Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800 Books

Book SynopsisIn a world increasingly defined by prose, poets adapted the new forms, characters, and moral themes of the novel in order to reinvigorate poetic practice.Trade ReviewRefreshingly, this impressive study of poetic form does not read the eighteenth century as a slow road to Romanticism, but fleshes out the period with surprising and important new detail. Times Literary Supplement In this intriguing formal study Starr breaks down the conventional barriers between the history of poetry and the history of the novel... Overall, a subtle and carefully executed genre study, of interest to anyone in 18th-century or Romantic studies. Choice For fifteen years or so, using a term provided by Mikhail Bakhtin, some Wordsworthians have characterized Wordsworth's lyric poetry as 'novelized.' G. Gabrielle Starr's Lyric Generations gives that characterization new force en specificity in the context of a larger argument that traces the interrelations of poetry and the novel through the long eighteenth century. -- Don Bialostosky Wordsworth Circle The rise of the novel, argues Starr, is strongly influenced by the lyric poetry which preceded it, while at the other end of the century romantic poetry owes much, in turn, to the rise of the novel. -- Bill Phillips Cercles Starr is an excellent close reader, and her observations about so large and diverse an array of texts are fresh, striking, and downright smart. -- Sophie Gee Eighteenth-Century Fiction Starr provides a brilliant reading of Clarissa. -- Christopher Johnson New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century Starr excels... in juxtaposing works seldom compared and so granting us the wherewithal to reframe familiar histories of formal change. -- Deirdre Lynch Modern Language Quarterly Original and compelling book... that should inspire discussion for some time to come. -- Anne Williams Studies in RomanticismTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Clarissa and the Lyric2. Modes of Absorption3. Lyric Tensions4. Rhetorical Realisms5. The Limits of Lyric and the Space of the Novel6. The Novel and the New LyricismNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisShe draws a direct link between the disparate theories of focus articulated in eighteenth-century literature and modern experiments in neuroscience, revealing that contemporary questions surrounding short attention spans are grounded in long conversations over the nature and limits of focus.Trade ReviewThoroughly informed by engagement with 17th- and 18th-century philosophies of mind, the book is also impressive for its periodic forays into modern cognitive science... Distraction is an important addition to the literature on 18th-century fiction and cognition. Highly recommended. Choice It reads... as a manifesto for the possibility of a kind of research in which disciplines are combined not in the sense of serving each other, or borrowing from each other, but in true synergy. From all the aspects of Phillips's book that are commendable - and there are many from its originality and clarity of argumentation through to its powers of interpretation - this is the most significant. Literature and science are on an equal footing here and the fruits of their combination are remarkable. British Society for Literature and ScienceTable of ContentsPreface Introduction. The Literary History of Distraction The Unifocal and the Multifocal The Rise of the Distracted CharacterAttention, Distraction, and Enlightenment Philosophy of MindA Swiftly Tilting MadnessCategorizing Distraction 1. Mind Wandering: Forms of Distraction in the Eighteenth-Century EssayDistraction and the Eighteenth-Century Essay The Rhetoric of Attention: Appealing to Pathos and Brevitas The Essay as a Tool of Focus Training Attention to Attention Strengthening Focus: Repetition and Dramatic Irony Economies of Attention The History of Attention Span 2. Lapses of Concentration: Distracted Vigilance and the Female MindEnvironment and Mind: Urban Diversion and the Distracted Brain The Problem of a Soft Female Mind Sex, Environment, and the Multifocal Coquette The Challenges of Situational Awareness Philosophizing Multiplicity: Cognitive Bottlenecks and Sorting Gloves Strained Omniscience and the Distracted Heroine The Crowded Syntax of Sexual Inattention "Might as Well Be Passed Over as Read:" Indulging the Diverted Reader 3. Scattered Attention: Distraction and the Rhythm of Cognitive Overload Rhythms of Narrative, Rhythms of Mind The Scattered Rhythms of Cognitive Overload Susannah and the Vexed Situation of Madam Reader The Anatomy of Parallel Processing The Sermon: Asynchronous Rhythms of Prose Hobbyhorses and the Individual Beat of Interest Irregular Distraction: The Tempo of Cognitive Overload Rhythms of the Brain: Creativity and the Timing of Distraction 4. Fixated Attention: The Gothic Pathology of Single-Minded FocusMicroscope and Mind Scientific Metaphors and the Madness of Attention The Politics and Poetics of Fixation Involuntary Attention: A Multifocal Selective Blindness Sympathy and the Benefits of Distraction Rewriting Suspense: Interruption and the Gothic Sublime Fixation and the Science of Obsession 5. Divided Attention: Characterization and Cognitive Richness in Jane Austen The Power of Multitasking in Pride and Prejudice The Singular Importance of Inattentive Characters Mr. Hurst: The Limited Capacity of the Undivided Mind Mrs. Jenkinson: Narrow Bandwidth and the Creation of Depth Lydia and Miss Bingley: Caricaturing Cognitive Vacancy The Dangers of Too Much Attention Distraction as Liveliness of Mind Mary Bennet: Hyperfocus and Cognitive Immobility Lady Catherine de Bourgh: The Problem of Excess Vigilance Elizabeth Bennet: The Benefits of Diversion Characterizing Reading: Maps of Distraction and Interest Coda: History of Mind and Literary Neuroscience Interdisciplinarity: From Theory to Practice Literary Attention: An fMRI Study of Reading Jane Austen The Value of Literary History NotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisLetters played a foundational role in facilitating the rise of print and popularizing new modes of writing in the long eighteenth century. In Writing to the World, Rachael Scarborough King examines the shift from manuscript to print media culture in the long eighteenth century. She introduces the concept of the bridge genre, which enables such change by transferring existing textual conventions to emerging modes of composition and circulation. She draws on this concept to reveal how four crucial genres that emerged during this timethe newspaper, the periodical, the novel, and the biographywere united by their reliance on letters to accustom readers to these new forms of print media. King explains that as newspapers, scientific journals, book reviews, and other new genres began to circulate widely, much of their form and content was borrowed from letters, allowing for easier access to these unfamiliar modes of printing and reading texts. Arguing that bridge genres encouraged people Trade ReviewThoughtful and engaging . . . valuable for not only for students and scholars of the eighteenth-century British literature but media studies more broadly.—Adam Sills, Hofstra University, Modern PhilologyExcellent . . . King's work here has further implications than simply attention to scribal antecedents: in her hands, these developments become a series of case studies in the history of media and technology.—Emily C. Friedman, Auburn University, Review of English Studies[King] shows us that letters are almost always both public and private, factual and fictitious, written 'from the heart' and 'to the world.'—Hazel Wilkinson, Times Literary SupplementElegantly written and methodically researched, Writing to the World makes a powerful case for the centrality of epistolarity to the development of eighteenth-century literature. For those interested in genre and form, the book inspires exciting lines of inquiry regarding the period's experiments in literary production. It is an excellent contribution to scholarship in periodical studies and book history and will appeal in particular to readers who seek new, reconceptualized literary histories of the eighteenth century.—Shang-yu Sheng, Eighteenth-Century FictionTable of ContentsAcknolwedgementsIntroduction1. Exchanging News2. Questions and Answers3. Open Letters4. ‘A New World’5. Leaving ‘the World’PostscriptBibliographical EssayNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisHaunting's consequences for the literary imagination.Reading is a weirdly phantasmic trade: animating words to revive absent voices, rehearing the past, fantasizing a future. In Romantic Shades and Shadows, Susan J. Wolfson explores spectral language, formations, and sensations, defining an apparitional poetics in the finely grained textures of writing and their effects on present reading. Framed by an introductory chapter on writing and apparition and an afterword on haunted reading, the book includes chapters of sustained, revelatory close attention to the particular, often peculiar, literary imaginations of William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, W. B. Yeats, and John Keats. Wolfson also explores the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a self-confessed Ghost-Theorist), Mary Shelley, and other writers of the Long Romantic era, canonical as well as less familiar. All are encountered in freshly pointed ways on an arc of investiTrade ReviewThis challenging study of apparitional epistemology is not for the fainthearted. Including extensive and interesting page notes, this book is for specialists with a linguistic background.—ChoiceA magnificent achievement in verse reading—and prose reading—and, indeed, reading of a range of significant Romantic authorships in their historic moments. It should be welcomed by everyone with a ready eye.—Ross Wilson, University of Cambridge, Review of English StudiesHow supremely quotable Wolfson is. From beginning to end, Romantic Shades and Shadows is engrossing, challenging, and deeply rewarding, one of the very best books published on Romantic poetry this decade. It will haunt us all.—Oliver Clarkson, Balliol College, Essays in CriticismThere are treasures in all of these chapters.—Michael Wood, London Review of Books[Wolfson's] witty meditation on the complex textual admixture of the intentional and the unintentional reveals both how much various writers know and how much they don't seem to know (or remember) that they know. Consuming their work, the sentient reader (whom Wolfson models for us) grows ever more aware of the mind-bending complexity of the referentiality of words that have been used, abused, reused, refashioned, repurposed in ways that trace their shadowy prior lives in the wordy works of any writer's contemporaries and predecessors.—Stephen Behrendt, University af Nebraska, European Romantic ReviewThe extensive critical and literary reach of Romantic Shades and Shadows is impressive . . . Wolfson is not alone in acknowledging the ghostliness of Romantic poetics. Yet her inventive readings of the spectral, its haunts, and hauntings do press upon us the necessity, as Nietzsche writes, of having 'friends as ghosts' if we are, as Wolfson's Afterword urges, to penetrate beneath the textual surface and hear the hauntingly instructive voices of past, present, and future shades.—Mark Sandy, Durham University, Modern Language ReviewThough Romantic Shades and Shadows is an elegant account of the hauntings of and by Romanticism in their own right, it is also a generous and invaluable schooling on the author's behalf in a necromantic approach to reading poetry and prose more generally. We surely derive as much pleasure from this book in the access that it affords us into the creative yet rigorous turns of Wolfson's own mind as we do from the critical insights into Romanticism that it yields. The result is nothing less than paradigm-shifting. Enjoined, along Coleridgean lines, to suspend our disbelief and to join Wolfson in her startling necromantic pursuits, we as readers and critics might only emerge from Romantic Shades and Shadows suitably changed, humbled, haunted.—Dale Townshend, Manchester Metropolitan University, CriticismWolfson has given us more than one masterclass in the art of retaining and connecting the complexities of an individual author-poet to his or her textual worlds . . . This is a book in which Wolfson returns to texts and poets that are both the back catalogue and the present focus of her critical practice, demonstrating the haunting and enduring power of those words which matter to us most. Romantic Shades and Shadows is testimony to that recognition.—Jane Moore, Cardiff University, Literature and History[Wolfson's] formalism is refreshing in the way that it refuses to subsume formal features under historical or political contexts. At the same time, when teasing out meanings, she does not sequester texts from history but shows how poetry and prose reverberate in social and cultural situations. This is a major gain . . . Wolfson has written a deeply intelligent study that demonstrates the rewards of formalist criticism, not least for its alertness to the fundamental instability of Romantic poetics.—Robert W. Rix, University of Copenhagen, British Society for Eighteenth-Century StudiesTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsTextsAbbreviations1. Setting the Stage: Apparitions of Writing2. Shades of Will + Words + Worth: What's in a Name?3. Hazlitt’s Conjurings: First Acquaintance & "Quaint Allusion"4. Shelley’s Phantoms of the Future in 18195. Me and My Shadows: Byron's Company of Ghosts6. Shades of Relay: Yeats's Latent Keats / Keats's Latent Yeats7. After Wording: Writing of ApparitionsAcknowledgmentsNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisWhat is the role of literary writing in democratic society?Building upon his previous work on the emergence of literature, Trevor Ross offers a history of how the public function of literature changed as a result of developing press freedoms during the period from 1760 to 1810. Writing in Public examines the laws of copyright, defamation, and seditious libel to show what happened to literary writing once certain forms of discourse came to be perceived as public and entitled to freedom from state or private control. Ross argues thatwith liberty of expression becoming entrenched as a national valuethe legal constraints on speech had to be reconceived, becoming less a set of prohibitions on its content than an arrangement for managing the public sphere. The public was free to speak on any subject, but its speech, jurists believed, had to follow certain ground rules, as formalized in laws aimed at limiting private ownership of culturally significant works, maintaining civility in public diTrade ReviewWriting in Public offers a brilliant synthesis of a massive set of interrelated topics: how the public role of literature gradually and radically shifted; its legal, social and literary causes; and its long-term implications for the public. For those grappling with the question of what literature's public functions were or were supposed to do, Ross offers both an insightful and provoking guide.—Andrew Benjamin Bricker, Ghent University, Review of English StudiesWriting in Public makes an ambitious argument with ramifications both for our reading of eighteenth-century literature and our contemporary understanding of literature as a form of public speech. One key strength of Ross's book is the way that highly specific examples are engagingly narrated and then open out into broad historical claims . . . [S]cholars in all areas of eighteenth century studies, as well as historians of free speech and the law, will find it a valuable resource.—Hannah Doherty Hudson, Eighteenth-Century FictionWhat Ross styles 'a cultural history of ideas about literature's place in the public sphere,' is timely and worth reading . . . This strikingly original volume is largely juridical; while Ben Jonson, Daniel Defoe, and Alexander Pope have their cameos, Writing in Public devotes itself to jurists and their legal reasoning as they debated intellectual property, perpetual copyright, the liberty of criticism, seditious libel, and so on.—University of Toronto QuarterlyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Writing in Public Part I. Copyright1. Literature in the Public Domain 2. The Fate of Style in an Age of Intellectual Property Part II. Defamation and Privacy3. What Does Literature Publicize? 4. How Criticism Became Privileged Speech: The Case of Carr v. Hood (1808) Part III. Seditious Libel5. Literature and the Freedom of Mind Epilogue: Unacknowledged Legislators Notes Index

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Book SynopsisHow eighteenth-century writers stretched systems designed to explain social relations to their breaking point, showing the flaws in their design. The Enlightenment has long been understoodand often understood itselfas an age of systems. In 1759, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, one of the architects of the Encyclopédie, claimed that the true system of the world has been recognized, developed, and perfected. In Systems Failure, Andrew Franta challenges this view by exploring the fascination with failure and obsession with unpredictable social forces in a range of English authors from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen. Franta argues that attempts to extend the Enlightenment's systematic spirit to the social world prompted many prominent authors to reject the idea that knowledge is synonymous with system. In readings of texts ranging from novels by Sterne, Smollett, Godwin, and Austen to Johnson's literary biographies and De Quincey's periodical essays, Franta shows how writers repeatedly take upTrade ReviewFranta tells an accurate and important story about how impossibility, unintelligibility, unpredictability, and disorder inform both narrative and style in the latter half of the long eighteenth century . . . Each chapter of Systems Failure offers a worthy contribution to the criticism of its respective subject, and the book might be especially useful to students and scholars of the Romantic and Victorian eras seeking an entry point into the eighteenth century.—Alex Solomon, Rutgers University, Review of English StudiesThis book is at once a counterhistory of the rise of the novel and a meditation on the social world as an elusive object of knowledge . . . While many others have emphasized the novel's commitment to representing the social world, this book demonstrates that such a commitment is compatible with a keen awareness of the inadequacy of the genre to that task . . . it is an admirable feature of Franta's argument that it often points past the edges of his archive toward a century-spanning, multidisciplinary history.—David Carroll Simon, University of Maryland, College Park, Critical InquiryAndrew Franta's Systems Failure: The Uses of Disorder in English Literature challenges a familiar account of the Enlightenment that views it as an age of order premised upon an overriding confidence in systems and systematic thinking . . . In Franta's compelling study, the novel becomes a kind of laboratory, or "staging ground," for Enlightenment theories that attempt to "apply principles derived from the natural sciences to the social world." What the novels that feature in Systems Failure discover is that the terrain of fiction—social life—seems always to escape systematic attempts to explain it. Fiction, one might say, is not reducible to principle.—Anthony Jarrells, University of South Carolina, Wordsworth CircleBy viewing characters as products of systems, Franta is able to show how the literature of this period contributed to "the idea that society has a structure," paving the way for the development of disciplinary sociology in the nineteenth century. As its title suggests, Systems Failure is a work whose strength lies in its author's ability to handle polarizing abstractions with nuanced attention.—Allison Turner, Columbia University, Modern PhilologySystems Failure is a profoundly 'human,' humanist book, attentive to explorations of failure, the contours of complex events, and the inevitable mismatch of things to ideas. And it belongs therefore on the shelf of anyone interested in the recent return to the Enlightenment not as a moment of triumphant system-building, but as a moment of encounter with difference, complexity, and the limitations of human knowledge.—Sean Silver, Rutgers University, Eighteenth-Century FictionTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Unconscionable MapsChapter 1. Life without Theory in the Life of SavageChapter 2. Sterne and the Uses of DisorderChapter 3. From Map to Network in Humphry ClinkerChapter 4. Godwin's HandshakeChapter 5. Jane Austen and the Morphology of the Marriage PlotChapter 6. De Quincey's SystemsCoda. The Strange System of Human SocietyNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA fascinating look at communication in the eighteenth century. This volume addresses questions of communication in several media, from the oral, printed, and visual to the physical. It encompasses essays featuring France, Germany, Early America, Scotland, and Britain more generally. The first section, Manuscript Communications, opens with Dena Goodman's presidential address on the secret history of learned societies. It is followed by a panel on manuscript and print circulation introduced by Colin Ramsey, which includes essays by Ryan Whyte, Chiara Cillerai, and Jurgen Overhoff. This section concludes with an essay by Carla J. Mulford on Benjamin Franklin's electrification of London politics. The second section, Arts and Manufactures, opens with David Shields's Clifford Lecture on the flavors of the eighteenth century. It contains essays by Hanna Roman on Buffon's language of heat and Jason Pearl on the perspective of aerostatic bodies and concludes with essays by Matthew Mauger

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Book SynopsisA field-defining study of the novel as a tragic form. Sandra Macpherson's groundbreaking study of the rise of the novel connects its form to developments in liability law across the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. In particular, Macpherson argues for a connection to legal principles of strict liability that hold persons accountable for harms inflicted upon others in the absence of intention, consent, direct action, or foreknowledge. In convincing polemical readings of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, she shows that these laws share with the novel the view that the state of a person's mind is irrelevant to the question of her responsibility for her actions. Macpherson urges readers to rethink the ancient consensus that the novel differs from tragedy in its elevation of character over plot. She concludes that the realist novel is ultimately a tragic form, committed to holding persons accountable for accidents of fate. Macpherson's original insights continue to have a broad and lasTrade ReviewOriginal, intelligent, fluent readings . . . Highly recommended.—ChoiceA wholly original approach to the relation between law and literature, [Harm's Way] will change the way we think about and teach some of these canonical works of fiction.—Times Literary SupplementMacpherson bears down intensely on several hard-won and difficult abstractions, including cause, intention, and meaning. To the degree to which we are accustomed to thinking through our most important literary-theoretical categories via a history of the novel, Harm's Way is a must read.—Studies in English LiteratureMacpherson presents a feminist argument of profound integrity and conviction. Harm's Way compels us to appreciate form not as an aesthetic or structural category but as a guarantor of justice, a way of attributing responsibility that, by divesting liability of mitigating intention, preserves the 'purely material' facticity of women's harm.—Modern PhilologyThis is a most thoughtful and thought-provoking book. It puts most other attempts to rewrite Rise of the Novel to shame.—ScriblerianIt is at once disturbing, exhilarating, and challenging. Where it succeeds, it dazzles, and where it falls short, it still demands, and deserves, our careful attention.—AMS PressA thoughtful, innovative, and important study of eighteenth-century fiction.—Review of English StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Injuring Love1. Matrimonial Murder2. The Encroachments of Others3. Fighting Men4. The Rape of the CockConclusion: Bad FormNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThe early novel was not the coming-of-age story we know todayeighteenth-century adolescent protagonists remained in a constant state of arrested development, never truly maturing. Between the emergence of the realist novel in the early eighteenth century and the novel's subsequent alignment with self-improvement a century later lies a significant moment when novelistic characters were unlikely to mature in any meaningful way. That adolescent protagonists poised on the cusp of adulthood resisted a headlong tumble into maturity through the workings of plot reveals a curious literary and philosophical counter-tradition in the history of the novel. Stephanie Insley Hershinow's Born Yesterday shows how the archetype of the early realist novice reveals literary character tout court. Through new readings of canonical novels by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, Hershinow severs the too-easy tie between novelistic form and charaTrade ReviewHershinow makes a compelling claim that the character of the novice represents a high point in the art of the novel. What makes her argument compelling is how she inhabits the novels at the level of the sentence, taking her vocabulary from the novelists.—Critical InquiryUltimately, to read this book was to confirm my suspicion that the best close readers are the best writers of literary criticism. The good reader takes pleasure in nuance and complexity; the good writer tends to repeat the qualities that inspired that pleasure. Hershinow's readings, in other words, are filled with the insights of discerning study; her prose is filled with wit and humor, always intellectually serious but also gracefully playful in a way uncommon in academic writing . . . Brimming with possibility—both as a whole and even at the level of the sentence—this book embodies the spirit of the vibrant characters it studies.—LA Review of BooksThe really radical implication of Born Yesterday is that character change itself is simply the wrong way to think about the category of experience in the novel . . . Hershinow does not shy away from pop-culture references, in part to challenge a conception of literary culture that is dismissive of girls and their aesthetic preferences. The payoff is as much stylistic as polemical. Lively and brimming with wit, Born Yesterday conveys through voice the impression of its author as a savvy and companionable guide to a selection of canonical novels she loves without apology.—Eighteenth-Century StudiesStephanie Insley Hershinow deftly lays out an argument that is both straightforward and dazzlingly complex, and which opens out onto myriad aspects of novel studies, from the complex ways that eighteenth-century fiction combines a drive toward mimetic realism with a tendency to idealize, to more fundamental questions of how we understand the relationship between plot and character . . . This exciting and invigorating work of scholarship will doubtless prove beneficial both to researchers and to teachers, for its economical, spirited chapters lend themselves beautifully to classroom use. Born Yesterday gives us new frameworks to think about the texts it examines, but it also invites us to revisit our ideas of character, plot, and adolescence in powerfully creative ways.—Eighteenth-Century FictionStephanie Hershinow offers a compelling counterargument that casts adolescent protagonists or "no-vices" who do not change as a "central, affirmative component of the novelproject" in this period.—De GruyterEven after a decade that has produced a slew of arresting readings of Clarissa, I think this chapter will be a touchstone for future discussions of the novel.—Eighteenth Century FictionHershinow teaches us to conceive of novels as thought experiments about resilience in the face of how things really were. Even more significantly, she encourages us to examine character closely to perceive how things should have been and to imagine how things could be.—The Eighteenth CenturyHershinow's is not the first study to question the classic assumption that novelistic characters are defined by interiority or development. But the analysis of Born Yesterday has interesting implications for the kind of affection this genre might command.... The novice, as Hershinow eloquently insists, allows an 'embedded utopianism' to emerge from within the novel.—Yoon Sun Lee, Public BooksTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Entering the World1. Clarissa's Conjectural History: The Novel and the Novice2. When Experience Matters (and When It Doesn't): Tom Jones and the Rake's Regress3. Simple and Sublime: The Otherworldly of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic4. Starting from Scratch: Frances Burney and the Appeals of InexperienceEpilogue. Emma's DystopiaNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1963. Moliere's plays rank among the great comic achievements in the history of the stage. Yet few attempts have been made to understand them as expressing the historical context of the author's time. Most frequently they have been interpreted from the point of view of purely literary history, while the characters have been seen as universal comic types. Lionel Gossman reappraises Moliere's comedy in the light of historical experience and interprets it in terms of the conditions from which it emerged. He brings it into the mainstream of seventeenth-century French literature and shows that Moliere was concerned with the same things that concerned Descartes, Corneille, Racine, or Pascal. Five comedies (Amphitryon, Dom Juan, Le Misanthrope, Le Tartuffe, and George Dandin) are studied in the first part of the book. A number of basic structures are found to be common to all of them, and these give the author his point of departure for the second part of the book. In Table of ContentsPrefaceChapter 1. AmphitryonChapter 2. Dom JuanChapter 3. Le MisanthropeChapter 4. Le TartuffeChapter 5. George DandinChapter 6. Molière in His Own TimeChapter 7. After MolièreIndex

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Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1989. In Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance the eminent scholar O. B. Hardison Jr. sets out to recover the special kinds of music inherent in English Renaissance poetry. The book begins with a thorough and wide-ranging survey of the development of prosodic theory from the ancient ars metrica tradition to the sixteenth century, with special emphasis on such issues as the relation of verse form and genre, the relation of syntax to prosody, and the role of language reform in shaping Renaissance prosody. The second part of the book considers the impact of prosodic traditions on specific literary works and verse forms, among them Surrey's Aeneid, Heywood's translation of Seneca's Thyestes, Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc, and the dramatic and epic verse of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Throughout, Hardison examines not only how poets crafted their verse but why. He explores authorial purposes ranging from technical attempts to match sound andTrade ReviewTwo large points that emerge are the importance of 'construction' and, perhaps more surprisingly, 'the dominance of syllabic concepts of prosody.' Hardison concludes that the English verse of this period 'is best understood in terms of this tradition.' He has written a learned, interesting, and civilized book.—Studies in English LiteratureTable of ContentsPrefacePart I. ContextsChapter 1. Prosody and Purpose Chapter 2. Ars Metrica Chapter 3. Rude and Beggerly Ryming: The Romance TraditionChapter 4. A Question of Language: Italy and the Shaping of Renaissance Prosodic TheoryChapter 5. Notes of Instruction Part II. PerformancesChapter 6. A Straunge Metre Worthy To Be Embraced Chapter 7. Jasper Heywood's Fourteeners Chapter 8. Gorboduc and Dramatic Blank Verse, with a Note on ComedyChapter 9. Heroic Experiments Chapter 10. Speech and Verse in Later Elizabethan Drama Chapter 11. True Musical DelightNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA critique of attempts by conservative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors to appropriate the rhetoric of victimhood and appeals to rights to safeguard the status of the powerful. As revolution and popular unrest roiled the final decades of the eighteenth century, authors, activists, and philosophers across the British Empire hailed the rise of the liberal subject, valorizing the humanity of the marginalized and the rights of members of groups long considered inferior or subhuman. Yet at the same time, a group of conservative authors mounted a reactionary attempt to cultivate sympathy for the privileged. In Defending Privilege, Nicole Mansfield Wright examines works by Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, and others to show how conservatives used the rhetoric of victimhood in attempts to convince ordinary readers to regard a privileged person's loss of legal agency as a catastrophe greater than the calamities and legally sanctioned exclusion suffered by the poor andTrade ReviewKeenly researched and persuasively conveyed, Defending Privilege is a fascinating, dynamic, and wonderfully engaging book.—Barbara Hughes-Moore, Hedgehogs and FoxesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: A Neglected InheritancePart I. Downward Mobility and the Safety Net of the Law1. Bad Citizens and Insolent Foreigners: Tobias Smollett's Elite Outsiders and the Suspension of Legal Agency2. Covert Critique: Genteel Victimhood in Charlotte Smith's Fictions of DispossessionPart II. The Pen as a Weapon against Reform of the Law3. Letters of the Law: Ambivalent Advocacy and Speaking for the Voiceless in Walter Scott's Redgauntlet4. Masters of Passion and Tongue: White Eyewitnesses and Fear of Black Testimony in the Proslavery NovelEpilogue: Abiding the LawNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA critique of attempts by conservative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors to appropriate the rhetoric of victimhood and appeals to rights to safeguard the status of the powerful. As revolution and popular unrest roiled the final decades of the eighteenth century, authors, activists, and philosophers across the British Empire hailed the rise of the liberal subject, valorizing the humanity of the marginalized and the rights of members of groups long considered inferior or subhuman. Yet at the same time, a group of conservative authors mounted a reactionary attempt to cultivate sympathy for the privileged. In Defending Privilege, Nicole Mansfield Wright examines works by Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, and others to show how conservatives used the rhetoric of victimhood in attempts to convince ordinary readers to regard a privileged person's loss of legal agency as a catastrophe greater than the calamities and legally sanctioned exclusion suffered by the poor andTrade ReviewKeenly researched and persuasively conveyed, Defending Privilege is a fascinating, dynamic, and wonderfully engaging book.—Barbara Hughes-Moore, Hedgehogs and FoxesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: A Neglected InheritancePart I. Downward Mobility and the Safety Net of the Law1. Bad Citizens and Insolent Foreigners: Tobias Smollett's Elite Outsiders and the Suspension of Legal Agency2. Covert Critique: Genteel Victimhood in Charlotte Smith's Fictions of DispossessionPart II. The Pen as a Weapon against Reform of the Law3. Letters of the Law: Ambivalent Advocacy and Speaking for the Voiceless in Walter Scott's Redgauntlet4. Masters of Passion and Tongue: White Eyewitnesses and Fear of Black Testimony in the Proslavery NovelEpilogue: Abiding the LawNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1982. The Poetics of Jacobean Drama argues for a rediscovered approach to the study of Renaissance drama. Coburn Freer observes that most modern criticism of this drama treats the plays as if they were written in prose, thus overlooking whole areas of dramatic meaning that were understood in the past. Such an understanding, he asserts, was common among writers, actors, audiences, and readers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, and a knowledge of it is essential to a full appreciation of the characterization and dramatic structures in these plays. Freer explores the evolution of the modern reluctance to approach Renaissance drama as one would dramatic poetryfrom the standpoint of a listener. Blank verse, the author shows, provided Jacobean dramatists with a poetic form against which they could work the pressures of experience within their characters. The writers' ability to work with and against this form provided infinite resources for delineating character anTrade ReviewThis bold and interesting book sets out to show that poetry functions integrally with characterization, structure and action in Jacobean drama.—Times Higher Education SupplementTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction A Note on Texts Chapter 1. Poetry in the Mode of Action Chapter 2. Contexts of Blank Verse Drama Chapter 3. The Revenger's Tragedy Chapter 4. Cymbeline Chapter 5. The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi Chapter 6. The Broken Heart Epilouge. The Metamorphosis Transformed NotesIndex

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Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1986. In The House of Death, Arnold Stein studies the ways in which English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries imagined their own ends and wrote of the deaths of those they loved or wished to honor. Drawing on a wide range of texts in both poetry and prose, Stein examines the representations, images, and figurative meanings of death from antiquity to the Renaissance. A major premise of the book is that commonplaces, conventions, and the established rules for thinking about death did not prevent writers from discovering the distinctive in it. Eloquent readings of Raleigh, Donne, Herbert, and others capture the poets approaching their own death or confronting the death of others. Marvell's lines on the execution of Charles are paired with his treatment of the dead body of Cromwell; Henry King and John Donne both write of their late wives; Ben Jonson mourns the death of a first son and a first daughter. For purposes of comparison, the governing perspeTrade ReviewUsing the traditional method of extremely close reading, combined with a Freudian theory of consciousness, [Stein] offers us without apology elegant interpretations—patient, subtle, probing—of various essays on the art of dying.—Yale ReviewTable of ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgementsPart I: Three Essays in BackgroundChapter 1: What Renaissance Poets Would Have KnownChapter 2: Answers and QuestionsChapter 3: Donne's Pictures of the Good DeathPart II: Writing About One's Own DeathChapter 4: Respice FinemChapter 5: Death in Earnest: "Tichborne's Elegy"Chapter 6: Dying in Jest and Earnest: RaleighChapter 7: Imagined Dyings: John DonneChapter 8: Entering the History of Death: George HerbertChapter 9: "The Plaudite, or End of Life"Part III: On the Death of Someone ElseChapter 10: IntroductionChapter 11: Lament, Praise, Consolation: Pain/Difficulty, EaseChapter 12: The Death of a Loved One: Personal and Public ExpressionsChapter 13: Episodes in the Progress of DeathPart IV: ExpressionChapter 14: Preliminary ViewsChapter 15: Thoughts and ImagesChapter 16: Images of ReflectionChapter 17: Reasoning by ResemblancesChapter 18: IntricaciesChapter 19: The EndNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA literary history of the old, broken, rusty, dusty, and moldy stuff that people dug up in England during the long eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, antiquarieswary of the biases of philosophers, scientists, politicians, and historiansused old objects to establish what they claimed was a true account of history. But just what could these small, fragmentary, frequently unidentifiable things, whose origins were unknown and whose worth or meaning was not self-evident, tell people about the past?In Artifacts, Crystal B. Lake unearths the four kinds of old objects that were most frequently found and cataloged in Enlightenment-era England: coins, manuscripts, weapons, and grave goods. Following these prized objects as they made their way into popular culture, Lake develops new interpretations of works by Joseph Addison, John Dryden, Horace Walpole, Jonathan Swift, Tobias Smollett, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, among others. Rereading these authors with the artifact in Trade ReviewWhile this review singles out only a few, Lake's examination of the narratives generated by many eighteenth-century first responders to coins, weapons, manuscripts and grave goods, is thorough and illuminating, as are her detailed and scholarly readings of literary texts where artifacts shape form and content.—Frances Singh, Hostos Community College, CUNY (emerita), Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer[A] engaging and thought-provoking study.—Kate Smith, University of Birmingham, Journal of British Studies..., the book is a powerful reminder of the nuances that paying more attention to objects can bring to the study of the intersections between literature and politics in the long eighteenth century.—Giacomo Savani, University College Dublin, Modern PhilologyTable of ContentsList of Illustrations AcknowledgmentsPrologue. Things Speaking for ThemselvesPart I. Terms and ContextsChapter 1. Leaving Room to Guess Chapter 2. Ten Thousand GimcracksPart II. Case StudiesChapter 3. Coins: The Most Vocal Monuments Chapter 4. Manuscripts: Burnt to a Crust Chapter 5. Weapons: A Wilderness of Arms Chapter 6. Grave Goods: The Kings' Four BodiesAfterword. The Artifactual FormNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisA revelatory history of the characters that playwrights and managers created out of the real lives of women in intimate relationships with military men to serve Great Britain's greatest needs during the war-saturated eighteenth century. During the long eighteenth century, Great Britain was almost continuously at war. As the era unfolded, the theatre gradually discovered the potential in having actresses, recently introduced to the stage in the 1660s, perform as wartime women characters. As playwrights and managers began casting women in transformative roles to meet each major national need, female characters came to be central figures in bringing the war home to the nation, transforming them into deeply patriotic British subjects. Paula Backscheider's Women in Wartime is the first study of theatrical representations of women with intimate connections to military men. Drawing upon her extensive expertise in gender, performance studies, popular culture, and archival studies, BackscheTrade ReviewPaula R. Backscheider, a significant writer on the subject of eighteenth-century drama...analyses more than fifty plays in a substantial work that she acknowldges took years to write.—Times Literary SupplementWomen in Wartime is masterfully written tying together theory, historical context and a vast body of evidence....Backscheider's work is relevant far beyond the eighteenth century; she identifies quintessential themes that continue to shape perceptions of gender in theatre and literature today, and perhaps most importantly, shows how intertheatricality can impact studies of theatre, gender, representation and reception.—Gender & HistoryPaula R. Backscheider offers an expansive prehistory of this familiar gendered and generational patriotism...There is much to appreciate in this study.—Theatre SurveyParticularly valuable among the critical pieces I have thus far discussed are those that contribute to the continued recovery and recentring of women's writing and women's representation in long eighteenth-century drama.... Prime among these is Paula R. Backscheider's Women in Wartime: Theatrical Representations in the Long Eighteenth Century, a tremendous undertaking that explores, as the title suggests, how the backdrop of 'intense periods of British wars' across the long eighteenth century affected playwrights' portrayals of female characters of all classes.—The Year's Work in English StudiesTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsAbbreviations and Textual NoteIntroduction1. Prolegomenon. The Genesis of Wartime Women: Statira, Parisatis, and Roxana2. The Changing Face of War: Fidelia, Mrs. Gripe, and Clarinda 3. In the Shadow of Marlborough's War: Silvia, Rose, Belvedera, and Dorcas4. Crisis Years: Women Must Say "Go"5. From Props to Players: Nelly, Sukey, and Feridon6. Marrying Military: Gendered PatriotismCodaAppendix A: Wars, Recruiting, and Women's Responsibilities and RightsAppendix B: NewsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA revelatory history of the characters that playwrights and managers created out of the real lives of women in intimate relationships with military men to serve Great Britain's greatest needs during the war-saturated eighteenth century. During the long eighteenth century, Great Britain was almost continuously at war. As the era unfolded, the theatre gradually discovered the potential in having actresses, recently introduced to the stage in the 1660s, perform as wartime women characters. As playwrights and managers began casting women in transformative roles to meet each major national need, female characters came to be central figures in bringing the war home to the nation, transforming them into deeply patriotic British subjects. Paula Backscheider's Women in Wartime is the first study of theatrical representations of women with intimate connections to military men. Drawing upon her extensive expertise in gender, performance studies, popular culture, and archival studies, BackscheTrade ReviewPaula R. Backscheider, a significant writer on the subject of eighteenth-century drama...analyses more than fifty plays in a substantial work that she acknowldges took years to write.—Times Literary SupplementWomen in Wartime is masterfully written tying together theory, historical context and a vast body of evidence....Backscheider's work is relevant far beyond the eighteenth century; she identifies quintessential themes that continue to shape perceptions of gender in theatre and literature today, and perhaps most importantly, shows how intertheatricality can impact studies of theatre, gender, representation and reception.—Gender & HistoryPaula R. Backscheider offers an expansive prehistory of this familiar gendered and generational patriotism...There is much to appreciate in this study.—Theatre SurveyParticularly valuable among the critical pieces I have thus far discussed are those that contribute to the continued recovery and recentring of women's writing and women's representation in long eighteenth-century drama.... Prime among these is Paula R. Backscheider's Women in Wartime: Theatrical Representations in the Long Eighteenth Century, a tremendous undertaking that explores, as the title suggests, how the backdrop of 'intense periods of British wars' across the long eighteenth century affected playwrights' portrayals of female characters of all classes.—The Year's Work in English StudiesTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsAbbreviations and Textual NoteIntroduction1. Prolegomenon. The Genesis of Wartime Women: Statira, Parisatis, and Roxana2. The Changing Face of War: Fidelia, Mrs. Gripe, and Clarinda 3. In the Shadow of Marlborough's War: Silvia, Rose, Belvedera, and Dorcas4. Crisis Years: Women Must Say "Go"5. From Props to Players: Nelly, Sukey, and Feridon6. Marrying Military: Gendered PatriotismCodaAppendix A: Wars, Recruiting, and Women's Responsibilities and RightsAppendix B: NewsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAn ambitious revisionist history of naturalization as a creative mechanism for national expansion.Before borders determined who belonged in a country and who did not, lawyers and judges devised a legal fiction called naturalization to bypass the idea of feudal allegiance and integrate new subjects into their nations. At the same time, writers of prose fiction were attempting to undo centuries of rules about who couldand who could notbe a subject of literature. In Before Borders, Stephanie DeGooyer reconstructs how prose and legal fictions came together in the eighteenth century to dramatically reimagine national belonging through naturalization. The bureaucratic procedure of naturalization today was once a radically fictional way to create new citizens and literary subjects.Through early modern court proceedings, the philosophy of John Locke, and the novels of Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley, DeGooyer follows how naturalizTrade Review...superbly interdisciplinary book...—International Journal of Law in ContextTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Open CountryPart I: Theories of NaturalizationChapter 1. Naturalization in HistoryChapter 2. Ideas of NaturalizationPart II: Fictions of NaturalizationChapter 3. Law of the Foreign FatherChapter 4. Open-Door Domestic FictionPart III: Relations of NaturalizationChapter 5. Unnatural-Born SubjectsCodaNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAn ambitious revisionist history of naturalization as a creative mechanism for national expansion.Before borders determined who belonged in a country and who did not, lawyers and judges devised a legal fiction called naturalization to bypass the idea of feudal allegiance and integrate new subjects into their nations. At the same time, writers of prose fiction were attempting to undo centuries of rules about who couldand who could notbe a subject of literature. In Before Borders, Stephanie DeGooyer reconstructs how prose and legal fictions came together in the eighteenth century to dramatically reimagine national belonging through naturalization. The bureaucratic procedure of naturalization today was once a radically fictional way to create new citizens and literary subjects.Through early modern court proceedings, the philosophy of John Locke, and the novels of Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley, DeGooyer follows how naturalizTrade Review...superbly interdisciplinary book...—International Journal of Law in ContextTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Open CountryPart I: Theories of NaturalizationChapter 1. Naturalization in HistoryChapter 2. Ideas of NaturalizationPart II: Fictions of NaturalizationChapter 3. Law of the Foreign FatherChapter 4. Open-Door Domestic FictionPart III: Relations of NaturalizationChapter 5. Unnatural-Born SubjectsCodaNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA revelatory reading of the British novel that considers interfaith marriage, religious toleration, and the ethics of sociability. Bringing together feminist theory, novel criticism, and religious studies, Alison Conway's Sacred Engagements advances a postsecular reading of the novel that links religious tolerance and the eighteenth-century marriage plot. Conway explores the historical roots of the vexed questions that interfaith marriage continues to raise today. She argues that narrative wields the power to imagine conjugal and religious relations that support the embodied politics crucial to a communal, rather than state-sponsored, ethics of toleration. Conway studies the communal and gendered aspects of religious experience embedded in Samuel Richardson's account of interfaith marriage and liberalism's understandings of toleration in Sir Charles Grandison. In her readings of Frances Brooke, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Maria Edgeworth, Conway considers how women authors reframe the Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Novel Intimacies Chapter 1. Religious Toleration and Interfaith Marriage, 1640-1720Chapter 2. Sir Charles Grandison's Religious DisturbancesChapter 3. Frances Brooke's Civil Disputes Chapter 4. Elizabeth Inchbald among the CisalpinesChapter 5. Maria Edgeworth's Jewish EnlightenmentConclusion: Mansfield Park Closes Its GatesNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisUntangling the private feelings, ambitions, and fears of early Americans through their personal writings from the Revolution to the Civil War. Modern readers of history and biography unite around a seemingly straightforward question: What did it feel like to live in the past? In Longing for Connection, historian Andrew Burstein attempts to answer this question with a vigorous, nuanced emotional history of the United States from its founding to the Civil War. Through an examination of the letters, diaries, and other personal texts of the time, along with popular poetry and novels, Burstein shows us how early Americans expressed deep emotions through shared metaphors and borrowed verse in their longing for meaning and connection. He reveals how literate, educated Americansboth well-known and more obscureexpressed their feelings to each other and made attempts at humor, navigating an anxious world in which connection across spaces was difficult to capture. In studying the power of poetr

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Book SynopsisOuterSpearesis the first book to examine the full spectrum of past and present adaptations, and one that offers a unique perspective on the transcultural and transdisciplinary aspects of Shakespeare in the contemporary world.Trade Review'OuterSpears enriches the remarkable tradition of Shakespeare scholarship in Canada... The book is highly interdisciplinary in character, making it an important contribution to the study of Shakespeare, adaptation, media, and contemporary culture.' -- Aneta Mancewicz English Studies in Canada vol 41:03:2015Table of ContentsIntroduction: OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation (Daniel Fischlin) Section 1: "Strange Invention": Shakespeare in the New Media YouTube Shakespeare and the Rhetorics of Invention (Christy Desmet) "Is there an app for that?": Mobile Shakespeare on the Phone and in the Cloud (Jennifer Ailles) Section 2: "These violent delights have violent ends": Shakespearean Adaptation and Film Intermedia Melted into Media: Understanding Julie Taymor's Film Adaptation of The Tempest in the Wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror (Don Moore) Transgression and Transformation: Mickey B and the Dramaturgy of Adaptation - An Interview with Tom Magill (Daniel Fischlin, Tom Magill, and Jessica Riley) Section 3: "All the Uses of this World": TV, Radio, Popular Music, Theatre and the Uses of Intermedia Slings & Arrows: Pedagogical Theory and Practice in an Intermediated Shakespeare (Kim Fedderson and Michael Richardson) Your Master's Voice: The Shakespearean Narrator as Intermedial Authority on 1930s American Radio (Andrew Bretz) Sounding Shakespeare: Intermedia Adaptation and Popular Music (Daniel Fischlin) "Playing the Race Bard": How Shakespeare and Harlem Duet Sold (at) the 2006 Stratford Festival (James McKinnon) Section 4: "Give No Limits to My Tongue ... I am Privileged to Speak": The Limits of Adaptation? Patchwork Shakespeare: Community Events at the American Shakespeare Tercentenary (1916) (Monika Smialkowska) Upcycling Shakespeare: Crafting Cultural Capital (Sujata Iyengar) Beyond Adaptation (Mark Fortier)

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Book SynopsisThe general theme that emerges from this study is the deeply ambivalent nature of communist Shakespeare who, like Feste's 'chev'ril glove,' often simultaneously served and subverted the official ideology.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments A Note on Slavic Transliteration Introduction: When Worlds Collide: Shakespeare and Communisms IRENA R. MAKARYK and JOSEPH G. PRICE PART ONE: SHAKESPEARE IN FLUX: 1917 TO THE 1930s Performance and Ideology: Shakespeare in 1920s Ukraine IRENA R. MAKARYK Shakespeare and the Working Man: Communist Applications during Nationalist Periods in Latvia LAURA RAIDONIS BATES Shakespeare as a Founding Father of Socialist Realism: The Soviet Affair with Shakespeare ARKADY OSTROVSKY A Five-Year Plan for The Taming of the Shrew lAURENCE SENELICK The Forest of Arden in Stalin's Russia: Shakespeare's Comedies in the Soviet Theatre of the Thirties ALEXEY BARTOSHEVITCH PART TWO: WORLD WAR, COLD WAR, AND THE GREAT DIVIDE Wartime Hamlet IRENA R. MAKARYK 'Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all': New Documentation on the Okhlopkov Hamlet LAURENCE SENELICK Shakespeare and the Berlin Wall WERNER HABICHT In Search of a Socialist Shakespeare: Hamlet on East German Stages LAWRENCE GUNTNER Shakespeare the Politicizer: Two Notable Stagings in East Germany MAIK HAMBURGER PART THREE: NATIONAL AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY Translations of Politics / Politics of Translation: Czech Experience MARTIN HILSKY Krystyna Skuszanka's Shakespeare of Political Allusions and Metaphors in Communist Poland KRYSTYNA KUJAWINB SKA COURTNEY War, Lechery, and Goulash Communism: Troilus and Cressida in Socialist Hungary ZOLTAN MARKUS The Chinese Vision of Shakespeare (from 1950 to 1990): Marxism and Socialism XIAO YANG ZHANG From Maoism to (Post) Modernism: Hamlet in Communist China SHUHUA WANG PART FOUR: THEORIZING MARXIST SHAKESPEARES Caliban/Cannibal/Carnival: Cuban Articulations of Shakespeare's The Tempest MARIA CLARA VERSIANI GALERY Ideology and Performance in East German Versions of Shakespeare ROBERT WEIMANN Marx Manque: A Brief History of Marxist Shakespeare Criticism in North America, ca. 1980-ca. 2000 349 SHARON O'DAIR Contributors Index Index of Shakespearean Plays

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Book SynopsisThe Civil War is a poem which Abraham Cowley (1618-67) did not complete, for political and historical reasons, and of which only the first volume was published; the other two volumes have been considered irrecoverably lost since Cowley's death. Professor Pritchard recently found two copies of the complete poem in a collection of family papers at the Hertfordshire County Record Office and here presents a corrected edition of the first and previously published book, and the text of the hitherto unpublished books two and three.The poem is a major addition to the body of Cowley's poetry; it has close and sometimes surprising connections with much of his other work. It is not only the most extended and important of his political poems but a significant addition to the genre of the political poem. It is also unique as the attempt by a poet of stature to give epic treatment to the events of the English Civil War.Professor Pritchard provides a discussion

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Book SynopsisComposed in a period of religious and political upheaval, Culverwell's Discourse of the Light of Nature is an imaginative statement of the teachings of Christian humanism concerning the nature and limits of human reason and the related concepts of natural and divine law. The lengthy introduction to this new critical edition throws light on the evolution of English rationalism in the seventeenth century, and the annotation establishes for the first time the full range of Culverwell's sources – classical, medieval, and Renaissance – and enables the reader to appreciate his manner of citing authority and handling illustration.(Department of English Studies and Texts 17)

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Book SynopsisThe noble wives in María de Zayas''s Desengaños suffer terrible fates: one is beheaded, another poisoned, one is cemented into a chimney, while yet another is locked into a tiny wall closet where she dies. The hallmark of Zayas''s aesthetics, these characters are the central reason why her fiction has increased in popularity through the ages. Yet their stories pose an apparent contradiction between the author''s pro-female rhetoric and her gusto for killing model women, then beautifying their mutilated cadavers.Dressed to Kill reconciles Zayas''s Desengaños with the age in which it was written, contextualizing the book in baroque poetics, the Spanish honour code, and fifteenth-century martyr saints'' lives. Elizabeth Rhodes elegantly uncovers Zayas''s intention to reform the Spanish nobility by displaying noble misbehaviour and its deadly consequences. Her book concludes by detailing the Desengaños'' intriguing influence on the aesthetic baTrade Review'This is a fine book that lives up to its beautiful packaging. Rhodes makes excellent use of artistic as well as literary evidence, incorporating carefully chosen illustrations into the body of her discussion... This new effort to read Zayas on her own terms can only enhance our experience of her texts. I applaud Elizabeth Rhodes for having the courage of her conviction.' -- Hilaire Kellendorf Renaissance Quarterly; vol 65:03:2012 'Dressed to Kill is written in a lively and engaging style... This monograph makes a substantial contribution to Maria de Zayas' works and more generally to the study of Golden-Age Spain; consequently it deserves to become a key reference point for future research.' -- Eavan O'Brien Bulletin of Spanish Studies, vol 90:07:2013Table of ContentsAbbreviations List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Setting the Interpretative Baseline 1. The Desenga os at a Distance 2. Attending the Soir e 3 Dressed to Kill: Death and Meaning in the Desenga os 4 Dead End: The Convent 5 Postscript: Laurela Conclusion Plot Summaries Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisThe essays demonstrate how the wide variety of ways in which Shakespeare has been recycled, reviewed, and reinterpreted from 19391945 are both illuminated by and continue to illuminate the War today.Trade Review'Shakespeare and the Second World War is consistently fascinating and wide-ranging in scope.' -- Garrett A. Sullivan Jr Studies in English Language vol 53:02:2013 'One of those rare books that merges both literature and history in equal proportion, Shakespeare and the Second World War is a rich mine of information to scholars, writers, historians, literary aficionados, and all general lovers of knowledge.' -- Oguntoyinbo Deji Journal of Military and Strategic Studies vol 15:03:2014Table of ContentsIllustrations Tables Acknowledgments Introduction: Shakespeare and the Second World War. IRENA R. MAKARYK (University of Ottawa) German Shakespeare, the Third Reich, and the War. WERNER HABICHT (University of W rzburg) Shakespearean Negotiations in the Perpetrator Society: German Productions of The Merchant of Venice during the Second World War. ZENO ACKERMANN (Freie Universit t Berlin) Shylock, Palestine, and the Second World War. MARK BAYER (University of Texas at San Antonio) "Caesar's word against the world": Mussolini's Caesarism and Discourses of Empire. NANCY ISENBERG (the Universit degli Studi Roma Tre) Shakespeare and Censorship during the Second World War: Othello in Occupied Greece TINA KRONTIRIS (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) "In This Hour of History: Amidst These Tragic Events": Polish Shakespeare during the Second World War KRYSTYNA KUJAWINSKA COURTNEY (University of Lodz) Pasternak's Shakespeare in Wartime Russia. ALEKSEI SEMENENKO (Stockholm University) Shakespeare as an Icon of the Enemy Culture: Shakespeare in Wartime Japan, 1937-1945 RYUTA MINAMI (Shirayuri College) "Warlike Noises": Jingoistic Hamlet during the Sino-Japanese Wars. ALEX HUANG (Penn State University) Shakespeare, Stratford, and the Second World War. SIMON BARKER (University of Lincoln) Rosalinds, Violas, and Other Sentimental Friendships: The Osiris Players and Shakespeare, 1939-45. PETER BILLINGHAM (University of Winchester) Maurice Evans's "G.I. Hamlet": Analogy, Authority and Adaptation. ANNE RUSSELL (Wilfrid Laurier University) The War at "Home": Representations of Canada and of World War II in Star Crossed. MARISSA MCHUGH (University of Ottawa) Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz. TIBOR EGERVARI (University of Ottawa) Appropriating Shakespeare in Defeat: Hamlet and the Contemporary Polish Vision of War. KATARZYNA KWAPISZ-WILLIAMS (University of Lodz) Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisIn Shakespeare in Québec, Jennifer Drouin analyses representations of nation and gender in Shakespearean adaptations written in Québec since the Quiet Revolution.Trade Review'Drouin's examination of Qu b cois literature is a refreshing, entirely new addition to the field of Shakespeare studies. This work would be of interest to readers who focus on any one of her three key terms - Qu b cois, adaptation, or Shakespeare - as well as those interested in postcolonial Studies.' -- Laura Schechter English Studies in Canada vol 41:03:2015Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1: Postcolonial Shakespeares and Gendering the Quebec Nation Chapter 2: A Theory of Shakespearean Adaptation Chapter 3: The Quiet Revolution: Passer a l'action Chapter 4: Tyrants and Usurpers: Tradapting the Conquest Chapter 5: The First Referendum: Daughters of the Carnivalized Nation Chapter 6: The Second Referendum: Plurality without Pluralism Conclusion: Quebec v. Canada: Interculturalism and the Politics of Recognition Appendix: Chronology of Quebecois Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1968-2013 Works Cited

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Book SynopsisIn Poets, Players and Preachers, Anne James explores the literary responses to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in poetry, drama, and sermons. This book is the first full-length study of the literary repercussions of the conspiracy.Trade Review‘Masterful, nuanced, and at times almost overwhelming treatment of Gunpowder Plot.’ -- Leah Knight * Renaissance and Reformation vol 40:04:2017 *"Poets, Players and Preachers is an ambitious book, as rewarding as it is challenging, covering a wide range of genres stretching across a hundred years of history and drawing on a wide range of scholarship and theory." -- Brent Nelson * Seventeenth Century News *"[This book] is a fine example of the iterative relationship between literary and historical inquiry, as well as a complex account of how the memory of a single (and ultimately failed) historical event can come to serve widely divergent ends." -- Todd Butler * Seventeenth Century News *"Poets, Players and Preachers offers a captivating study of the literary repercussions of the Gunpowder Plot. James makes it clear that this is very much a historicist approach to literary studies and demonstrates the importance and advantages that a greater interdisciplinary relationship between literary and historical studies can bring to enrich our understanding of intention, transmission, and reception of early modern literature." -- Tatyana Zhukova, University of Nottingham * The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol xlix, no 2, Summer 2018 *Table of Contents1.Introduction: Writing the Gunpowder Plot 2."like Sampson's foxes": Creating a Jacobean Myth of Deliverance 3."And no religion beinds men to be traitors": The Plot on Stage 4."In marble records fit to be inrold": Epic Monuments for a Protestant Nation 5"fit audience find, though few": Militant Protestants and Forgotten Monuments 6."For God and the King": Preaching on the Plot Anniversary 7.Conclusion: Echoes and Reverberations Works Cited

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Book SynopsisShakespeare's Big Men examines five Shakespearean tragedies Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Coriolanus through the lens of generative anthropology and the insights of its founder, Eric Gans.Trade Review"Shakespeare’s Big Men is an earnest, ambitious, and illuminating book... Van Oort’s close readings, which occupy the better part of the book, are well paced, thorough, and careful... In the end, the greatest strength of the book is that van Oort manages to present a Shakespeare who is both an acute observer of human society and, as an artist, a contributor to it - someone whose tragic theater can defer violence. Admirers of Bradley and Girard will find a great deal to like in this book. Adherents to what Harold Bloom calls ‘French Shakespeare’ or the ‘school of resentment’ might do well to reckon with it." -- Blair Hoxby * Modern Philology (2018) *"Shakespeare’s Big Men by Richard van Oort is one of the most intriguing and thought-provoking books to appear on Shakespeare in the past few years. Drawing on the anthropologies of Eric Gans and René Girard, van Oort argues that Shakespeare’s tragedies provide a way of dealing with the problem of resentment... Through compelling readings of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Coriolanus, van Oort proposes that Shakespearean tragedy goes further [than Greek tragedy] in its anthropological insights, thematizing tragedy’s role in the discharge of resentment." -- Paul Kottman * Shakespeare Jahrbuch (2018) *‘Shakespeare’s Big Men is an earnest, ambitious and illuminating book.’ -- Blair Hoxby * Modern Philology vol 115:04:2017 *"Van Oort’s strategy of comparing the structural significance and experiences of characters from play to play energizes and strengthens his claims. The book is especially intriguing for its compelling exploration of tragic meta-theatricality as a sign of the frightening and stimulating openness of the early modern centre." -- Glenn Clark, University of Manitoba * University of Toronto Quarterly, vol 87 3, Summer 2018 *Table of ContentsChapter 1 - Why Shakespeare and Generative Anthropology? Chapter 2 - The Originary Hypothesis: Hierarchy, Resentment, and Tragedy Chapter 3 - Brutus's Neoclassical Irony Chapter 4 - Hamlet's Filthy Imagination Chapter 5 - Iago Our Co-Conspirator Chapter 6 - Macbeth Unseamed Chapter 7 - Coriolanus's Impotence Chapter 8 - Coda: Rene Girard's Shakespeare

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Book SynopsisThere is scarcely an element of Hamlet that has not received attention many times, yet both general reader and sophisticated critic would generally agree that the character of Hamlet and the full meanings of the play remain mysteries. No less a puzzle is the art of Hamlet, for, while the form of the art is elusive, the feeling of essential meaning is strong.Professor Aldus hopes to enlarge our understanding of Hamlet and our appreciation of Shakespeare as a conscious artist of great subtlety by studying the play’s dramatic structure in the light of Aristotle’s Poetics and its meaning as literary myth in the light of Plato’s Phaedrus. This is a study of Hamlet as literary myth, a figurative mode of art in which structure is basic; yet primal myth, myth in the larger, non-literary sense, becomes part of it too, because the substance of Hamlet seems to be of this kind.Professor Al

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Book SynopsisA Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text introduces the early editions, editing practices, and publishing history of Shakespeare's plays and poems, and examines their influence on bibliographic studies as a whole. The first single-volume book to provide an accessible and authoritative introduction to Shakespearean bibliographic studies Includes a helpful introduction, notes on Shakespeare's texts, and a useful bibliography Contributors represent both leading and emerging scholars in the field Represents an unparalleled resource for both students and faculty Trade Review"As the concept of authorship continues to deconstruct itself in the wake of postmodernism, the volume is an indispensable addition to the bookshelves of both students and academics." (Notes and Queries, December 2009) "The essays offer a good balance of general history, theoretical issues, and individual case studies, such that, as a whole, the collection will be a valuable resource for those new to book-history studies, while also advancing ongoing debates through a series of thoughtful reflections on the state of the field." (Archiv, 2009) "This collection is more than a companion. It is a superlative guide to the current crisis surrounding the editing of the complex Shakespearean text ... .Essential” (CHOICE) "Andrew Murphy's ably edited Concise Companion to Shakespeare and Text ... constitutes an appropriate consecration for an area in Shakespeare studies whose vast importance has become increasingly obvious. [This book] provides an authoritative introduction to the field and full coverage of it, with a useful division into three main parts: 'Histories of the Book' (I), 'Theories of Editing' (II), and 'Practicalities' (III) … a fine achievement." (Around the Globe)Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors vii Acknowledgments x Note on Texts xi Introduction: What Happens in Hamlet? 1Andrew Murphy Part I Histories of the Books 15 1 The Publishing Trade in Shakespeare’s Time 17Helen Smith 2 Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590–1619 35Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier 3 Shakespeare Writ Small: Early Single Editions of Shakespeare’s Plays 57Thomas L. Berger 4 The Life of the First Folio in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 71Anthony James West Part II Theories of Editing 91 5 The Birth of the Editor 93Andrew Murphy 6 The Science of Editing 109Paul Werstine 7 Editing Shakespeare in a Postmodern Age 128Leah S. Marcus 8 Shakespeare and the Electronic Text 145Michael Best Part III Practicalities 163 9 Working with the Text: Editing in Practice 165David Bevington 10 Working with the Texts: Differential Readings 185Sonia Massai 11 Mapping Shakespeare’s Contexts: Doing Things with Databases 204Neil Rhodes Afterword 221John Drakakis Bibliography 239 Index 258

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Book SynopsisThis Companion represents the myriad ways of thinking about the remarkable achievement of Shakespeare's sonnets. An authoritative reference guide and extended introduction to Shakespeare's sonnets. Contains more than 20 newly-commissioned essays by both established and younger scholars. Considers the form, sequence, content, literary context, editing and printing of the sonnets. Shows how the sonnets provide a mirror in which cultures can read their own critical biases. Informed by the latest theoretical, cultural and archival work. Trade Review"Of making many reference books about Shakespeare there is no end, and Blackwell, a leader in the field of reference books on literature and other topics, has produced a large and expensive Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets" (Chronique) "This title provides a solid introduction to key concepts and ways of studying the work of an author who whose reputation is so great it is often difficult for readers new to the works to know where to begin.... The quality of all the essays is very high." (Reference Reviews, Issue 4 2008) "Michael Schoenfeldt's compilation of twenty-five critical essays takes into account the most important issues concerning Shakespeare's sonnets: historical, interpretive, biographical, and editorial ... Several familiar themes in Sonnet criticism get fresh readings here … it is obviously impossible to do justice here to all of the essays ... it is a valuable [guide] to the current state of criticism and scholarship." (Renaissance Quarterly) "This is generally an excellently structured collection of essays." (Notes and Queries)Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors viii Acknowledgments xii Introduction 1 Part I Sonnet Form and Sonnet Sequence 13 1 The Value of the Sonnets 15 Stephen Booth 2 Formal Pleasure in the Sonnets 27 Helen Vendler 3 The Incomplete Narrative of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 45 James Schiffer 4 Revolution in Shake-speares Sonnets 57 Margreta de Grazia Copyrighted Material Part II Shakespeare and His Predecessors 71 5 The Refusal to be Judged in Petrarch and Shakespeare 73 Richard Strier 6 “Dressing old words new”? Re-evaluating the “Delian Structure” 90 Heather Dubrow 7 Confounded by Winter: Speeding Time in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 104 Dympna Callaghan Part III Editorial Theory and Biographical Inquiry: Editing the Sonnets 119 8 Shake-speares Sonnets, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Shakespearean Biography 121 Richard Dutton 9 Mr. Who He? 137 Stephen Orgel 10 Editing the Sonnets 145 Colin Burrow 11 William Empson and the Sonnets 163 Lars Engle Part IV The Sonnets in Manuscript and Print 183 12 Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Manuscript Circulation of Texts in Early Modern England 185 Arthur F. Marotti 13 The Sonnets and Book History 204 Marcy L. North Part V Models of Desire in the Sonnets 223 14 Shakespeare’s Love Objects 225 Douglas Trevor 15 Tender Distance: Latinity and Desire in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 242 Bradin Cormack 16 Fickle Glass 261 Rayna Kalas 17 “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame”: Mapping the “Emotional Regime” of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 277 Jyotsna G. Singh Part VI Ideas of Darkness in the Sonnets 291 18 Rethinking Shakespeare’s Dark Lady 293 Ilona Bell 19 Flesh Colors and Shakespeare’s Sonnets 314 Elizabeth D. Harvey Part VII Memory and Repetition in the Sonnets 329 20 Voicing the Young Man: Memory, Forgetting, and Subjectivity in the Procreation Sonnets 331 Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. 21 “Full character’d”: Competing Forms of Memory in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 343 Amanda Watson Part VIII The Sonnets in/and the Plays 361 22 Halting Sonnets: Poetry and Theater in Much Ado About Nothing 363 Patrick Cheney 23 Personal Identity and Vicarious Experience in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 383 William Flesch Part IX The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 403 Margaret Healy 25 The Enigma of A Lover’s Complaint 426 Catherine Bates Appendix: The 1609 Text of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 441 Index 502

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Book SynopsisThis special issue interrogates the plantation as a form, logic, and technology that continues to produce inequalities. Attending to the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, contributors follow the evolution of plantation slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through its subsequent iterations in the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and into the neoliberal present, where the carceral state props up fantasies of postracialism. The contributors rethink the necro- and biopolitics of plantation slavery, uncovering laborers' strategies of self-determination, affiliation, and communication in spite of the plantation's mechanisms of control. Essay topics include the circulation of a weekly newspaper published by black tenant farmers in the 1920s, a nineteenth-century trial of an enslaved woman, and the fetish-making of Haitian revolutionary François Makandal. Reconsidering the time and space of the plantation, contributors analyze Western processes of racialization a

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Book SynopsisWitty, bawdy, and vicious, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded pits the coarse rural masses against the refined urban population. In Volume One, al-Shirbini describes the three rural typespeasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural dervishoffering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with digressions into love, food, and flatulence. Volume Two of Brains Confounded is followed by Risible Rhymes, a concise text that includes a comic disquisition on rural verse, mocking the pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside. Risible Rhymes alTrade Review"Lucid and imaginative...the translation is thankfully reliable and delightfully readable...a remarkable achievement in many ways." -- Li Guo * Journal of the American Oriental Society *"Paints a sharp portrait of Egyptian villagers. . . . This book has long had its passionate Egyptian adherents: both for its bawdy depictions of village life and for its language, which moves deftly between colloquial and 'high' classical expressions." * Middle East Eye *

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Book SynopsisWitty, bawdy, and vicious, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded pits the coarse rural masses against the refined urban population. In Volume One, al-Shirbini describes the three rural typespeasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural dervishoffering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with digressions into love, food, and flatulence. Volume Two of Brains Confounded is followed by Risible Rhymes, a concise text that includes a comic disquisition on rural verse, mocking the pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside. Risible Rhymes alTrade Review"Lucid and imaginative...the translation is thankfully reliable and delightfully readable...a remarkable achievement in many ways." -- Li Guo * Journal of the American Oriental Society *"Paints a sharp portrait of Egyptian villagers. . . . This book has long had its passionate Egyptian adherents: both for its bawdy depictions of village life and for its language, which moves deftly between colloquial and 'high' classical expressions." * Middle East Eye *

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Book SynopsisWitty, bawdy, and vicious, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded pits the coarse rural masses against the refined urban population. In Volume One, al-Shirbini describes the three rural typespeasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural dervishoffering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with digressions into love, food, and flatulence. Volume Two of Brains Confounded is followed by Risible Rhymes, a concise text that includes a comic disquisition on rural verse, mocking the pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside. Risible Rhymes alTrade Review"Lucid and imaginative...the translation is thankfully reliable and delightfully readable...a remarkable achievement in many ways." -- Li Guo * Journal of the American Oriental Society *"Paints a sharp portrait of Egyptian villagers. . . . This book has long had its passionate Egyptian adherents: both for its bawdy depictions of village life and for its language, which moves deftly between colloquial and 'high' classical expressions." * Middle East Eye *

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Book SynopsisSatirical verse on society and its hypocrisiesA master of satire known for his ribald humor, self-deprecation, and invective verse (hija?), the poet ?medan al-Shwe?ir was an acerbic critic of his society and its morals. Living in the Najd region of the Arabian Peninsula, ?medan wrote in an idiom widely referred to as Naba?i, here a mix of Najdi vernacular and archaic vocabulary and images dating to the origins of Arabic poetry. In Arabian Satire, ?medan is mostly concerned with worldly matters and addresses these in different guises: as the patriarch at the helm of the family boat and its unruly crew; as a picaresque anti-hero who revels in taking potshots at the established order, its hypocrisy, and its failings; as a peasant who labors over his palm trees, often to no avail and with no guarantee of success; and as a poet recording in verse how he thinks things ought to be.The poems in Arabian Satire reveal a plucky, headstrong, yet intenselyTrade ReviewColorful contrasts abound. . . . Quite entertaining. * The Complete Review *[Ḥmēdān's] gift for the memorable turn of phrase has ensured that his poetry has never been forgotten… A handsomely produced volume of 'melodic verses that swell and roll / like roaring waves on a pitch-black sea.' * IASA Bulletin *

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Book SynopsisWitty, bawdy, and vicious, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded pits the coarse rural masses against the refined urban population. In Volume One, al-Shirbini describes the three rural typespeasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural dervishoffering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with digressions into love, food, and flatulence. Volume Two of Brains Confounded is followed by Risible Rhymes, a concise text that includes a comic disquisition on rural verse, mocking the pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside. Risible Rhymes alTrade Review"Lucid and imaginative...the translation is thankfully reliable and delightfully readable...a remarkable achievement in many ways." -- Li Guo * Journal of the American Oriental Society *"Paints a sharp portrait of Egyptian villagers. . . . This book has long had its passionate Egyptian adherents: both for its bawdy depictions of village life and for its language, which moves deftly between colloquial and 'high' classical expressions." * Middle East Eye *

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Book SynopsisSamson’s Cords examines the radically different responses of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Samuel Butler to the existential crises caused by an explosion of loyalty oaths in Britain before and after 1660.Trade Review"Samson’s Cords is a sophisticated, learned, and thoughtful book based on wide reading and deep thinking." -- Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex * Modern Philology *"Garganigo’s work certainly increases our understanding of the literature of Milton, Marvell, and Butler, and for those who specialize in their study, Samson’s Cords is well worth a read." -- Jonathan Michael Gray * Renaissance Quarterly *"The dialogic nature of Samson’s Cords will make it the go-to book for people interested in any and all issues surrounding the oath: perjury, censorship, cursing, equivocation, casuistry, office, loyalty, promise, and ethics. There is much here as well for early modernists working on Butler, Marvell, and Milton, as Garganigo provides new, innovative, and restorative readings of all three, reminding readers how important literary poetics continues to be within the ethically focused historical scholarship of the last several years." -- Megan Matchinske, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill * University of Toronto Quarterly: Letters in Canada 2018 *Table of Contents1. Samson’s Cords in Restoration England 2. Conjuring Oaths and Identities in Hudibras 3. Testing the Tests in The Rehearsal Transpros’d 4. An Horatian Oath: the Horatian Ode, Secularism, and Toleration 5. Samson’s Cords: Imposing Oaths in Eikonoklastes and Samson Agonistes 6. Paradise Lost I: God’s Swearing By Himself 7. Paradise Lost II: Of Apples, Oaths, and Women A Proposal for Emending One of Marvell’s Letters

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Book SynopsisPremodern Ecologies explores how places, both local and global, shape scholarship on medieval and Renaissance English literature.Table of ContentsPreface Environmental Reading: Premodern Literature in Its Places Introduction Oecologies: Engaging the World, from Here 1. The Love of Life: Reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Close to Home 2. Backyard 3. Bold Riparian Schemes: Imagining Water and the Hydrosocial Cycle across Time and Space 4. Distemperature in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5. Biodynamic Viticulture, Natural Wine, and the Premodern 6. Sustainability 7. Consuming Debt 8. Failure 9. A Singular World: The Perils and Possibilities of the Bird’s Eye View 10. Liquids and Solids: Indigeneity as Capricious Matter in William Colenso’s Colonial Encounters 11. Ruined Medievalism 12. Tangled History: Nature, Nation, and Canadian Neomedievalism Afterword: Environmentalism, Eco-Cosmopolitanism, and Premodern Thought

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Book SynopsisDrawing on the theories of Kant and Lacan, this book reveals how modernity's characteristic stance produces an infinitely demanding ethics and a traumatic sublime.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Catastrophic Benevolence, Ruinous Immortality: Wollstonecraft’s Shipwreck 2. Prohibiting the Impossible: Godwin and the Formation of the Real 3. After the Covenant: Undead Subjectivity in Wordsworth’s Alpine Sublime 4. Trusting to the Billows: Byron’s Poetics of the Real 5. Tarrying with Disaster: Ethical Destitution in Shelley’s "The Triumph of Life" Coda: Melting the Sublime: Disastrous Objectivity in the Era of Climate Change Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisArms and Letters analyses the unprecedented number of autobiographical accounts written by Spanish soldiers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These first-person retrospective works recount a range of experiences throughout the sprawling domain of the Hispanic monarchy. Reading a selection of autobiographies in contemporary historical context including the coalescing of the first modern armies, which were partially populated by forced recruits and the urban poor Faith S. Harden explains how soldiers adapted the concept of honour and contributed to the burgeoning autobiographical form. Harden argues that Spanish military life writing took two broad forms: the first as a petition, wherein the soldier’s service was presented as a debt of honour, and second, as a series of misadventures, staging honour as a spectacle that captivated an audience. Honour was inevitably gendered and performative, and as such, it functioned as one of the overarching metTrade Review"Harden’s study focuses on specific texts, but her in-depth analysis and conclusions provide new insights into the social, historical, military, religious, cultural, and literary implications of soldier writing in early modern Spain." -- Iana Konstantinova, Southern Virginia University * Journal of Military History *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Arms and Letters 1. Virtue, Honour, and Exemplarity 2. Professional Honour and the Production of Knowledge 3. Spiritual Honour and Religious Authority 4. Playing the Pícaro Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisThe cultural forms often referred to as ‘baroque’ are the most spectacular expressions of early modern Europe’s effort to mediate between knowledge and power at a time when political authority was being centralized, the authority of religion undermined by the division of Christianity, and science and poetry were seen increasingly as rival forms of intellectual authority. Culture and Authority in the Baroque explores the baroque across a wide range of disciplines, from poetics to politics, to the rituals of musical, dramatic, and religious performance.The essays in this collection span what has been called the ‘baroque crescent’ stretching from Spain through Italy to Russia, but they also bring Shakespeare and English cosmological poetry into productive dialogue with continental Europe in the reinterpretation of baroque world-views. The editors, Massimo Ciavolella and Patrick Coleman, along with a group of eminent scholars from across the Table of ContentsIntroduction MASSIMO CIAVOLELLA AND PATRICK COLEMAN Believing and Not Believing': Shakespeare and the Archaeology of Wonder PETER G. PLATT Philosophical Tours of the Universe in British Poetry, 1700-1729, Or, The Soaring Muse LORNA CLYMER Marino and the Meraviglia PAOLO CHERCHI I Would Rather Drown, Than Not Find New Worlds PAOLO FASOLI Truth and Wonder in Naples circa 1640 JON R. SNYDER 'Particolar gusto e diletto alle orecchie': Listening in the Early Seicento ANDREW DELL'ANTONIO From Liturgy to Literature: Prayer and Play in the Early Russian Baroque RONALD VROON Reconciling Divine and Political Authority in Racine's Esther ANN DELEHANTY Apostles and Apostates: The Court of Peter the Great as a Chivalrous Religious Order ERNESTA ZITSER Self-Knowledge and the Advantages of Concealment: Pierre Nicole's 'On Self-Knowledge' JOHN D. LYONS The Baroque Social Bond in the Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz MALINA STEFANOVSKA A Different Kind of Wonder? Women's Writing in Early Modern Spain LISA VOLLENDORF Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThe moralistic tendencies that culminated in the Republic of Virtue can be traced in literature back to the late seventeenth century. In the 1690s two separate and antithetical moralities began to take shape, one erotic and libertine, the other highly moralistic. Both represented a revolt against the formalism of the seventeenth century. The roman érotique was rooted in a hedonistic philosophy whose objective was to enlarge the scope of freedom, translated in sexual terms, while the moralistic literature, also influenced by philosophical hedonism, was sentimental, romantic, and defended the Christian idea of love and marriage. Roberts discards some of the common presuppositions of historical and literary criticism, for example, that the literature of sensibility was the reaction of the bourgeoisie against the degenerate aristocracy, and that the libertine literature was created by and accurately portrayed the aristocracy. Such explanations have never been su

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