Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800 Books
Stanford University Press Preromanticism
Book SynopsisThis volume seeks the common ground of British literature from 1740 to 1798 not in the foreshadowing of Romanticism but in incomplete discoveries and in impediments to expression that Romanticism was to lift.Trade Review"This is a major achievement, an artfully written and carefully articulated contribution to the theory of literary history, and a powerful interpretation of eighteenth-century literature with which all scholars in the field will have to contend."—Philosophy and LiteratureTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. On textual production 2. The urbane sublime 3. Transcendental aesthetics 4. The discovery of consciousness 5. The economy of sensibility 6. Goldsmith's endings 7. The Vicar of Wakefield 8. She Stoops to Conquer 9. Sheridan's semiotics 10. Beaumarchais's stagecraft 11. Sterne's stories 12. Wordsworth's old gray stone 13. Touchstones Notes Index.
£112.20
Stanford University Press Writing Matter
Book SynopsisA Stanford University Press classic.Trade Review"Some 25 years ago Derrida called for a 'cultural graphology' which would study the material practices, institutions, and ideologies of writing. Goldberg takes up this call. . . . He adds a political edge by drawing on ethnographic and sociological themes of writing and literacy as forms of cultural domination. . . . A highly informative and provocative book."—Shakespeare Yearbook"A book that will be of use to many."—English Language Notes
£112.20
Stanford University Press Congreve the Drama and the Printed Word
Book SynopsisTheatre and print began their tense relations and imperfect alliance in the late 17th century. This text focuses on the most active phase of the career of William Congreve, a crucial juncture in the history of print and publishing and a time when the book trade was becoming a lucrative business.Trade Review'An impressive debut by a subtle and learned scholar. Julie Peters has intellectual agility and grace; her restless seeking of connections gives her work relevance to a wide variety of literary, philosophical, historical, and social problems. This book is at once a penetrating reading of Congreve's career, a detailed study of changing attitudes toward spoken and written language, and a sophisticated contribution to the theory of genre.' James A. Winn, The University of MichiganTable of ContentsNote to the reader; Introduction; 1. Drama and print; 2. Publishers, pirates and the library text; 3. The technologized muse; 4. 'Asterisms'; 5. Scandal's portraits; 6. The dictionary and the monkey; 7. Nature and art; Conclusion; Notes; References; Index.
£59.40
Stanford University Press Designing Dead Souls
Book SynopsisThis original work presents an integral and inclusive explanatory model for the elusive narrative strategies of Gogol's Dead Souls: in the process, it draws larger conclusions about Gogol's creative methods and aesthetic concerns.
£55.80
Stanford University Press Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales
Book SynopsisDuring the first half of the reign of Louis XIV, Charles Perrault enjoyed the status of a prominent public intellectual. A key player in the development of the arts, he has commonly been situated in French literary and cultural history as the spokesman for the Moderns in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, the seventeenth century''s protracted aesthetic controversy. During the 1690s, after falling from political favour, Perrault took up the writing of fiction and achieved lasting fame as the author of the Mother Goose Tales. Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales proposes a framework for relating these two distinct facets of his career. The author shows how the intellectual and conceptual compromises that the fairy tales rearticulate derive their force and coherence from the priority that Perrault''s characters, faithful to the dominant values of the century, accord to visual representation.Trade Review“A powerful new vision of 17th-century literary and intellectual history. . . . Lewis has very much changed the way we will teach these tales and French classicism in general.”—John D. Lyons, University of Virginia“Lewis’s reading of Perrault is informed by a deep knowledge of seventeenth-century French culture, ideology, and aesthetic theories as well as a particularly astute grasp of contemporary theoretical discourses. . . . We are finally given the extraordinarily complex workings of stories that for almost 300 years have been relegated to the domain of ‘children’s’ literature.”—Mitchell Greenberg, Miami UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction Part I. Turns of Mind: Perraldian Compromises: 1. The Cartesian turn: Perrault against Descartes 2. The sublime turn: Perrault against Boileau 3. The preteritional turn: Perrault against Racine Part II. Returns of Compromise: Perrault's Tales of Ogres: 4. Food for sight 5. The Ogre's Genesis 6. Bluebeard's secret Conclusion: the end in sight Appendix Notes Bibliography Index.
£59.50
Stanford University Press The Armature of Conquest Spanish Accounts of the
Book SynopsisFocusing on certain key firsthand narratives of the discovery, exploration, and conquest of the New World, the author views various journals, letters, and other documents not merely as narratives of facts and events but as literary expressions of the dynamics of the writer's experience.Trade Review"Of all the books inspired by the Columbian quincentenary, this is easily one of the most challenging. Bodmer uses early Spanish chronicles to take the reader on a journey of exploration. . . . A richly detailed analytical history of the gradual awakening of a critical consciousness concerning accepted versions of the discovery and conquest of America."—Canadian Journal of History"A quite splendid book."—Journal of Latin American StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction; Part I. The Discourse of Mythification; 1. Christopher Columbus and the definition of America as booty; 2. Hern n Cortes and the creation of the model conqueror; Part II. Demythification and Questioning: 3. From failure to demythification; 4. The models in crisis; Part III. A Literary Expression of the Unfolding of a New Consciousness: 5. Alonso de Ercilla and the development of a Spanish American Consciousness; Notes; Index.
£22.49
Stanford University Press Outing Goethe and His Age
Book SynopsisThis collection of twelve essays reclaims "the Age of Goethe"—to call upon a literary designation of roughly the same period—as a time when same-sex erotic attraction suffused artistic production from Winckelmann's art treatises and Goethe's plays to Friedrich Schlegel's self-reflexive novel Lucinde and Kleist's letters.Table of ContentsContributors Abbreviations Introduction Alice A. Kuzniar 1. Winckelmann's progeny: homosocial networking in the eighteenth century Simon Richter 2. Wieland and the homoerotics of reading Simon Richter 3. Homosocial necrophilia: the making of man in Jung-Stillings's idyllic patriarchy Stephan K. Schindler 4. The homosexual, the prostitute, and the castrato: closet performances by J. M. R. Lenz Roman Graf 5. In and against nature: Goethe on homosexuality and heterotextuality Robert D. Tobin 6. Male desire in Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen Susan E. Gustafson 7. Amazon, agitator, allegory: political and gender cross(-dress)ing in Goethe's Egmont W. Daniel Wilson 8. Psy fi explorations of out space: on Werther's special effects Laurence A. Rickels 9. 'Confessions of an Improper Man': Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde Martha B. Helfer 10. The 'third sex' in an age of difference: androgyny and homosexuality in Winckelmann, Friedrich Shclegel, and Kleist Catriona MacLeod 11. Friendship and gender: the aesthetic construction of subjectivity in Kleist Joachim Pfeiffer (translated by Robert D. Tobin) 12. Eternal love or sentimental discourse? Gender dissonance and women's passionate 'friendships' Susanne T. Kord Notes Works cited.
£25.19
Stanford University Press The Specular Moment Goethes Early Lyric and the
Book SynopsisIn this book, the author has three aims: (1) to elaborate an interpretation of Goethe''s lyric poetry adequate to the intricacies of its subject matter; (2) to demonstrate the significance of that poetry to the development of European Romanticism; (3) to establish a method of inquiry that weaves together the major strands of theoretical reflection in modern literary studies. Remarkably enough, no study of Goethe''s early lyric poetry has been published in English in the last fifty years. But the reading of this poetry the author presents is not intended merely to introduce an English readership to a major body of work; rather, the book delineates for the first time in any language an account of the symbolic network or organizing myth that underlies Goethe''s individual poems. This marks a decisive break with the previous research on Goethe, which has tended to view his poetry as the expression of occasional experiences. The author shows, on the contrary, that Goethe''s lyric work ciTrade Review"The Spectacular Moment is a beautifully produced volume, and it is evident that Wellbery has crafted each sentence with remarkable care and elegance. As with all important contributions to the field, there are points he raises and interpretive turns he takes that can and need to be challenged.... [Wellbery's] discussion of Goethe's early lyric should form a vital part of any graduate seminar on the topic, as well as of course being a cornerstone for future analysis." -- Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography"Wellbery provides a fresh understanding of Goethe's new poetic discourse, analyzing its semiological, discursive, and hermeneutic features. In the process, he relates Goethe's lyric poetry to the entirety of his writings, establishing links and filiations that have not previously been noted. All this is done in the broad context of historical comparison and in dialogue with previous scholarship." -- Ernst Behler * University of Washington *Table of ContentsNote on abbreviations Part I. The Specular Moment: 1. Idyllic and lyric intimacy 2. the crisis of vision 3. Transcendental etudes Part II. The Sexualization of Specularity: 4. The originary donation 5. Genius and the wounded subject of modernity Part III. The Myth of Lyric Voice 6. Primordial orality 7. Primordial song Part IV. Poetic Vocation: 8. Hermeneutics and the origin of humanity 9. The sublime Notes Index.
£26.99
Stanford University Press The Ideology of Imagination Subject and Society
Book SynopsisExploring how the concept of the imagination is figured in some principal texts of English Romanticism, this book convincingly argues that this figuring is a deeply ideological activity which reveals important social and political investments. By attending to the textual figures of the imagination, the book sheds critical light not only on Romanticism but on the very workings of ideology.Trade Review"Engrossing. . . . Intensely interesting readings abound in this book." -- Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900"Perceptive close reading of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and other works, Wordsworth's Prelude, Shelley's Triumph of Life, Keats's Fall of Hyperion, and George Eliot's Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss." -- The Wordsworth Circle"Pyle is especially good at teasing out the chiasmic relations of the literary and the real." -- The Byron Journal"Pyle makes Romanticism interesting all over again. . . . His provocative rereading of five major authors demonstrates that we can learn something very important about nineteenth-century social theory—and particularly the role of ideology—from Romantic representations of the imagination." -- Nancy Armstrong * Brown University *Table of ContentsContents 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
£22.79
Stanford University Press The Gender of Freedom
Book SynopsisIn a sweeping reassessment of early American literature, The Gender of Freedom explores the workings of the literary public sphere-from its colonial emergence through the antebellum flourishing of sentimentalism-and places representations of and by women at the center rather than the margin of the public sphere and the politics of liberalism.Trade Review"Through an impressive synthesis of critical material from a wide range of disciplines and some astute readings of political theorists from Adam Smith to Jürgen Habermas, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has produced an intriguing and largely persuasive account of the relationship between liberalism and gender difference." -- William and Mary Quarterly"In this highly intelligent and elegantly written book, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon makes the important observation that U.S. liberalism depends upon the concept of gender for its successful functioning and, more particularly, that women's private status has been integral to liberalism since its inception." -- LegacyTable of ContentsContents Introduction: The Gender of Freedom and Women in Public 1 Chapter One. Gender, Liberal Theory, and the Literary Public Sphere 00 Chapter Two. Puritan Bodies and Transatlantic Texts 00 Chapter Three. Contracting Marriage in the New Republic 000 Chapter Four. Sociality and Sentiment 000 Coda. Queering Marriage: Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of Title 000 Notes Works Cited 000 Index Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: American literature Colonial period, ca, 1600-1775 History and criticism, Liberty in literature, Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886 Criticism and interpretation, American literature 1783-1850 History and criticism, Politics and literature United States History, Women and literature United States History, Sentimentalism in literature, Liberalism in literature, Sex role in literature, Marriage in literature, Women in literature
£89.10
Stanford University Press Desiring Women Writing English Renaissance
Book SynopsisIn readings ranging from early-16th- through late-17th-century texts, this book aims to resituate women's writing in the English Renaissance by studying the possibilities available to these writers by virtue of their positions in society and by their articulation of the desire to write.Trade Review'This is a remarkable book. Goldberg introduces readers to a field of study that scarcely existed twenty years ago, surveys its scholarship and many of the major texts, says what he thinks still needs to be done, and ventures to do it himself. This is a fine study by a distinguished author at the top of his form.' David Riggs, Stanford UniversityTable of ContentsPart I. The Legend of Good Women: Introduction 1. Canonizing Aemelia Lanyer 2. Aphra Behn's female pen Part II. Translating Women: Introduction 3. Margaret Roper's daughterly devotions: unnatural translations 4. The countess of Pembroke's literal translation Part III. Writing as a Woman: Introduction 5. Mary Shelton's hand Graphina's mark Notes Bibliography Index.
£21.59
Stanford University Press Consuming Anxieties
Book SynopsisBoycotts are so commonplace these days that one hardly notices them, and yet they have a fascinating history, one closely connected to the growth of the British Empire and the birth of a consumer society. Consuming Anxieties asks why this mode of political protest has proved so influential over the past two hundred years, and why it was particularly useful in anticolonial struggles. It answers these questions through new readings of literary works by Jonathan Swift, Tobias Smollett, and others, as well as through investigations of eighteenth-century political and economic discourses connected with consumer culture and colonialism.The book examines the history of consumer protests against colonialism from 1713 to 1833from the Treaty of Utrecht to the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean. Recognizing the impact of consumerism on perceptions of the colonial periphery during this period reveals the crucial role of commodity fetishism in colonialist ideology. At thTrade Review"Sussman. . . . pulls off the difficult task of writing a truly interdisciplinary study. . . .—Slavery and Abolition"This is an insightful and welcome treatment of an important subject . . . .The style and substance of this volume are evident." -- Canadian Journal of History"An illuminating study." -- Albion"Consuming Anxieties is an absorbing book that deserves to be read and reread. . . . Sussman brilliantly recreates the cultural milieu in which sentimental abolitionism took root." -- International History Review"[An] interesting and well-written book." -- Slavery and AbolitionTable of ContentsIntroduction; 1. Colonialism and the politics of consumerism; 2. From curiosity to commodity: Swift's writings of the 1720s; 3. Foreign objects, domestic spaces: transculturation in Humphry Clinker; 4. Women and the politics of sugar, 1972; 5. 'Reading before praying': ladies' antislavery societies, textuality, political action, and The History of Mary Prince; 6. Overseeing violence: sentimental vision and slave labor; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
£52.20
Stanford University Press Literati Identity and Its Fictional
Book SynopsisThis book is a study of the intellectual and literary factors that in the mid-Qing dynasty contributed to the development of vernacular fiction of unprecedented scholarly and satirical sophistication. The author examines three works of vernacular fictionRulin waishi (ca. 1750), Yesou puyan (ca. 1780), and Jinghua yuan (1821/1828)for their articulation of new perceptions of the literati, or Confucian scholar-gentry. He places the reevaluation of literati roles and privilege found in these novels within the context of scholarly and cultural developments, notably the ascendance of the philological or evidential studies movement of the Qianlong and Jiaqing periods (1736-1820).The author cites a broad range of contemporary discursive writings to corroborate evidence of a clearly discernible trend to modify or negate the ethical and epistemological certainties that had long served as the ideological basis of literati social eminence. These writings implicitly rTrade Review"What makes this book so outstanding is that unlike the plethora of books that talk in generalities about 'the literati' as an undifferentiated group, Roddy disaggregates the literati, discussing the recognized literati vocations in turn and making clear that literati at different social levels were differently situated in terms of their ability to realize the potential of each vocation. Roddy is rare among scholars of Ming and Qing fiction in combining analysis of literati novels with this sort of responsible historical scholarship." -Katherine Carlitz,University of PittsburghTable of ContentsIntroduction; Part I. The Image of the Literati in Qing Discourse: 1. Literati identity and the Qing epistemological crisis; 2. Discourses of the literati and the literati in discourse; 3. The intellectual milieus of three novelists; Part II. The Deconstruction of Literati Identity in Rulin Waishi: 4. Scholars, poets, painters and essayists; 5. The decline of literati mores; 6. The use and abuse of ritual; Part III. Fictional Reconstruction of Literati Identity: 7. Yesou Puyan: a Confucian-feminist utopia?; 8. The philological musings of Jinghua Yuan; Conclusion; Appendix; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
£56.10
Stanford University Press Elations
Book SynopsisElations rewrites the history of early-18th-century English literature around the politics and poetics of "Enthusiasm." It examines the aesthetic theory of the period, traces the evolution and differentiation of a poetic enthusiasm from religious enthusiasm, and reassesses the poetry of two poets very popular in their time: James Thomson and Edward Young.Trade Review"Like Derrida and Paul de Man, what Irlam does is not "scholarship," but textual reading yoked to a priori metaphysical argument. . . . Irlam's readings [of Young's Conjectures on Original Composition], and in his chapters on Thomson, make Elations a book worth inspecting." -- Modern Philology"Irlam brings an imaginative historical perpective to bear on his subjects, contextualizing their achievement through detailed examination of contemporaneous critical and philosophic discourse. . . . The reading of Thomson supported by the preliminary history of enthusiasm is thorough, imaginative, and innovative." -- Studies in Romanticism"Irlam's readings are deft and judicious, and this study makes a large and . . . brilliant contribution to the field." -- Journal of English and Germanic PhilologyTable of ContentsIntroduction Part I. Power Speaking: 1. Enthusiasm in the seventeenth century: the vicissitudes of an image 2. 'For the benefit of civil society': impressing the subject 3. In the dungeons of the sublime: Joseph Addison and 'the pleasures of the imagination' Part II. Accesses Of Ecstasy And The Rhetoric Of Self-Alteration: 4. Vatic tremors: unworlding and otherworldliness in James Thomson's 'The Season' 5. Altered states: epiphany and the logic of sacrifice in 'The Seasons' 6. Immortality, or the art of remaining forever young: Edward Young's 'Night-Thoughts' 7. Absence begins at home: crafting the moral subject Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index.
£59.40
Stanford University Press Invisible Relations Representations of Female
Book SynopsisThis book explores how representations of intimacy between women included both a sexualized model of the "lesbian" tribade and an "idealized" model that portrayed female friendship as devoid of sexual expression.Trade Review"The work's merits . . . .lie in its meticulous research, judicious criticism and lucid analysis. This is a worthy contribution to the history of female-female relations." -- British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies" Invisible Relations breaks important new ground in the study . . . of female intimacy and homoeroticism. . . . An insightful, intelligent book that will challenge how scholars have traditionally perceived female intimacy and female communities in the Enlightenment." -- Choice"A work of impressive scholarship. . . . of solid value in presenting new material to scholars of the history of sexuality and in cultural studies. Written in a precise yet accessible style, the book is a pleasure to read." -- Modern PhilologyTable of ContentsIntroduction Part I. Sexualized Models of Female Intimacy: 1. The Tribade, the Hermaphrodite and othe 'lesbian' figures in medical and legal discourse 2. Representations of the Tribade in libertine literature Part II. Idealized Models of Female Intimacy: 3. 'L'Amour Galant' and 'Tendre Amitie;': love and friendship outside the bonds of marriage 4. Female intimacy and the question of 'lesbian' identity: rereading the female friendship poems of Katherine Philips Part III. The Politics of Intimacy: 5. Female intimacy and the problem of female communities: salons, satire, and the mystery of the 'Pre;cieuses' 6. Regulating the 'real' in fictional terms: the (auto)biography of the Tribade in erotic and documentary texts Notes Index.
£25.19
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 Books and Readers in Early Modern England
Book SynopsisBooks and Readers in Early Modern England examines readers, reading, and publication practices from the Renaissance to the Restoration. The essays draw on an array of documentary evidence—from library catalogs, prefaces, title pages and dedications, marginalia, commonplace books, and letters to ink, paper, and bindings—to explore individual reading habits and experiences in a period of religious dissent, political instability, and cultural transformation.Chapters in the volume cover oral, scribal, and print cultures, examining the emergence of the public spheres of reading practices. Contributors, who include Christopher Grose, Ann Hughes, David Scott Kastan, Kathleen Lynch, William Sherman, and Peter Stallybrass, investigate interactions among publishers, texts, authors, and audience. They discuss the continuity of the written word and habits of mind in the world of print, the formation and differentiation of readerships, and the increasing influence of pubTrade Review"Showcasing an innovative, interdisciplinary group of essays, Books and Readers in Early Modern England will interest scholars of bibliography, collections studies, literature, and history. This book should also prove useful in the classroom. . . . It is only fitting that a book so productively devoted to the history of textual consumption should itself appeal to a wide audience." * Albion. *
£999.99
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 Reading Women
Book SynopsisIn 1500, as many as 99 out of 100 English women may have been illiterate, and girls of all social backgrounds were the objects of purposeful efforts to restrict their access to full literacy. Three centuries later, more than half of all English and Anglo-American women could read, and the female reader was emerging as a cultural ideal and a market force. While scholars have written extensively about women''s reading in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and about women''s writing in the early modern period, they have not attended sufficiently to the critical transformation that took place as female readers and their reading assumed significant cultural and economic power.Reading Women brings into conversation the latest scholarship by early modernists and early Americanists on the role of gender in the production and consumption of texts during this expansion of female readership. Drawing together historians and literary scholars, the essays share a concern with loTrade Review"Destined to become a landmark study and a fixture in the bibliographies of feminist and textual scholars, literary and social historians, students of the English Renaissance and the American Republic alike." * William Sherman, University of York *"Highly recommended." * Choice *"Reading Women . . . generously offers important new historical, textual, and theoretical ways of accessing, describing, and interpreting early modern women's reading." * Journal of American History *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction —Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly PART I. PLEASURES AND PROHIBITIONS Inventing the Early Modern Woman Reader through the World of Goods: Lyly's Gentlewoman Reader and Katherine Stubbes —Mary Ellen Lamb Engendering the Female Reader: Women's Recreational Reading of Shakespeare in Early Modern England —Sasha Roberts Crafting Subjectivities: Women, Reading and Self-Imagining —Mary Kelley PART II. PRACTICES AND ACCOMPLISHMENT 'you sow, Ile read': Letters and Literacies in Early Modern Samplers —Bianca F.-C. Calabresi The Female World of Classical Reading in Eighteenth-Century America —Caroline Winterer Reading and the Problem of Accomplishment —Catherine E. Kelly PART III. TRANSLATION AND AUTHORSHIP 'Who Painted the Lion?' Women and Novelle —Ian Frederick Moulton The Word Made Flesh: Reading Women and the Bible —Janice Knight 'With All Due Reverence and Respect to the Word of God': Aphra Behn as Skeptical Reader of the Bible and Critical Translator of Fontenelle —Margaret Ferguson Female Curiosities: The Transatlantic Female Commonplace Book —Susan M. Stabile Reading Outside the Frame —Robert A. Gross Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Index
£999.99
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 Recipes for Thought Knowledge and Taste in the
Book SynopsisTrade 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
£999.99
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
