and exceptionally clear prose. Scrupulous but never sloppy, Disknowledge makes us think differently not just about the history of fiction making but also about the forms of unknowing at the heart of early modern knowledge systems. It provides a compelling account of a society that experienced acutely what she calls 'epistemological risk' in the face of new global flows of wealth and learning." * Modern Philology *"In this sharp and original book, Katherine Eggert takes on the challenge of characterizing knowledge formation in the period between early humanism and the rise of Baconian empiricism . . .Disknowledge, in Eggert's clever framework, has its own methodologies for impeding progress, including conscious forgetting, skimming texts, or treating relevant knowledge as immaterial." * Review of English Studies *"Katherine Eggert's Disknowledge breathes new life into a topic whose quirky fascination in early modern studies has foreclosed more nuanced ways of reading the specificities of its cultural potency . . . Eggert's analysis convincingly shows how the alchemical expressions of disknowledge may indeed 'model for modernity a kind of nimble epistemological and literary inventiveness' that imagines how looking backward may sometimes be the best way to move forward, but not without risk." * Studies in English Literature. *"Disknowledge's vigour and curiosity are inspiring . . . Eggert's line of argument is usually stringent, always erudite, and all the while tends to anticipate possible counterarguments . . . a valuable, rich and frequently thought-provoking addition to its field." * Early Modern Culture Online *"Disknowledge is a stimulating read, as this book challenges and provokes the reader to think deeply about what we as historians have come to know, and why, inviting response to Eggert's stated position from diverse disciplinary perspectives. As a scholarly resource, Disknowledge is an important and useful work for the ways in which Eggert sheds light on the inherent messiness of the state of learning during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . . [A] significant work for opening up new ways to probe the project of knowledge-making in early modern England, and beyond." * Early Science and Medicine *"An unusually wide-ranging and original book, written with real stylistic flair. Eggert shows how alchemy, as both a discourse and a set of knowledge-practices, illuminates problems in many different domains, from transubstantiation to Kabbalah to debates over anatomy and reproduction. By using alchemy as a guiding thread, she reveals how each domain points up the limits of humanism in the early modern period. A delicately balanced, timely study that will be widely of interest to scholars of literature, science, medicine, and intellectual history more broadly." * Henry S. Turner, Rutgers University *Table of ContentsNotes on Texts, Biblical Quotations, and Bibliography Introduction Chapter 1. How to Sustain Humanism Chapter 2. How to Forget Transubstantiation Chapter 3. How to Skim Kabbalah Chapter 4. How to Avoid Gynecology Chapter 5. How to Make Fiction Afterword Notes Select Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£77.35
University of Pennsylvania Press Recipes for Thought Knowledge and Taste in the
Book SynopsisSituated at the vital intersection of physiology, gastronomy, decorum, knowledge-production, and labor, recipes from the past allow us to understand the significant ways that kitchen work was an intellectual and creative enterprise.Trade Review"Wall brilliantly restores an unfamiliar version of early modern domesticity. [Her] achievement . . . is to light up this earlier period, when England was the most dynamic site of recipe publication in Europe." * London Review of Books *"A nuanced and in many ways fresh account of how Renaissance recipes function as knowledge. . . . The book is a signal accomplishment that will prove as useful in the years to come as the recipes it analyzes proved to an earlier age." * Renaissance and Reformation *"Crammed with delightful discoveries, Recipes for Thought offers us a vibrant new picture of the early modern housewife as reader, writer, and knowledge producer and the kitchen as an arena of debate, experiment, and invention. Linking the kitchen to the lab and the pharmacy, the recipe to the poem and the play, Wendy Wall rejoins what has since been put asunder to re-create a world we not only lost but forgot about." * Frances Dolan, University of California, Davis *Table of ContentsPreface. The Appetizer Introduction. The Order of Serving Chapter 1. Taste Acts Chapter 2. Pleasure: Kitchen Conceits in Print Chapter 3. Literacies: Handwriting and Handiwork Chapter 4. Temporalities: Preservation, Seasoning, and Memorialization Chapter 5. Knowledge: Recipes and Experimental Cultures Coda Notes Works Cited Index Acknowledgments
£70.55
University of Pennsylvania Press Sociable Knowledge
Book SynopsisWorking with the technologies of pen and paper, scissors and glue, naturalists in early modern England, Scotland, and Wales wrote, revised, and recombined their words, sometimes over a period of many years, before fixing them in printed form. They built up their stocks of papers by sharing these materials through postal and less formal carrier services. They exchanged letters, loose notes, drawings and plans, commonplace books, as well as lengthy treatises, ever-expanding repositories for new knowledge about nature and history as it accumulated through reading, observation, correspondence, and conversation. These textual collections grew alongside cabinets of natural specimens, antiquarian objects, and other curiosities—insects pinned in boxes, leaves and flowers pressed in books, rocks and fossils, ancient coins and amulets, and drafts of stone monuments and inscriptions. The goal of all this collecting and sharing, Elizabeth Yale claims, was to create channels through which Trade Review"Meticulously researched, [Sociable Knowledge] provides a fine-grained account of how the world of early modern natural historical research worked. . . . Elizaberth Yale has provided a useful antidote to the idea that historians, or indeed others, should attempt to set out a single, unified vision, of what Britain is or was. The first methodical topographers were wise-or humble-enough to allow a multifaceted, sometimes contradictory Britain to emerge from the jumbled testimonies of her inhabitants."" * Times Literary Supplement *"Yale toggles deftly, in delightfully clear and organized prose, between the local particulars of both material and textual collections and the national visions they served. In so doing she makes a substantial and meticulous contribution to many fields, from the history and sociology of science to literary studies and early modern cultural history, as well as museum, media, and communications studies." * Bibliographical Society of America *"Sociable Knowledge is the first work I know of that discusses every means of early modern scientific communication-letters, conversation, printed books-their perceived advantages and limitations, and their complementary and supplementary roles. It is a book of exemplary scholarship and erudition." * Sachiko Kusukawa, University of Cambridge *Table of ContentsNote on Sources List of Abbreviations Introduction. "A Whole and Perfect Bodie and Book": Constructing the Human and Natural History of Britain Chapter 1. "This Book Doth Not Shew You a Telescope, but a Mirror": The Topographical Britain in Print Chapter 2. Putting Texts, Things, and People in Motion: Learned Correspondence in Action Chapter 3. Natural History "Hardly Can Bee Done by Letters": Conversation, Writing, and the Making of Natural Knowledge Chapter 4. John Aubrey's Naturall Historie of Wiltshire: A Case Study in Scribal Collaboration Chapter 5. Publics of Letters: Printing for (and Through) Correspondence Chapter 6. "The Manuscripts Flew About like Butterflies": Self-Archiving and the Pressures of History Conclusion. Paper Britannias Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£62.90
University of Pennsylvania Press Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern
Book SynopsisThe letter is a powerfully evocative form that has gained in resonance as the habits of personal letter writing have declined in a digital age. But faith in the letter as evidence of the intimate thoughts of individuals underplays the sophisticated ways letters functioned in the past. In Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain leading scholars approach the letter from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to uncover the habits, forms, and secrets of letter writing. Where material features of the letter have often been ignored by past generations fixated on the text alone, contributors to this volume examine how such elements as handwriting, seals, ink, and the arrangement of words on the manuscript page were significant carriers of meaning alongside epistolary rhetorics. The chapters here also explore the travels of the letter, uncovering the many means through which correspondence reached a reader and the ways in which the delivery of letters preoccupied contempoTrade Review"Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain is a collection of eleven essays edited by James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, two acknowledged authorities in this lively and fast-growing field . . . .Where this collection really distinguishes itself is in the section on the afterlives of letters. Here, the textual problems raised by the archiving and preservation of letters are thought-provoking and important." * Times Literary Supplement *"Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain overturns the notion that letters are private, unmediated sources of the writer's thoughts and instead reveals and delights in the literary, artful qualities of letters and the cultures of collaboration and rewriting that produced them. By attending to what the editors call the social materiality of letter writing-the physical features of the text; the social and cultural practices of epistolary culture; and the material contexts in which letters were produced-this collection provides a rich sociology of early modern letter writing that will interest and provoke anyone working in early modern studies." * Adam Smyth, University of Oxford *
£62.90
University of Pennsylvania Press Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeares Theater
Book SynopsisPlaywriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater shows how the rise of England's first commercialized culture industry also gave rise to the first generation of participatory consumers and their attempts to engage with mainstream culture by writing early modern "fan fiction."Trade Review"An extremely substantial contribution to the field. Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater has the potential to reconfigure current debates about theatrical authorship and spectatorship, and it also acts as an invaluable primer on a range of neglected material." * Lucy Munro, King's College London *Table of ContentsIntroduction. "All write Playes" Chapter 1. "Mayn't a spectator write a comedy?": The Early Modern Idea of Playgoers as Playmakers Chapter 2. "Some other may be added": Playwriting Playgoers Revising in Their Manuscripts Chapter 3. "As shall be shewed before the daye of action": Playwriting Playgoers and Performance Chapter 4. "Watching every word": Playwriting Playgoers as Verse Dramatists Conclusion. "I began to make a play" Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£49.30
University of Pennsylvania Press The Wreckage of Intentions
Book SynopsisThe Wreckage of Intentions offers a comprehensive account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century projects-concrete yet incomplete efforts to advance British society during a period defined by revolutions in finance and agriculture, the rise of experimental science, and the establishment of constitutional monarchy.Trade Review"In his fine new book, [Alff] recovers a rich history of social, economic and agricultural improvement ventures . . . There was a time when this sort of book would have arrived at bleak conclusions about technocratic control and domination. Alff, in contrast, prefers to dwell on possibility . . . Most projects fail, but some succeed, and a portion of the successes are utterly disastrous for the Earth and human well-being. David Alff rebalances the scales, but academic debate, itself an abiding project will surely continue." * Times Literary Supplement *"[A] superb first book . . . The combination of superb close reading and impressive scholarly research, of historical depth and literary power, features in every elegant and gripping chapter . . . Wreckage of Intentions makes a compelling argument about the power of paying attention to the debris of the past, of the might-have-beens before they were killed off. The Wreckage of Intentions makes us question the historical ground we're standing on." * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *"Alff’s ambitious study recovers a genre—the project—whose permeable boundaries have made it difficult for previous literary critics not only to delimit their analytic object but also to measure a project’s influence. The importance of Alff’s book is how it furthers our definition of what, precisely, imagination means during the civic-minded eighteenth century, before imagination is reconceived by Romantic poets to mean a subjectively creative faculty of the individual mind." * Eighteenth-Century Studies *"[A]n impressive analysis of an overlooked body of work, full of insights, balanced judgements and sensitive readings about project literature, with much to say about economics, histories and the role of imagination in shaping the future. Virginia Woolf observed that words ‘hate making money’, and while plans for improvement rarely produce great literature, the clarity of Alff ’s sentences, his well-judged phrases and striking expressions make this a project so elegantly written it is unlikely to suffer the waste-basket fate of so many of the texts it surveys." * Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies *"Elegantly organized and incisive in its analysis, The Wreckage of Intentions opens up the narrative cage that our stories of progress and modernization have locked us into. David Alff's close reading of tracts, pamphlets, and treatises that propose various improvements, from insurance to agriculture, enables us to understand the ways in which future possibility and change were imagined in early modern Britain." * Wolfram Schmidgen, Washington University in St. Louis *Table of ContentsIntroduction. What Is a Project? Chapter 1. Improvement's Genre: Andrew Yarranton and the Rhetoric of Projection Chapter 2. Company in Paper: Aaron Hill's Beech Oil Bust Chapter 3. Projects Beyond Words: Undertaking Fen Drainage Chapter 4. Inheriting the Future: Georgic's Projecting Strain Chapter 5. Swift's Solar Gourds and the Antiproject Tradition Coda. Imaginary Debris in Defoe's New Forest Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£52.70
University of Pennsylvania Press Poetry Wars
Book SynopsisDuring America''s founding period, poets and balladeers engaged in a series of literary wars against political leaders, journalists, and each other, all in the name of determining the political course of the new nation. Political poems and songs appeared regularly in newspapers (and as pamphlets and broadsides), commenting on political issues and controversies and satirizing leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Drawing on hundreds of individual poems—including many that are frequently overlooked—Poetry Wars reconstructs the world of literary-political struggle as it unfolded between the Stamp Act crisis and the War of 1812.Colin Wells argues that political verse from this period was a unique literary form that derived its cultural importance from its capacity to respond to, and contest the meaning of, other printed texts—from official documents and political speeches to newspaper articles and rival political poems. First arising duringTrade Review"With his comprehensive study of political poetry from the American Revolution through the War of 1812, Colin Wells foregrounds a body of writing not often given extended treatment by literary scholars, but one which, as he superbly demonstrates, played an influential role in shaping the cultural and political landscape of the nation's turbulent, but formative, early years . . . Poetry Wars unearths a trove of poems published in partisan newspapers and other print outlets to reveal the intricate ideological and rhetorical dy-namics at work in the political debates that shaped the new nation and the active role that poetry played in them. [Wells] therefore makes a persuasive case that poetry, despite W. H. Auden's later assertion to the contrary, does, in fact, make things happen." * Early American Literature *"Poetry Wars explains the explosion of printed verse at the end of the eighteenth century in America and the evolution of several strands of political consciousness articulated through poetry. Arguing that poetry, not prose, was in fact the dominant belletristic mode of expression in the early United States, Colin Wells provides an important corrective to our understanding of American literary history." * David Shields, University of South Carolina *"Poetry Wars offers an erudite and engaging account of the surprisingly instrumental role of verse in U.S. nation formation. Colin Wells gives us a sense of how bold, playful, and rhetorically incisive political poems could be. He has done literary history a great service by recovering a time when poetry was both a vital force in public life and a dynamic means of effecting political change." * Edward Cahill, Fordham University *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1. The Poetics of Resistance Chapter 2. War and Literary War Chapter 3. Poetry and Conspiracy Chapter 4. The Language of Liberty Chapter 5. The Voice of the People Chapter 6. Mirror Images Chapter 7. The Triumph of Democracy Epilogue Notes Index Acknowledgments
£49.30
University of Pennsylvania Press Shakespearean Intersections
Book SynopsisWhat does the keyword continence in Love''s Labor''s Lost reveal about geopolitical boundaries and their breaching? What can we learn from the contemporary identification of the quince with weddings that is crucial for A Midsummer Night''s Dream? How does the evocation of Spanish-occupied Brabant in Othello resonate with contemporary geopolitical contexts, wordplay on Low Countries, and fears of sexual/territorial occupation? How does supposes connote not only sexual submission in The Taming of the Shrew but also the transvestite practice of boys playing women, and what does it mean for the dramatic recognition scene in Cymbeline?With dazzling wit and erudition, Patricia Parker explores these and other critical keywords to reveal how they provide a lens for interpreting the language, contexts, and preoccupations of Shakespeare''s plays. In doing so, she probes classical and historical sources, theatrical performance practices, geopolitical inTrade Review"By honing a feminist philological practice attuned to the intersections of language, class, gender, sexuality, and race, Parker illuminates how single words and their discursive networks firm up or challenge hierarchies of self and other in early modern English culture....Working across historical periods, geographies, discourses, and languages, Parker traces how single words range far afield to mate, drawing other terms into the orbit of the self-same in subtle, queer, and preposterous ways. As one has come to expect from Parker, delight is in the details....Shakespearean Intersections delivers on the promises of philologically attuned intersectional analysis, revealing the critical, historical, ontological, and epistemological insights that arise when we delve deeply and patiently into the world of words." * Shakespeare Quarterly *"The conclusion one draws from Shakespearean Intersections is that a lifetime of study in classical and early modern literature, multiple languages, philosophy, and world history might foster a critical perspective that invigorates our most familiar texts and makes them speak to the pressing issues of our time. This is the true promise of creative, inspiring literary criticism. It is a promise made good in Shakespearean Intersections." * Renaissance Quarterly *"Parker has always been one of the most trenchant and dazzling observers of word behaviour and her command of the almost incorrigible and mischievous elements of Shakespeare's language is an art in itself. The vibrant way in which she conjures contexts and allusions, recalls, suppositions, bends, behinds and breaches draws out the spectacular ways in which meanings are networked across the plays, but also the audiences and how the word becomes a powerful token or gift through which we can explore the rich complexities of belonging to Shakespeare's play worlds." * Shakespeare Survey *"Providing a rather prolific response to the age-old question, 'what's in a name?' this book's methodological approach to words (including nominal) as uniquely rewarding vehicles for exploring the language, contexts, and preoccupations of a period's literature and drama-together with oft-overlooked issues and historical intersections-testifies to the rich dividends paid by the meticulously close scholarly readings at which Parker is so adept." * Renaissance and Reformation *"Shakespearean Intersections offers a stunningly creative and illuminating method for reading Shakespeare's words as nodes in densely linked webs of religious, racial, political, and sexual meanings. No word is safe from Patricia Parker's eagle-eyed attention to the polyglot resonances, inferences, and figurations that unexpectedly connect Shakespeare's language to contemporary discourses as diverse as sodomy, military science, biblical teleology, and orthography. Shakespearean Intersections shows us how much we have overlooked in Shakespeare's language, and how much richer and more inventive our readings of even his most familiar texts might be." * Mario DiGangi, The Graduate Center, City University of New York *"Our editorial and critical endeavors have always (and perhaps necessarily) underestimated the activity of words-which is why we need Patricia Parker's extraordinary readings of Shakespeare." * Margreta de Grazia, University of Pennsylvania *"In Shakespearean Intersections, Patricia Parker identifies a wide range of especially resonant keywords and cultural contexts for early modern drama. Her readings of Shakespearean drama are a joy to encounter: immensely learned; acutely sensitive to rhetorical complexity; and deeply thoughtful about the politics of language." * Patricia Cahill, Emory University *
£49.30
University of Pennsylvania Press Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing
Book SynopsisIn the decades after U.S. independence, American novelists carried on an argument that pitted direct democracy against the representative liberalism they attributed to their British counterparts. The result was an American novel distinguished by its use of narrative tropes that generated a social system resembling today's distributed network.Trade Review"Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have long been our preeminent theorists of the novel. In this latest, virtuoso installment, they take on the novels of the early republic, seeing this corpus as nothing less than a template for a new polity, an updated version of the global and the local, replacing the hierarchical social contract of their English counterparts with a managed horizontality, a controlled redistribution of property and sensibility. Electrifying and eye-opening." * Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University *"An important, timely, and much-needed book. Few accounts of the early American novel have the tenacity, willingness, and breadth of learning to accomplish what Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse do here: to reframe the novel form in relation to what has been thought of as its American variant. When this book has done its work, there will be no British novel or American novel; there will be the 'network novel.'" * Lloyd Pratt, University of Oxford *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Argumentum ad Populum Chapter 1. Style in the Time of Epidemic Writing Chapter 2. Refiguring the Social Contract Chapter 3. Novels as a Form of Democratic Writing Chapter 4. Dispersal Chapter 5. Population Chapter 6. Conversion Chapter 7. Hubs Chapter 8. Anamorphosis Chapter 9. Becoming National Literature Notes Works Cited Index Acknowledgments
£48.60
University of Pennsylvania Press Feeling Time
Book SynopsisLiterary historians have tended to associate the eighteenth century with the rise of the tyranny of the clock-the notion of time as ruled by mechanical chronometry. The transition to standardized scheduling and time-discipline, the often-told story goes, inevitably results in modernity's time-keeper societies and the characterization of modern experience as qualitatively diminished. In Feeling Time, Amit Yahav challenges this narrative of the triumph of chronometry and the consequent impoverishment of individual experience. She explores the fascination eighteenth-century writers had with the mental and affective processes through which human beings come not only to know that time has passed but also to feel the durations they inhabit. Yahav begins by elucidating discussions by Locke and Hume that examine how humans come to know time, noting how these philosophers often consider not only knowledge but also experience. She then turns to novels by Richardson, Sterne, and Radcliffe, atteTrade Review"Feeling Timeprovides its readers with an erudite and capacious look at the feelings that characterize duration and how duration reproduces feelings in ways that capture the ethos of modernity from the eighteenth century and beyond. Its readings are astute and striking. They ask us to reconsider the way felt time figures in a multitude of Enlightenment discourses. If you are interested in philosophical readings of the novel before Jane Austen, then read Feeling Time." * Studies in the Novel, *"In her elegant study, Amit Yahav argues that chronometry and chronology do not exhaust the novel’s ways of engaging with time. Rather, the eighteenth-century British novel explores the phenomenality of duration: the textured, variable, intensive experience of intervals of time. Yahav reveals at the heart of novels ranging from Robinson Crusoe to Sense and Sensibility this experience of duration through the senses and emotions...Yahav’s study provides fresh readings of well-known texts; it also opens up less familiar areas that are well worth exploring further." * Novel: A Forum on Fiction *"Yahav's book offers a compelling new perspective on how temporality can be read as "felt duration" in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy." * Eighteenth-Century Studies *"In Feeling Time, Yahav turns to the relationship between a sense of time and the experience of reading. Yahav’s central contention is that the idea of reading as a suspension of time comes not from the Romanticists, but from the earlier 18th-century novel of sensibility. Yahav reminds us that over 30 years ago Paul Ricoeur conceptualized narrative as mediating temporal experience, often as a way of understanding the representation of consciousness." * Los Angeles Review of Books *"In this innovative and ambitious book, Amit S. Yahav challenges some overly entrenched critical commonplaces about the Enlightenment roots of modernity while simultaneously elaborating new and compelling analyses of novels and aesthetic treatises that are the well-established mainstays of eighteenth-century literary studies." * Deidre Lynch, Harvard University *Table of ContentsIntroduction. The Sensibility Chronotope Chapter 1. Composing Human Time: Locke, Hume, Addison, and Diderot Chapter 2. Temporal Moralities and Momentums of Plot: Richardson and Hutcheson Chapter 3. Sympathetic Moments and Rhythmic Narration: Sterne, Early Musicology, and the Elocutionists Chapter 4. Durational Aesthetics and the Logic of Character: Radcliffe, Burke, and Smith Coda. The End of Human Time? Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£48.60
University of Pennsylvania Press Literature American Style
Book SynopsisBetween 1780 and 1800, authors of imaginative literature in the new United States wanted to assert that their works, which bore obvious connections to anglophone literature on the far side of the Atlantic, nevertheless constituted a properly American tradition. No one had yet figured out, however, what it would mean to write like an American, what literature with an American origin would look like, nor what literary characteristics the elusive quality of Americanness could generate. Literature, American Style returns to this historical momentdecades before the romantic nationalism of Cooper, the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, or the iconoclastic poetics of Whitmanwhen a fantasy about the unique characteristics of U.S. literature first took shape, and when that notion was linked to literary style. While late eighteenth-century U.S. literature advertised itself as the cultural manifestation of a radically innovative nation, Ezra Tawil argues, it was not primarily marked by iTrade Review"[Tawil's] fresh and illuminating readings of major works of the 1780s and '90s will make Literature, American Style an important book for early Americanists. But what will make this book important for a wide range of scholars working on the long history of American literature is its reframing of the issue of literary Americanness. One of the signature achievements of Literature, American Style is the synthesis it provides of the divergent lines of scholarship focused on national distinctiveness and transatlantic indebtedness, respectively." * Early American Literature *"[A] masterful treatise . . . {An] excellent, learned study . . . Literature, American Style makes a substantial contribution to the study of early national literary culture from which future scholars of the period will greatly profit." * American Literary History *"[F]or readers interested in this dialectic and in parsing the tangled literary relationship between Britain and the United States, Tawil's book is essential reading. His own lucid style makes Literature, American Style a pleasure to read." * Studies in the Novel *"In Literature, American Style, Tawil's subject matter is, itself, a crucial intervention in the field of American literary studies because it foregrounds something-the 'choice of words and the manner of arranging them'-that is often ignored . . . What Tawil does remarkably well, and vitally so for the field, is to put a finer point on the intricacies of transatlantic exchange, literary style, and cultural nationalism that critics have too often painted with a broad brush." * Soundings *"Ezra Tawil's Literature, American Style confronts one of the most fundamental problems in the study of US culture: how and why do we claim 'a national tradi-tion' of American literature that can be distinguished from other literatures in English . . . Tawil provides a deeper historical, philosophical and literary context for the enduring allure of the unpolished voice on both sides of the Atlantic.." * Literature & History *"This is a beautifully written, well-structured, and impressively informed study of early national American literature. Drawing on pre-romantic aesthetic philosophy and deft stylistic analysis, Ezra Tawil succeeds in elucidating a significant late eighteenth-century cultural paradox: the transatlantic roots of American literary originality." * Paul Downes, University of Toronto *"Literature, American Style is a timely and innovative account of some very old-fashioned ideas in American literary studies-nationalism, originality, and style. In Ezra Tawil's engaging, lucid prose, they come alive in ways that reveal American 'exceptionalism' to be a far more important and complex cultural strategy than we have understood it to be." * Edward Cahill, Fordham University *Table of ContentsIntroduction. Style and the Cisatlantic Chapter 1. To Form a More Perfect Language: Noah Webster's American-Style English Chapter 2. Transatlantic Correspondences: Crèvecoeur and the Incorrect Style Chapter 3. "New Forms of Sublimity": Charles Brockden Brown and the Irregular Style Chapter 4. "Homespun Habits": Seduction, Sentiment, and the Artless Style Coda. Stock and Soil Notes Index Acknowledgments
£56.10
University of Pennsylvania Press Dramatic Justice
Book SynopsisTrade Review"[O]ne of the last decade's most important books on eighteenth-century theater . . . Readers should not be fooled by the title: this book is not just about trials or plays depicting trials. Dramatic Justice is a meticulously researched coup against the idea that transparency and progress were uncontroversial values among the Revolution's most vocal proponents of liberalism . . . Robert's theorization of reenactment should be studied by contemporary performance scholars and his lucid explanation of Robespierre's (self-described) Socratic death would help students of all levels and disciplines understand the Revolution's most startling paradoxes. Robert has written an excellent book on eighteenth-century theater that resonates with today's trial practices, where tensions between accuracy and openness, due process and "purely theatrical spectacles" have not lost their vigor." * The French Review *"Robert richly and compellingly illustrates the promise and peril that theatricality represented for legal reformers between 1750 and 1800. Dramatic Justice describes in great detail both the reform of French legal proceedings during the Revolution and the debates that preceded and attended it . . . Robert succeeds in challenging some commonly accepted notions about eighteenth-century theater and justice in France." * Modern Philology *"[O]ne of the most important recent contributions to the growing scholarship on French Revolutionary drama...[Yann's] study will be appreciated for its interdisciplinary scope, lucid writing, and stimulating polemic (and charming predilection for exclamation points!). The impressive wealth of material and topics explored both illuminates underexplored pockets of the archive and offers new insight into well-known texts by leading Enlightenment figures...[A] tour de force that will be required reading for anyone working on theatre and history of the French Enlightenment and Revolution." * Theatre Survey *"[A] very substantial, well-made and thought-provoking monograph, and an important contribution to understanding the cultural politics of revolutionary France . . . Robert's research [is] a richly complex landscape in which French thinkers wrestled with the dilemma of judicial theatricality, as they wrestled with the wider cultural question of the theatrical, the performative and the emotional in public life." * English Historical Review *"This book constitutes a bold and detailed look at the relationship between theatre and justice in 'the Age of the French Revolution . . . ' Robert offers genuinely new readings of many plays and a sophisticated model for further analysis." * French Studies *"[O]riginal perspectives on French revolutionary justice and the significant transformation in the relation between representations of justice in the theatre and actual legal proceedings that occurred in the latter half of the eighteenth century . . . Through his incisive history of the intellectual, symbolic, and practical exercise of justice in the years before and during the Revolution, Robert offers an alternative to the political lens that informs prevailing narratives." * Modern Language Review *"Dramatic Justice is an impressive and erudite study that elucidates theatre’s complicated relationship with the law and underscores the power of antitheatrical thinking in dramatic and nondramatic realms...[I]t is hard to do justice to the intricacy and breadth of Robert’s scholarship or to the range of his legal, literary, and dramatic sources. Dramatic Justice is essential reading for anyone concerned with eighteenth-century France, with theatre and drama studies, and with the historical, cultural, and legal worlds of the late eighteenth century." * Theatre Journal *"Yann Robert’s Dramatic Justice provides a wonderful reading of 'judicial theater,' a term [Robert] coins to designate those plays that sought to reenact recent events taken from political life and that functioned to retry the matter before their spectators...[A] bold and original contribution to eighteenth-century French theater studies." * Modern Language Notes *"No one has pursued the arguments for and against theatricalizing justice across the Enlightenment and Revolutionary periods as thoroughly as Yann Robert does in this excellent book." * Jeffrey S. Ravel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology *"In Dramatic Justice, Yann Robert offers an original, nuanced, and convincing analysis of the interplay between justice, legitimacy, and representation in France in the second half of the eighteenth century." * Thomas Wynn, Durham University *Table of ContentsIntroduction PART I. THEATER AS JUSTICE Chapter 1. Fixing the Law: Reenactment in Diderot's Fils naturel Chapter 2. The Many Faces of Aristophanes: The Rise of a Judicial Theater PART II. JUSTICE AS THEATER Chapter 3. Players at the Bar: The Birth of the Modern Lawyer Chapter 4. Judges, Spectators, and Theatrocracy Chapter 5. From Parterre to Pater: Dreaming of Domestic Tribunals PART III. THE REVOLUTION'S PERFORMANCE OF JUSTICE Chapter 6. Performing Justice in the Early Years of the Revolution Chapter 7. The Curtain Falls on Judicial Theater and Theatrical Justice Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£59.50
University of Pennsylvania Press Paper Monsters
Book SynopsisIn Paper Monsters, Samuel Fallon charts the striking rise, at the turn to the seventeenth century, of a new species of textual being: the serial, semifictional persona. When Thomas Nashe introduced his charismatic alter ego Pierce Penilesse in a 1592 text, he described the figure as a paper monster, not fashioned but begotten into something curiously like life. The next decade bore this description out, as Pierce took on a life of his own, inspiring other writers to insert him into their own works. And Pierce was hardly alone: such figures as the polemicist Martin Marprelate, the lovers Philisides and Astrophil, the shepherd-laureate Colin Clout, the prodigal wit Euphues, and, in an odd twist, the historical author Robert Greene all outgrew their fictional origins, moving from text to text and author to author, purporting to speak their own words, even surviving their creators'' deaths, and installing themselves in the process as agents at large in the real world of writing, Trade Review"[Paper Monsters] throughout is elegantly written, persuasively argued, and well anchored in current theoretical and critical debates: it will be the starting point for any future consideration of literary personae and the role they played in the early modern literary field independently of the authors who created or inspired them." * Journal of British Studies *"Samuel Fallon is a skilled and often revelatory close reader of literature who displays a remarkable familiarity with minor writers and publishers of late Elizabethan England. Capacious and ambitious in its scope, Paper Monsters is a distinctive and highly accomplished piece of literary criticism." * Alan Stewart, Columbia University *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1. Robert Greene's Ghosts Chapter 2. Rehearsing Colin Clout Chapter 3. Astrophil, Philisides, and the Coterie in Print Chapter 4. Pierce Penilesse and the Art of Distinctions Coda Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£49.30
University of Pennsylvania Press Fiction Without Humanity
Book SynopsisAlthough the Enlightenment is often associated with the emergence of human rights and humanitarian sensibility, humanity is an elusive category in the literary, philosophical, scientific, and political writings of the period. Fiction Without Humanity offers a literary history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century efforts to define the human. Focusing on the shifting terms in which human difference from animals, things, and machines was expressed, Lynn Festa argues that writers and artists treated humanity as an indefinite class, which needed to be called into being through literature and the arts. Drawing on an array of literary, scientific, artistic, and philosophical devices the riddle, the fable, the microscope, the novel, and trompe l'oeil and still-life painting Fiction Without Humanity focuses on experiments with the perspectives of nonhuman creatures and inanimate things. Rather than deriving species membership from sympathetic identification or likeness to a fixedTrade Review"Fiction without Humanity is a dauntingly learned book, in which Lynn Festa deploys and contributes to such diverse fields as thing theory, animal studies, art history, the history of science, folklore, rhetoric and grammar, and Peircean semiotics."" * Eighteenth Century Fiction *"Fiction Without Humanity is a profound book that tenders as many pleasures as Pope or Swift as it dances between empirical minima (fleas, flies, personal pronouns, unmatched shoes) and concepts and questions that remain urgent today: Just what makes a thing count as human? How does literary form participate in this accounting? What, specifically, does literature do to, with, for us humans? Lynn Festa has written a posthumanist classic-albeit one that returns us to a new and more demanding humanity." * Jayne Lewis, author of Air's Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794 *"With its critical attention to such things as birds, insects, paintings, scientific engravings, riddles, fables, and Robinson Crusoe's island, Fiction Without Humanity offers an ambitious and persuasive account of the meaning of 'humanity'-and humanity's fictions-from radically other points of view. This book marks a bracing and mobilizing intervention in eighteenth-century eco-criticism as well as the environmental humanities more generally." * Helen Thompson, author of Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1. Bird's-Eye View Chapter 2. Lousy Bodies Chapter 3. Anthropomorphic Things Chapter 4. Flea, Fly, Fable Chapter 5. Crusoe's Island of Misfit Things Coda Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£70.55
