Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800 Books

Book SynopsisIt has been said that one of the finest achievements of the Church of England was the maintenance of one well-educated man in every English community. Such a man was Richard Graves. He is best remembered as the author of The Spiritual Quixote, and engaging comic novel written in the mid-eighteenth century. But this life was essentially that of a rural parson. In exploring that life, Clarence Tracy allows us a detailed view of rural English society of the period as well as an appreciation of Graves’s writing.As the second son of a family of landed gentry, Graves was raised with a well-defined sense of his position in society but no income with which to sustain it. He found his place as a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, from which vantage point his future looked bright. But he fell in love with a young woman, Lucy Bartholomew, and secretly married for a few weeks before she before their first child. Marriage was forbidden to fellows of All Souls, and when G

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Book SynopsisEver since the word romantic and its many cognates in European languages began to be used as technical terms towards the end of the eighteenth century, the quest for a satisfactory definition of their meanings has continued unabated. This collection of essays traces the history of the word in the major European languages, showing how romantic and its cognates were first introduced, how their usage spread and their connotations proliferated, and how their present usage became established.This book opens with an introduction by the editor, followed by an essay in which Professor Raymond Immerwaher, Chairman of the Department of German, University of Western Ontario, shows how romantic and its cognates became fashionable in England, France and Germany, and traces the extension of the meanings of these words up to 1790. The story is then taken up in individual essays on the history of the word and its cognates in the major European countries: in Germany, by the editor; in England

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Book SynopsisThis anthology has a double aim: to present a body of poetry, none of it easily available, some of it never before reproduced, and to point up a particular trend, until now nearly lost sight of in the maze of generalizations about eighteenth-century French poetry. This trend, called individualist, in contradistinction to the academic and universalist trends of the century, has been chosen since it is the least known and most original of the three.The individualist poets are avowed moderns, and their attitude toward poetry and their concept of its nature often anticipate attitudes held by our poets of our own time. There has not been available to this point a sufficiently representative body of poems by these poets, a gap that Professors Finch and Joliat have attempts to fill with their anthology.Readers will find the notes to the poems especially useful, since many of them provide out-of-the-way background material and, as well, offer new insights into the poetry of th

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Book SynopsisIt has long been the custom to condemn eighteenth-century French poetry outright as generally unworthy of attention. However, in keeping with a recent change of attitude towards this vast and diverse body of literature, Professor Finch here undertakes to isolate a certain group of poets, belonging to the first half of the century, who may appropriately be called individualistes and who are in various ways characteristic of a definite and important trend of their time. The authors he has chosen were selected from the larger group of individualists because each provides, in addition to his poems, a complete statement of his own conception of poetry and of that conception which is common to the group as a whole. Since the works treated are comparatively unfamiliar the author has considered them from a historical and an analytical as well as a critical point of view. In addition he has devoted three special chapters to a literary historian (Evrard Titon du Tillet) and to three critical the

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Book Synopsis 2018 Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women In the last thirty yearsscholarship has increasingly engaged the topic of women’s alliances in early modern Europe. The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England expands our knowledge of yet another facet of female alliance: the political. Archival discoveries as well as new work on politics and lawhelp shape this work as a timely reevaluation of the nature and extent of women’s political alliances. Grouped into three sections—domestic, court, and kinship alliances—these essays investigate historical documents, drama, and poetry, insisting that female alliances, much like male friendship discourse, had political meaning in early modern England. Offering new perspectives on female authors such as the Cavendish sisters, Anne Clifford, Aemilia Lanyer, and Katherine Philips, as well as on male-authored texts such as Romeo and Juliet,Trade Review"This volume is more than a collection; it is itself a conversation about where early modern feminist scholarship might "go" next. These chapters perform an extraordinary service, each in its own special expertise, embracing dramatic and poetic performance, the sociology of both collective labor and disruptive competition."—Naomi Conn Liebler, Early Modern Women: An Introductory Journal“An excellent exploration of the ways that politics—writ large—resonated and were represented in literary and dramatic productions in early modern England. Together the authors make a compelling case that the political dimensions of women’s alliances are deserving of more scholarly attention, as they figured largely in the intellectual and cultural worlds of the period and as they have been, up to this point, underexplored by scholars.”—Amanda Herbert, assistant director at the Folger Institute and author of Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern BritainTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Editors’ Introduction Part 1. The Politics of Women’s “Domestic” Alliances 1. Distaff Power: Plebeian Female Alliances in Early Modern England Bernard Capp 2. Between Women: Slanderous Speech and Neighborly Bonds in Henry Porter’s The Two Angry Women of Abington Ronda Arab 3. The Political Role of the Gossip in Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women Megan Inbody 4. Virtual and Actual Female Alliance in The Maid’s Tragedy and The Tamer Tamed Niamh J. O’Leary 5. Failed Alliances and Miserable Marriages in Katherine Philips’s Letters Elizabeth Hodgson Part 2. Women’s Alliances and the Politics of the Court 6. Performing Patronage, Crafting Alliances: Ladies’ Lotteries in English Pageantry Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich 7. Tyrants, Love, and Ladies’ Eyes: The Politics of Female-Boy Alliance on the Jacobean Stage Roberta Barker 8. Her Advocate to the Loudest: Arbella Stuart and Female Courtly Alliance in The Winter’s Tale Alicia Tomasian 9. Not Sparing Kings: Aemilia Lanyer and the Religious Politics of Female Alliance Christina Luckyj Part 3. The Politics of Female Kinship 10. Shakespeare Revises Juliet, the Nurse, and Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet Steven Urkowitz 11. Crossing Generations: Female Alliances and Dynastic Power in Anne Clifford’s Great Books of Record Jessica L. Malay 12. Exilic Inspiration and the Captive Life: The Literary / Political Alliances of the Cavendish Sisters Jennifer Higginbotham 13. Afterword Susan Frye and Karen Robertson Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisExamines New World plants - tobacco, amaranth, guaiacum, and the prickly pear cactus - and their associated Native myths as they moved across the Atlantic and into English literature. Edward McLean Test reinstates the contributions of indigenous peoples to European society, charting an alternative cultural history that explores the associations and assemblages of transatlantic multiplicity.Trade Review"Sacred Seeds is engaging, richly informative, and a joy to read."—Anna K. Sagal, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700"Sacred Seeds is an important book that underscores the ways in which global botanical knowledge and management has the power to shape human cultures and interactions for better or for worse. It is a timely topic in a world of border crossings, monoculture, and dwindling biodiversity among native plants."—Nicole A. Jacobs, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment"The breadth of source material that Sacred Seeds addresses makes the work a tremendously useful resource for anyone studying the European representation of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or seeking to more fully understand the transnational contexts influencing early modern English culture."—Andrea Crow, Renaissance Quarterly"A hugely enjoyable, ambitious and readable book."—Michael H Whitworth, Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, Merton College“Edward McLean Test shows how Eurocentrism has impoverished our understanding of the early modern world. . . . Test insists on the contributions of indigenous peoples to European society, showing how their ideas and stories, as well as their plants, changed Europe. He also reveals the power of literature as an agent of historical change.”—Frances E. Dolan, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Davis“We need a global early modern studies, and this book will help us make one. Test’s wide-ranging and erudite study enriches the environmental humanities through its deep familiarity with English, Spanish, and Native American texts and contexts, as well as his shrewd engagement with the theoretical insights of contemporary ecocriticism. . . . Test’s book will take its place as one of the significant works in creating the fully global, multilingual, and multiethnic understanding of early modernity that we need today.”—Steve Mentz, professor of English at St. John’s University in New York CityTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. New Seeds, Strange Countries: Herbals 2. People of the Figs: Travel Writing 3. King Tobacco: A Study in Genre 4. The Holy Wood of America: Guaiac and The Faerie Queene 5. Love Lies Bleeding: Amaranth and The Faerie Queene Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisMillennial Cervantes explores some of the most important recent trends in Cervantes scholarship in the twenty-first century. It brings together leading Cervantes scholars of the United States in order to showcase their cutting-edge work within a cultural studies frame that encompasses everything from ekphrasis to philosophy, from sexuality to Cold War political satire, and from the culinary arts to the digital humanities. Millennial Cervantes is divided into three sets of essaysconceptually organized around thematic and methodological lines that move outward in a series of concentric circles. The first group, focused on the concept of Cervantes in his original contexts, features essays that bring new insights to these texts within the primary context of early modern Iberian culture. The second group, focused on the concept of Cervantes in comparative contexts, features essays that examine Cervantes's works in conjunction with those of the English-speaking world, both seventeenth- andTrade Review"This collection of nine provocative, beautifully elaborated essays explores the impact of Cervantes’s writings in their own time and place, and well beyond."—E. H. Friedman, Choice“As the four hundredth anniversary of Don Quixote was celebrated around the world, the book was proclaimed to be not only one of the most transcendental works of the Western tradition—considered second only to the Bible—but also a global phenomenon, perfectly in keeping with our times. Millennial Cervantes is important as part of that global celebration but also as the due contribution of North American Hispanist scholarship.”—Aurora Hermida-Ruiz, coeditor of Garcilaso Studies: A New TrajectoryTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Bruce R. Burningham Part 1. Cervantes in His Original Contexts 1. From Literary Painting to Marian Iconography: The Cult of Auristela in Cervantes’s Persiles y Sigismunda Mercedes Alcalá Galán 2. “Dios Me Entiende y No Digo Más”: Nominalism, Humanism, and Modernity in Don Quixote Rosilie Hernández 3. Obscene Onomastics and the Sheep-Army Episode of Don Quixote Sherry Velasco Part 2. Cervantes in Comparative Contexts 4. Befriending and Being Friends in Cervantes’s La Galatea (1585) and Sidney’s Arcadia (1593) Marsha S. Collins 5. Cervantine Curiosity and the English Stage Marina S. Brownlee 6. QuixoNation: Unfinished Adaptations of Don Quixote in Cold War U.S. Cinema William P. Childers Part 3. Cervantes in Wider Cultural Contexts 7. Don Quixote and the American Culinary Arts Carolyn A. Nadeau 8. Cervantes, Reality Literacy, and Fundamentalism David Castillo and William Egginton 9. Don Quixote and the Rise of Cyberorality Bruce R. Burningham Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThe Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch (13041374) is best remembered today for vibrant and impassioned love poetry that helped to establish Italian as a literary language. Petrarch inspired later Renaissance writers, who produced an extraordinary body of work regarded today as perhaps the high-water mark of poetic productivity in the European West. These Petrarchan poets were self-consciously aware of themselves as poetsas craftsmen, revisers, and professionals. As William J. Kennedy shows in Petrarchism at Work, this commitment to professionalism and the mastery of poetic craft is essential to understanding Petrarch's legacy.Petrarchism at Work contributes to recent scholarship that explores relationships between poetics and economic history in early-modern European literature. Kennedy traces the development of a Renaissance aesthetics from one based upon Platonic intuition and visionary furor to one grounded in Aristotelian craftsmanship and techniqueTrade ReviewKennedy's command of the source materials and close readings of poetic variants are exceptional. With Petrarchism at Work he has written another authoritative and original study of Petrarch's legacy that will greatly impact theeld. * Renaissance Quarterly *Invites debate, reflection, and further contributions on a widening variety of textual corpora. This fine book has much to recommend it, especially to English-language students of Renaissance literature and history who seek to weigh the importance of one of Renaissance Europe's principal literary idioms as its distinctive forms appear in a representative variety of national contexts. * Renaissance and Reformation *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Marketplace of Mercury Part One: Petrarch and Italian Poetry1. Petrarch as Homo Economicus 2. Making Petrarch Matter: The Parts and Labor of Textual Revision 3. Jeweler's Daughter Sings for Doge: Gaspara Stampa’s Entrepreneurial Poetics 4. Incommensurate Gifts: Michelangelo and the Economy of Revision Part Two: Pierre De Ronsard and Pléiade Aesthetics1. Polished to Perfection: Ronsard’s Investment in Les Amours 2. Ronsard Furieux: Interest in Ariosto 3. Passions and Privations: Writing Sonnets like a Pro in Les Amours de Marie4. The Smirched Muse: Commercializing Sonnets pour Hélène Part Three: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Economy of Petrarchan Aesthetics1. To Possess Is Not to Own: The Cost of the Dark Lady and the Young Man 2. Polish and Skill: Will’s Interest and Self-Interest in Sonnets 61–99 3. Owning Up to Furor: The "Poets’ War" and Its Aftermath in Sonnets 100–1264. Shakespeare as Professional: The Economy of Revision in Sonnets 1–60 Conclusion: Mercurial Economies

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Book SynopsisThe Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has often been called a decisive turning point in human history. It represents, for good or ill, the birth of modern science and modern ways of viewing the world. In What Galileo Saw, Lawrence Lipking offers a new perspective on how to understand what happened then, arguing that artistic imagination and creativity as much as rational thought played a critical role in creating new visions of science and in shaping stories about eye-opening discoveries in cosmology, natural history, engineering, and the life sciences.When Galileo saw the face of the Moon and the moons of Jupiter, Lipking writes, he had to picture a cosmos that could account for them. Kepler thought his geometry could open a window into the mind of God. Francis Bacon''s natural history envisioned an order of things that would replace the illusions of language with solid evidence and transform notions of life and death. Descartes designed a hypothetical Book ofTrade ReviewThe ten amusing and witty essays in What Galileo Saw, which are loosely connected and can be read independently, stem from the premise that if Christian time 'began with the Nativity of Christ, then another age, the dawn of modern times, began when Galileo looked through his spyglass' (p. 3). Lawrence Lipking deals with the cultural impact of the Scientific Revolution and does not claim to explain its genesis beyond recognizing three basic versions of the story. -- William R. Shea * Isis *While tensions between religion and science and arguments about the loss of meaning in the world were obvious as early as the 1600s and continue today (witness modern scientists such as Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot and Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow attempting to dispel this perception), Lipking supports his thesis admirably by blending literary analysis of period texts with the philosophers' own writings. He demonstrates that there was no clean line of progress and that the world was never turned fully mechanistic by any of these great scientists. VERDICT Substantial and erudite, this title will appeal to scholarly readers studying the philosophy and history of science. -- Evan M. Anderson * Library Journal *Eighteenth-century literary studies have always been interdisciplinary; understanding Pope and Swift entails understanding garden history and developments in astronomy. Distinguished historian of literary and art theory and of the novel, Lipking (emer.Northwestern) has done enough homework to write a book about the scientific revolution that passes muster with such discerning of historians of science as Peter Dear. The book is not, as it first seems, a connected account of the role of visual imaging in science; rather, Lipking offers a series of meditations on individual figures from Galileo and Kepler to Hooke and Newton.... Lipking's audience is not historians of science but students of literature and even, given his admirable clarity, general readers, for whom he has provided a thoroughly accessible intellectual feast. -- D.L. Patey * Choice *Table of Contents1. Introducing a Revolution2. What Galileo Saw: Two Fables of Sound and Seeing3. Kepler's Progress: Imagining the Future4. The Poetry of the World: A Natural History of Poetics5. "Look There, Look There!" Imagining Life in King Lear6. The Dream of Descartes: The Book of Nature and the Infinite I AM7. A History of Error: Robert Fludd, Thomas Browne, and the Harrow of Truth8. The Century of Genius (1): Measuring Up9. The Century of Genius (2): Hooke, Newton, and the System of the World10. Revolution and Its Discontents: The Skeptical ChallengeAppendix 1. Galileo: The Fable of SoundAppendix 2. Descartes's Three DreamsNotes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions.Tang highlights the various modes in which literary textssome highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, LohensTrade ReviewAdding to the growing body of work on law and literature, Tang (German, Univ. of California, Berkeley) offers a solid overview of the emergence and evolution of international law, and he argues plausibly that, lacking a supranational enforcement mechanism, international law depended on the poetic imagination to create an idea of world order. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction International Law Literary Approaches to International World Order A Dual History of International Law and European Literature 1. The Old World Order Dissolving Universal Laws in Flux: (Neoscholastic Jurisprudence) Cosmic Order Disturbed: (Camões's Os Lusíadas, Reason of State) The Beginnings of Public International Law: (Gentili, Suárez, Grotius) 2. The Poetics of International Legal Order Treaty and Allegory in the Renaissance The Founding Narratives of International Legal Personality: (Grotius, Hobbes, Leibniz) The Founding Narratives of International Society: (Grotius, Leibniz) Spectacles of International Order The Drama of International Society 3. International Order as Tragedy The Renaissance of Tragedy and the Problem of International Order The Sovereign Will and the Tragic Form: (Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Shakespeare's King John) A Tragicomic Intermezzo: The Shapes of World Order in Shakespeare's Romances The Tragedy of Reason of State: (Lohenstein) The Tragedy of Marriage Alliance: (Corneille) International Order Through Tragic Experience 4. International Order as Romance The Romance Form and World Order: (The Greek Romance, Barclay's Argenis) The Crisis of Political Romance in the Mid-Seventeenth Century: (Herbert) The Apotheosis and Extinction of Political Romance: (Anton Ulrich, Leibniz) 5. The Divergence Between International Law and Literature around 1700 The Depersonalization of the State: (Gryphius, Milton) The Birth of the Private Individual: (Milton, Racine) International Law as a Field of Expert Knowledge Literature and the Private Individual 6. The Novel and International Order in the Eighteenth Century The Fictional Construction of Society: Ius Naturae et Gentium The Fictional Construction of Society: Poetics of the Novel Transnational Commercial World Order: (Defoe) Sentimental World Order: (Gellert, Sterne) Cosmopolitan World Order: (Wieland, Goethe, Kant) Epilogue Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisEchoes of Desire variously invokes and interrogates a number of historicist and feminist premises about Tudor and Stuart literature by examining the connections between the anti-Petrarchan tradition and mainstream Petrarchan poetry. It also addresses some of the broader implications of contemporary critical methodologies. Heather Dubrow offers an alternative to the two predominant models used in previous treatments of Petrarchism: the all-powerful poet and silenced mistress on the one hand and the poet as subservient patron on the other.Trade ReviewDubrow’s attempt to renegotiate a definition of Petrarchism and its counterdiscourses ultimately succeeds because she insists on the value of traditional literary formalism, including attention to epigram and the treatment of literary genres as ‘metaphors for perspectives and attitudes. Her sensitive and nuanced close readings of verse reveal quite specifically how diacritical desire functions within these poems and how these poems, in turn, participate in a critical dialogue. This thoughtful and thought- provoking book deserves our attention. -- Jeffrey N. Nelson * Sixteenth Century Journal *This book is packed with research and revelations about the Renaissance lyric tradition, set forth in a consummate critical style. * Clio *

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Book SynopsisJoel B. Lande's Persistence of Folly challenges the accepted account of the origins of German theater by focusing on the misunderstood figure of the fool, whose spontaneous and impish jest captivated audiences, critics, and playwrights from the late sixteenth through the early nineteenth century. Lande radically expands the scope of literary historical inquiry, showing that the fool was not a distraction from attempts to establish a serious dramatic tradition in the German language. Instead, the fool was both a fixture on the stage and a nearly ubiquitous theme in an array of literary critical, governmental, moral-philosophical, and medical discourses, figuring centrally in broad-based efforts to assign laughter a proper time, place, and proportion in society.Persistence of Folly reveals the fool as a cornerstone of the dynamic process that culminated in the works of Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist. By reorienting the history of German theater, Lande's work conclusiTrade ReviewIn Persistence of Folly, Lande... provides a well-researched study of the fool in German literature from the time of the English comedians to the great Faust dramas and Heinrich von Kleist's Broken Jug.... This is a valuable resource on a significant topic. * Choice *It is the mark of a good teacher to present new knowledge in a way that inspires students to do their own thinking. Lande's book is an excellent seminar room—or traveling stage—for this kind of learning. Fittingly, he directs the fool to do this maieutic work, and the result is both entertaining and edifying * Goethe Yearbook *Persistence of Folly shows Lande's skill in implementing a large amount of historical and theoretical research to produce fascinating contributions to the way we read these plays. The book takes the reader on a journey along the fool's trajectory with carefully chosen examples that render his conclusions convincing and insightful, and pro- vides indispensable insights for any Goethe or Kleist scholar, or for those interested in German literary history in general. * European Romanitc Review *More than a literary history of German comedy or a study of the figure of the fool in dramatic texts, the analyses carried out in The Persistence of Folly exemplify and point to key methodological and theoretical reorientations of broader relevance * Modern Language Review *Photographic Literacy certainly offers a new way to think about the relationship between text and image in Russian modern culture. For this reason, it will doubtless be valuable not only to literary scholars and historians of photography, but also specialists in Russian cultural, social and intellectual history. * Europe-Asia Studies *Lande's book is a complex and interesting investigation into the role of the comic in the development of German theatre from its popular origins in the 17th century to its 'classical' phase around 1800 * Monatshefte *Lande's Persistence of Folly is one of the best works on German comedies in the Anglophone world in recent decades. It is an essential read for anyone interested in comedy studies and German literary history, and will appeal to scholars interested in form and genre theory as much as to scholars interested theories of performance * Athenäum: Jahrbuch der Friedrich Schlegel-Gesellschaft *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part I The Fool at Play: Comic Practice and the Strolling Players 1. Birth of a Comic Form 2. Strolling Players and the Advent of the Fool 3. Practice of Stage Interaction 4. The Fool's Space and Time Part II Fabricating Comedy and the Fate of the Foolin the Age of Reform 5. Making Comedy Whole 6. Biases in Precedent 7. Sanitation and Unity 8. Comedic Plot, Comic Time, Dramatic Time Part III Life, Theater, and the Restoration of the Fool 9. Policey and the Legitimacy of Delight 10. The Place of Laughter in Life 11. National Literature I: Improvement 12. National Literature II: Custom Part IV The Vitality of Folly in Goethe's Faustand Kleist's Jug 13. Faust I: Setting the Stage 14. Faust II: Mirroring and Framing in the Form of Faust 15. Faust III: The Diabolical Comic 16. Antinomies of the Classical: On Kleist's Broken Jug Postlude Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTimothy J. Reiss perceives a new mode of discourse emerging in early seventeenth-century Europe; he believes that this form of thought, still our own, may itself soon be giving way. In The Discourse of Modernism, Reiss sets up a theoretical model to describe the process by which one dominant class of discourse is replaced by another. He seeks to demonstrate that each new mode does not constitute a radical break from the past but in fact develops directly from its predecessor.Trade ReviewThis is a difficult book which makes an interesting contribution to the history of ideas. It should be valued by those whose special field is seventeenth- or eighteenth- century literature and rhetoric, as well as by scholars of epistemology of aesthetic theory. Timothy J. Reiss is an erudite and provocative scholar. -- Kirsty Cochrane * Review of English Studies *

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Book SynopsisIn a book that draws attention to some of our most familiar and unquestioned habits of thoughtfrom framing to perspective to reflectionRayna Kalas suggests that metaphors of the poetic imagination were once distinctly material and technical in character. Kalas explores the visual culture of the English Renaissance by way of the poetic image, showing that English writers avoided charges of idolatry and fancy through conceits that were visual, but not pictorial. Frames, mirrors, and windows have been pervasive and enduring metaphors for texts from classical antiquity to modernity; as a result, those metaphors seem universally to emphasize the mimetic function of language, dividing reality from the text that represents it. This book dissociates those metaphors from their earlier and later formulations in order to demonstrate that figurative language was material in translating signs and images out of a sacred and iconic context and into an aesthetic and representational one. ReaTrade ReviewIn Frame, Glass, Verse, Rayna Kalas shows the way the mindset worked when poesis was still the same as techne. In the figurative language and its subtle complexity and multiple meanings of Renaissance literature, she finds the conceptual frame, the reflective mirror or 'perspective glass,' the power of prosody and what Coleridge was to call 'the esemplastic power of the imagination.'... The result is nothing less than a new window opening on Renaissance literature. We see through this 'magic casement,' as Keats put it, the way those texts were first intended to be seen, not distorted by our more modern ways of thought or ideas about the nature and use of literature which was constructed and intended as a 'through-shine' communication but created by minds rather unlike our twenty-first century ones. * Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance *A welcome and persuasive book, not only for Renaissance scholars but for all readers of poetry and poetics. * Renaissance Quarterly *Probably the most exciting insight Kalas makes is that to frame meant, in essence, to make rather than to delineate, and that a revision in our understanding of the term necessitates a reconsideration of poetic making: words were understood as material and temporal matter, as distinguished from divine essence.... Overall this is an innovative, wide-ranging and provocative book. * Comitatus *Kalas is finely tuned to the work that words do. Throughout the book, Kalas unpacks poetic conceits, spins out elaborate etymologies, and follows Raymond Williams and Reinhart Koselleck in considering the ways in which key words can teach us about social and conceptual structures.... Frame, Glass, Verse will appeal to more than editors and critics: a contribution to the history of optics and philosophy as well as literature, this lucid and wide-ranging book has much to teach scholars who are interested in all aspects of Renaissance word and worldmaking. * Shakespeare Studies *This intelligent and subtle book joins a growing body of work that reinterprets Renaissance culture in light of the material conditions of lived experience.... Like a good steel glass, [this book] reflects an abundance of hard work and exquisite craftsmanship. * Modern Philology *

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Book SynopsisDuring the tumultuous years of the English Revolution and Restoration, national crises like civil wars and the execution of the king convinced Englishmen that the end of the world was not only inevitable but imminent. National Reckonings shows how this widespread eschatological expectation shaped nationalist thinking in the seventeenth century. Imagining what Christ''s return would mean for England''s body politic, a wide range of poets, philosophers, and other writersincluding Milton, Hobbes, Winstanley, and Thomas and Henry Vaughan,used anticipation of the Last Judgment to both disrupt existing ideas of the nation and generate new ones. Ryan Hackenbracht contends that nationalism, consequently, was not merely a horizontal relationship between citizens and their sovereign but a vertical one that pitted the nation against the shortly expected kingdom of God. The Last Judgment was the site at which these two imagined communities, England and ecclesia (the universal churTrade ReviewNational Reckonings is a valuable addition to scholarship on the early-modern understanding of Judgment Day... Hackenbracht's scholarship is solid and needs to be considered and discussed. * Choice *National Reckonings succeeds in detailing the religious texture of early modern nationalism by offering a rich early modern social horizon, one in which ecclesia and the faithful remnant hold power alongside (often beyond) the emerging nation-state... National Reckonings will certainly appeal to Miltonists and scholars of the English revolution looking for a sophisticated yet lucid explication of the biblical roots of early modern political thought. * Renaissance Quarterly *National Reckonings offers a short, lucid, and provocative rereading of some key (and some unjustly neglected) texts of the tumultuous mid-seventeenth-century England. Hackenbracht's prose moves the reader easily and clearly among languages, authors, and genres. His command of Greek and Latin is impressive (he does his own translations of texts in both languages) and he renders the often-obscure prose of writers like Thomas Vaughan and Abiezer Coppe easily accessible in his paraphrases. This [is an] intriguing, thoughtful, and well-written book. * Milton Quarterly *With fresh readings of canonical figures such as Milton and Hobbes, as well as lesser-known religious and literary figures, National Reckonings provides a helpful resource for scholars of early modern religious and political thought. * Sixteenth Century Journal *

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Book SynopsisFrom Gerald Ford''s preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump''s claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary understandings of pardoning to tragicomic theaters of pardoning in the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and legislative vision of sovereignty.Meyler shows that on the English stage, individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of revolution, from Shakespeare''s Measure for Measure, where a series of final pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycleTrade ReviewA valuable contribution to Law and Humanities scholarship and reflection on the future of liberal constitutionalism, Meyler's book cuts to the quick of pardoning practices from seventeenth-century England to contemporary America. Highlighting both the seemingly irresistible draw of pardoning as a theatrical assertion of sovereign power and the revolutionary opportunities latent in the uncoupling of sovereignty from the figure of the sovereign ruler, Meyler pierces the illusion of absolute authority and sets out an alternative Arendtian vision for the state grounded in forgiveness. * The New Rambler *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Theaters of Pardoning 1. Dramatic Judgments: Measure for Measure, Revenge, and the Institution of the Law 2. Emplotting Politics: James I and the "Powder Treason" 3. Non-Sovereign Forgiveness: Mercy among Equals in The Laws of Candy 4. From Sovereignty to the State: The Tragicomic Clemency of Massinger's The Bondman 5. Between Royal Pardons and Acts of Oblivion: The Transitional Justice of Cosmo Manuche and James Compton, Earl of Northampton 6. Pardoning Revolution: The 1660 Act of Oblivion and Hobbes's Recentering of Sovereignty Postlude: Pardoning and Liberal Constitutionalism Appendix A Appendix B Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisWhat is revenge, and what purpose does it serve? On the early modern English stage, depictions of violence and carnagethe duel between Hamlet and Laertes that leaves nearly everyone dead or the ghastly meal of human remains served at the end of Titus Andronicusemphasize arresting acts of revenge that upset the social order. Yet the subsequent critical focus on a narrow selection of often bloody revenge plays has overshadowed subtler and less spectacular modes of vengeance present in early modern culture.In Civil Vengeance, Emily L. King offers a new way of understanding early modern revenge in relation to civility and community. Rather than relegating vengeance to the social periphery, she uncovers how facets of societychurch, law, and educationrelied on the dynamic of retribution to augment their power such that revenge emerges as an extension of civility. To revise the lineage of revenge literature in early modern England, King rereads familiar revenge tragediTrade ReviewThis is an enjoyably ambitious, sophisticated, and subtle rethinking of the ways in which revenge permeated and preoccupied early modern English culture. * Modern Language Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Note on Citation Introduction: Playing the Long Game 1. Teaching Revenge: Social Aspirations and the Fragmented Subject of Early Modern Conduct Books 2. Feeling Revenge: Emotional Transmission and Contagious Vengeance in Donne's Deaths Duell 3. Fantasizing about Revenge: Vagrancy and the Formation of the Social Body in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI and Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller 4. Commemorating Revenge: Mourning, Memory, and Retributive Alternatives in the English Interregnum Afterword: What Remains of Civil Vengeance? Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn Untold Futures, J. K. Barret locates models for recovering the variety of futures imagined within some of our most foundational literature. These poems, plays, and prose fictions reveal how Renaissance writers embraced uncertain potential to think about their own present moment and their own place in time. The history of the future that Barret reconstructs looks beyond futures implicitly dismissed as impossible or aftertimes defined by inevitability and fixed perspective. Chapters on Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline, and John Milton's Paradise Lost trace instead a persistent interest in an indeterminate, earthly future evident in literary constructions that foreground anticipation and expectation. Barret argues that the temporal perspectives embedded in these literary texts unsettle some of our most familiar points of Trade ReviewUntold Futures offers persuasive close analysis of the literary techniques and devices through which Barret suggests these writers were constantly 'capturing, pacing, arranging and reimagining linear time'.... [T]he future is destabilized, overdetermined, and ultimately, 'reliably, even permanently, ephemeral' in Untold Futures. This book succeeds in making us question not only the fixity of future times, but the very terms we use to describe this period in history itself. * Renaissance Quarterly *A smart and daring work of scholarship that speaks to some of the most pressing issues in the study of sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature today. Barret's argument ties together a novel critique of periodization with a sophisticated recuperation of the aesthetic, and her style of argumentation realizes an alternative critical model to the historicism that has long held sway over the field. Untold Futures should be read by anybody for whom the 'literary' in literary history still makes a difference, and should be required to be read by everybody for whom it does not. * Shakespeare Quarterly *Thought-provoking, insightful, and carefully crafted.... At the heart of Untold Futures, then, is a challenge to familiar teleologies. Calvinist election, secularist science, the humanist recovery of antiquity: all are in play as these authors pose alternative conceptions of future time, but none of these developments explains early modern temporal consciousness as these literary works envision it. Barret instead credits literature itself for constructing new modes of temporality. * Journal of British History *One of the many things that makes this book impressive is the fact that Barret is not just a skilled intellectual and literary historian, but also an expert close-reader. She manages to weave big ideas through the complex particularities of literary language without losing any of the latter's nuance or energy. * Studies in English Literature *Barret's way of thinking and challenging the habitual perceptions of time are groundbreaking. * The Sixteenth Century Journal *The book is a shot in the arm for critics wondering about the direction literary scholarship will take in the years and decades to come. Fortunately, Barret makes a strong case that the future is wide open. * Comitatus *A thought-provoking, insightful, and carefully crafted book. * Journal of British Studies *Barret does a fine job articulating technical and historically sited arguments in accessible language, and she avoids contemporary theoretical jargon in favor of broad engagement with a refreshingly diverse range of scholarly approaches. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Promising the Future: The Language of Obligation in Sidney's Old Arcadia 2. The History of the Future: Spenser's The Faerie Queene and the Directions of Time 3. The Fiction of the Future: Dangerous Reading in Titus Andronicus 4. Shakespeare's Second Future: Anticipatory Nostalgia in Cymbeline 5. Imminent Futures: Absent Art and Improvised Rhyme in Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline Afterword: Circles of the Future: Memory or Monument in Paradise Lost

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Book SynopsisUnfelt offers a new account of feeling during the British Enlightenment, finding that the passions and sentiments long considered as preoccupations of the era depend on a potent insensibility, the secret emergence of pronounced emotions that only become apparent with time. Surveying a range of affects including primary sensation, love and self-love, greed, happiness, and patriotic ardor, James Noggle explores literary evocations of imperceptibility and unfeeling that pervade and support the period''s understanding of sensibility.Each of the four sections of Unfelton philosophy, the novel, historiography, and political economycharts the development of these idioms from early in the long eighteenth century to their culmination in the age of sensibility. From Locke to Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney, and from Dudley North to Hume and Adam Smith, Noggle''s exploration of the insensible dramatically expands the scope of affect in the pTrade ReviewNoggle's superlative study traces unfelt tributaries of affect that, though not immediately perceptible, nevertheless flow together into the kinds of sea-changes that we might call identity formation, character development, or, on a much larger scale, social evolution writ large.... Precise, forthright, and circumspect... Unfelt is a book for scholars of the long eighteenth century, and it unquestionably succeeds as such. * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *James Noggle's Unfelt offers both genealogy and endorsement. Unfelt is a densely theorized book. * Modern Language Quarterly *Noggle's account certainly represents one of the most careful dialogues I've seen yet between eighteenth-century literary studies and the broader Spinozist paradigm of affect theory. * Eighteenth-Century Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Unfelt Affect 1. Philosophy: Affective Nonconsciousness 1.1. The Insensible Parts of Locke's Essay 1.2. David Hartley's Ghost Matter 1.3. Vivacity and Insensible Association: Condillac and Hume 1.4. Sentiment and Secret Consciousness: Haywood and Smith 2. Fiction: Unfelt Engagement 2.1. Unfeeling before Sensibility 2.2. External and Invisible 2.3. Insensible against Involuntary in Burney 2.4. Austen as Coda 3. Historiography: Insensible Revolutions 3.1. The Force of the Thing: Unfelt Moeurs in French Historiography 3.2. The Insensible Revolution and Scottish Historiography 3.3. Gibbon in History 3.4. The Embrace of Unfeeling 4. Political Economy: Moving with Money 4.1. Mandeville and the Other Happiness 4.2. Feeling Untaxed 4.3. The Money Flow 4.4. Invisible versus Insensible Epilogue: Insensible Emergence of Ideology

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Book SynopsisKatharine Cleland''s Irregular Unions provides the first sustained literary history of clandestine marriage in early modern England and reveals its controversial nature in the wake of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, which standardized the marriage ritual for the first time. Cleland examines many examples of clandestine marriage across genres. Discussing such classic works as The Faerie Queene, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, she argues that early modern authors used clandestine marriage to explore the intersection between the self and the marriage ritual in post-Reformation England.The ways in which authors grappled with the political and social complexities of clandestine marriage, Cleland finds, suggest that these narratives were far more than interesting plot devices or scandalous stories ripped from the headlines. Instead, after the Reformation, fictions of clandestine marriage allowed early modern authorsTrade ReviewCleland's book represents an important step forward in contextualizing early modern English literature. This book enriches that scholarship by providing a deeper understanding of the many types of marriages portrayed in early modern literature and how they reflect the social anxieties of the period. Clearly written and tightly argued, the book should be of interest to scholars of literature and history. * Renaissance and Reformation *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Making a Clandestine Match in Early Modern English Literature 1. Reforming Clandestine Marriage in Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book I 2. "Wanton Loves and Young Desires": Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Chapman's Continuation 3. Sacred Ceremonies and Private Contracts in Spenser's Epithalamion and Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint 4. "Lorenzo and His Infidel": Elopement and the Cross-Cultural Household in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice 5. "Are You Fast Married?": Elopement and Turning Turk in Shakespeare's Othello Conclusion: Incestuous Clandestine Marriage in John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewNorton's book is to be commended for casting fresh and invigorating light on the living relevance of eighteenth-century intellectual problems to one of the central preoccupations of such modern thinkers as Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Richard Rorty. * Modern Language Review *The Beautiful Soul is an important and fascinating book which traces the rise and fall of what Robert E. Norton takes to be one of the European Enlightenment's most characteristic ideas —that there might be an intrinsic link between ethics and aesthetics, the good and the beautiful, which manifested itself in the concept of the 'beautiful soul.' * International Journal of the Classical Tradition *Norton's book is a fine contribution to scholarship, one that is well worth pondering. * The Journal of English and Germanic Philology *

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Book SynopsisThe Life of Wisdom in Rousseau''s Reveries of the Solitary Walker is the first complete exegesis and interpretation of Rousseau''s final and culminating work, showing its full philosophic and moral teaching. The Reveries has been celebrated as a work of literature that is an acknowledged acme of French prose writing. Thomas L. Pangle argues that this aesthetic appreciation necessitates an in-depth interpretation of the writing''s complex and multileveled intended teaching about the normatively best way of lifeand how essential this is for a work that was initially bewildering.Rousseau stands out among modern political philosophers in that he restored, to political philosophy, what Socrates and his students (from Plato and Xenophon through Aristotle and the Stoics and Cicero) had made centraland that the previous modern, Enlightenment philosophers had eclipsed: the study of the life and soul of the exemplary, independent sage, as possessor of human Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. "First Walk"—Rousseau's Introduction 2. "Second Walk"—Nature, Mortality, God 3. "Third Walk"—A Spiritual-Religious Autobiography 4. "Fourth Walk"—The Virtue of Truthfulness 5. "Fifth Walk"—Happiness 6. "Sixth Walk"—Goodness versus Virtue 7. "Seventh Walk"—Botany as Consuming "Amusement" 8. "8"—Renewed Self-exploration 9. "9" and "10"—The Solitary Walker's "Truly Loving Heart"

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Book SynopsisFor more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India. Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.Trade Review"A work of theory and method, Archaeology of Babel is a very important intervention into a current high-profile discussion of comparative literature. Every chapter of this galvanizing and historically informed book develops new possibilities for the field." -- Lee Morrissey * Clemson University *"Siraj Ahmed launches a powerful critique of the method of comparative philology that has established a hegemony of the printed text, thereby impeding our ability to conceptualize collective life. A reasoned but passionate plea for reading anti-philologically, this impressive book is sure to provoke much discussion." -- Partha Chatterjee * Columbia University *"An important, scintillating study that deserves a wide interdisciplinary readership, Archaeology of Babel reappraises the historical roots of philology and encourages readers to re-imagine our present." -- Talal Asad, The Graduate Center * CUNY *"According to Siraj Ahmed's revelatory Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities, modern philology is at once a tool and a product of colonial domination....This is an ambitious, significant, and potentially incendiary book that reconceptualizes humanistic inquiry tout court." -- Jayne Lewis * Studies in English Literature *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Colonial History of Comparative Method chapter abstractThis chapter reconsiders Edward Said's call for a return to philology, the consequence of his career-long engagement with Erich Auerbach's work. It argues that Said and Auerbach privileged the new philology because they ignored its colonial matrix. On one hand, the new philology annulled the dream of recovering the divine language spoken before destruction of the Tower of Babel and preserved this dream in a higher form. The new philology was the science that would make sense of everything human, turning linguistic confusion into total knowledge—hence its attraction to Said, Auerbach, and countless other comparatists. But the new philology's original utility lay in its capacity to reconstruct South Asia's otherwise incommensurable legal and literary traditions and to make them legitimize colonial rule. This chapter places colonial philology at the origins of comparatism and "World Literature": both their materials and their need to be understood as colonial legacies. 1First Stratum: The Literary. The Persian Imperium and Hafiz, 1771 A.D. – 1390 A.D. chapter abstractThis chapter excavates the colonial roots of comparative (or historical) grammar. East India Company scholars used this nascent discipline to reconstruct the languages and literatures they encountered in South Asia. Historical grammar helped produce the Romantic definition of literature to which we still cling: an aesthetic practice attuned to language's performative (or "literary") power. In fact, only after the advent of colonial rule—as European scholars began to re-interpret non-European verbal art according to this standard—could such a definition of literature appear universally valid. Our concept of literature must be understood, therefore, as the product of colonization. It has globalized new philological values while effacing the antithetical practices that helped constitute precolonial traditions. This chapter focuses on Sir William Jones's A Grammar of the Persian of Language and "A Persian Song of Hafiz," a translation of Hafiz's ghazal "The Shirazi Turk." 2Second Stratum: The Immanent. Sharia and the Muallaqāt, 1782 A.D. – 550 A.D. chapter abstractThis chapter studies the origins of colonial law, which sought to define the immanent traditions of the East India Company's Muslim and Hindu subjects. Its premise was that such traditions could be found only in their canonical texts. The identification of a culture's canonical texts and its immanent principles eventually became as fundamental to the methods of literary history as it was to those of colonial rule. But the identification of authoritative texts and immanent traditions has only served to obscure—indeed turn inside out—their actual relationship. To the extent that sharia had been an immanent tradition, it turned not on the production of authoritative texts but rather on practices that defended communities from the dangers of textual authority. Focusing on William Jones's codification of sharia and his translation of the Muallaqāt, this chapter returns to the discursive practices colonial and postcolonial ideologies of the text have eclipsed. 3Third Stratum: The Originary. The Dharma and Śakuntalā, 1794 A.D. – 1400 B.C. chapter abstractWilliam Jones's Indo-European hypothesis triggered a feverish quest throughout the nineteenth century to reconstruct every language's root words and hence map human development in its historical totality. The humanities are still shaped by the relationship Jones posited between the roots and evolution of languages on one hand and the origins and development of culture on the other. This chapter calls this model into question by studying its colonial history and logic. European philosophers, poets, and philologists identified the dharma texts Jones translated, The Laws of Manu and Śakuntalā, with humanity's original (non-violent or ecological) consciousness. An archaeological approach reveals that these texts were in fact deeply implicated in Indo-European violence: i.e., the burning of the forests, the dispossession and displacement of its inhabitants, and the erasure of their way of life. Ecological sensitivity can belong only to those forms of life that textual culture attempted to destroy. Conclusion: Genealogies of Emergency chapter abstractThis chapter argues that states of emergency, which define global politics now, were prefigured in colonial law and philology. In fact, the rule of law in colonial India devolved almost immediately into emergencies, which the East India Company imposed on native populations at its frontiers. The historical function of colonial law and philology was to circumscribe legal authority within the state. The transfer of such authority from the people to the executive is the very definition of emergency. But far from understanding the disturbing relationship between philology (the methodological foundation of the humanities) and the emergency (the global subversion of democracy taking place all around us today), leading theorists instead consider new philological concepts of language the very antithesis of extralegal sovereignty. To move beyond this methodological impasse, this chapter studies Benjamin's "On the Concept of History," which opposed historical method and emergency powers at the same time.

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Book SynopsisChallenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. Tita Chico shows that early science relied on what she calls literary knowledge to present its experimental findings. More radically, she contends that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, literary knowledge challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.Trade Review"The Experimental Imagination reveals the deep connections between and across the realms of literature and science. Tita Chico shows that literary modes enabled key developments in the new scientific practice, and, reciprocally, that the definition of art itself is based on a profound alliance between aesthetics and experimental philosophy. This is a fertile and important intervention in integrative thinking about the long eighteenth century." -- Laura Brown * Cornell University *"Starting from the elegant assertion that 'science is a literary trope,' Tita Chico offers illuminating, expert readings that fully vindicate her claims to make an original and important contribution to the evolving understanding of British Enlightenment culture." -- Robert DeMaria, Jr. * Vassar College *"Subtle, learned, and inventive at every turn, The Experimental Imagination is essential reading for anyone seeking to rethink the relationship between literature and science in the eighteenth century. The effort to join these histories is one of the great projects of our time. This book is the state of the art." -- Jonathan Kramnick * Yale University *"Tita Chico's The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment does no less than offer a landmark contribution to both literary studies and the history of science and technology....Chico's study offers a timely, relevant, and consistently exciting set of arguments....The Experimental Imagination's theoretical and methodological lenses serve as a call to arms for scholars of these fields to perform more nuanced intersectional work that will productively explore how issues of race, gender, and power amplify, echo, and inform literary-scientific discourse in the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries and beyond." -- Danielle Spratt * Digital Defoe *"Chico sketches out what she calls the "experimental imagination," a mixture of plot forms and rhetorical aesthetics, which underwrites the profound social and cultural transformations of the British Enlightenment. She traces the long, difficult disentanglement of objectivity from poetry and romance—or, really, the construction of objectivity as one creative mode of discourse among others." -- Sean Silver * Los Angeles Review of Books *"[The Experimental Imagination] offers up some rich, highly suggestive texts that confirm the idea that the literary imagination was integral to the development of early science." -- Sharon Ruston * Times Literary Supplement *"The Experimental Imagination constitutes a tremendous addition to scholarship regarding eighteenth-century British literature, science, intellectual history, aesthetics, gender, and Enlightenment as well as the intellectual functions of literature more generally. It usefully extends the archive of what constitutes and concerns scientific writing in the period."––J. Ereck Jarvis, Review of English Studies"Chico powerfully models how literary texts are central to understanding the history of science despite the field's historical resistance to the literary....[Her] framework of affective epistemology opens new avenues for thinking about the unique role of feeling in histories of science."––Travis Chi Wing Lau, Eighteenth-Century Fiction"This is an insightful and enviably disciplined book about a predisciplinary moment." -- Jayne Lewis * Studies in English Literature *"Tita Chico's learned and eloquent book leverages the superior status of literature over science in the Enlightenment by thinking about how literature made natural philosophical knowledge itself possible....Chico's deft recognition of the period's capacious understanding of something like literariness transforms what we think we know about literature and science." -- Richard C. Sha * Eighteenth-Century Studies *"The Experimental Imagination envisions an exciting way forward for literature scholars interested in the history and future of knowledge production....Chico's book is extraordinary, and not to be missed by anyone interested in early modern and Enlightenment literature, history, and natural philosophy." -- Aaron R. Hanlon * Genre *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis introduction challenges the "two cultures" debate about disciplinarity. Critical studies of literature and science have not presented a satisfactory understanding of the two domains' comingling and reciprocity. Early science formulated itself through literary knowledge: natural philosophers relied on literariness not only to present experimental findings but also to imagine the practice of science. The multiplicity and diversity of allusions to science in the long eighteenth-century literary archive reflect an understanding of literary knowledge as epistemologically superior. Natural philosophical practice requires yet obscures the imaginative practice; literary knowledge embraces this impulse as a way of understanding the world at large. The experimental imagination encapsulates the process and effects of literary knowledge as an epistemology. The keywords literary knowledge, science, trope, and gender reveal core concepts that enable myriad writers to posit alternative models of experience, authority, and evidence. 1"Literary Knowledge" chapter abstractNatural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of science as a trope finds support in reflections on language as a scientific tool by Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and other natural philosophers. The two dominant technologies of the experimental imagination are the observed particular and the modest witness. Observed particulars of empirical study are those nuggets of data that disclose themselves and, in their revelation, produce knowledge. The modest witness is the individual who is objective by virtue of erasing himself through his privilege. Tropes are literary tools that not only enable practitioners to describe scientific findings, but also enable an even more fundamental component of experimentalism: literariness makes possible the conceptualization of scientific findings and the individual who produces them. 2"Immodest Witnesses" chapter abstractThe character of the immodest witness embodies the self-interest, sexual desire, and circulation of wealth implicitly bound up with the practice of experimental philosophy. The characterization of Gimcracks in Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso, James Miller's The Humours of Oxford, and Susannah Centlivre's The Basset-Table and coquettes in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator and Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator all represent self-interest. In plays and periodicals, characterization, metaphor, and plot together reveal the logic of self-interest undergirding claims to scientific objectivity. If the ideal natural philosopher removed himself to achieve objectivity, then the Gimcrack and coquette were defined by an inability to overcome prejudice and desires, speaking for themselves rather than for the object. For some, this form of bias leads to self-delusion, eroticism, and social obstruction, but for others, it allows a new form of self-directed agency and social, even moral, improvement. 3"Scientific Seduction" chapter abstractBeginning with Bacon, natural philosophy texts frequently present scientific practice as an erotic quest, establishing a correspondence between sexual seduction and natural philosophical inquiry. Bernard de Fontenelle's and Francesco Algarotti's scientific dialogues, translated by Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Carter, respectively, adopt the literary plot of seduction to explain and promote Cartesianism, Copernicanism, and Newtonianism. Both Behn and Carter embrace the suitability of natural philosophical education for women. For Fontenelle and Algarotti, understanding science necessitates new ways of thinking that are possible only with one's imagination and requires that characters undergo a process of seduction. Learning science is a conversion process, simultaneously rational and affective. Mathematicians, like lovers, are persuasive and persistent, ultimately demanding submission. These scientific dialogues reframe erotic plots to promote intellectual and moral self-improvement, qualities posited as uniquely modern and widely available to the texts' readers. 4"Political Science" chapter abstractLate seventeenth-century natural philosophers inherited the conjunction of politics and science at the core of Francis Bacon's experimental project. Thomas Sprat's The History of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels use the conventions of literary knowledge to express their scientific-political visions, insisting that natural philosophy cannot be understood apart from the political institutions enabling and enabled by its practice and promulgation. These writers use the experimental imagination to envisage, in turn, civil government, absolutist monarchy, and imperialism. Sprat advances scientific triumphalism and a model for schooling gentlemen into civil society. 5"When Science Becomes Literature" chapter abstractThe eighteenth-century aesthetic theories of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson use scientific tropes, consequently revealing the reciprocity of scientific and literary epistemologies. Poets use an expressly aesthetic mode to imagine beyond the limits of experimental knowledge, even though eighteenth-century aesthetics takes shape through unacknowledged appropriation of scientific structures and processes. With this reciprocity obscured, natural philosophy may well disclose sights unseen, but poetry does more. In Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, poems inspired by Queen Caroline's homage to British theological and scientific accomplishments in her Richmond Hermitage, and James Thomson's The Seasons, science becomes literature: aesthetic mediations of natural philosophy draw on but also challenge the intellectual work of science, and mount a case for the epistemological superiority of the literary.

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Book SynopsisFor all that we love and admire Shakespeare, he is not that easy to grasp. He may have written in Elizabethan English, but when we read him, we can't help but understand his words, metaphors, and syntax in relation to our own. Until now, explaining the powers and pleasures of the Bard's language has always meant returning it to its original linguistic and rhetorical contexts. Countless excellent studies situate his unusual gift for words in relation to the resources of the English of his day. They may mention the presumptions of modern readers, but their goal is to correct and invalidate any false impressions. Shakesplish is the first book devoted to our experience as modern readers of Early Modern English. Drawing on translation theory and linguistics, Paula Blank argues that for us, Shakespeare's language is a hybrid English composed of errors in comprehension—and that such errors enable, rather than hinder, some of the pleasures we take in his language. Investigating how and why it strikes us, by turns, as beautiful, funny, sexy, or smart, she shows how, far from being the fossilized remains of an older idiom, Shakespeare's English is also our own.Trade Review"As Paula Blank argues, whether or not we are dipping into a 'No Fear' edition, we are always paraphrasing Shakespeare. Shamelessly fun to read, this original and timely book should have broad appeal." -- Julia Reinhard Lupton * University of California, Irvine *"In her worthy sequel to Broken English, Paula Blank meditates provocatively on the 'friction' induced by our distance from early modern English. Shakesplish confronts and celebrates that distance, giving voice to a past now revived for our era." -- Scott Newstok, Director, Pearce Shakespeare Endowment * Rhodes College *"This beautifully conceived book argues for a new and suggestive way of making Shakespeare our contemporary, at once familiar and exotic. Focusing on Shakespeare's language not as he might have intended it but as we understand it today, Paula Blank shows how what registers to a modern reader as the difficulty or strangeness of Shakespeare actually provokes singularly rich forms of cultural and personal self-discovery." -- Geoffrey Harpham, Kenan Institute for Ethics * Duke University *"We owe Paula Blank much thanks for bequeathing to us a book that I would not hesitate to describe as possessing the same traits she has analyzed for us—a book that is 'beautiful', 'funny', 'smart', and yes, even 'sexy': seductive, that is, in the elegant and articulate way in which it helps reveal to us our innermost desires about what Shakespeare's language should be." -- Iolanda Plescia * Memoria di Shakespeare *"Blank returns the reader to the act of luxuriating in the opulent richness of Shakespeare's language like no other scholar I have ever encountered. Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare's Language will be consulted for decades to come because of its indefatigable energy and exuberate erudition." -- William Reginald Rampone * Sixteenth Century Journal *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1"Shakespeare in Modern English" chapter abstractThis chapter lays the groundwork for approaching Shakespeare's English from the perspective of our own, drawing on translation theory, second-language acquisition theory, and performance studies. It destabilizes the argument over whether Shakespeare should or should not be translated into modern English by posing the theory that Shakespeare's English, in our reception of it, has become an "interlanguage," a uniquely modern hybrid. 2"Beautiful" chapter abstractThis chapter attempts to account for our continuing sense of Shakespeare's language as "beautiful" in an age in which the traditional aesthetic categories of "beautiful" and "sublime" have given way to new categories, such as "cute" or "interesting." Starting from the premise that, when it comes to Shakespeare, we are closer to eighteenth-century critics than twenty-first century ones, this chapter posits that our best chance of determining what it is that makes Shakespeare's language beautiful lies in considering what happens in the moment we make contact with his texts, the moment of our interlinguistic participation. Focusing on our experience of belatedness in relation to Shakespeare's Early Modern diction and syntax, this chapter examines various examples of Shakespeare's beautiful—and not so beautiful—language in order to determine the source of our aesthetic pleasure. 3"Sexy" chapter abstractThis chapter shows that Shakespeare's language is more openly sexual, when it is sexual, than our Modern English expectations have led us to believe. Early Modern English lacked "clinical" terms for male and female sexual organs and for the act of sexual intercourse itself. When Shakespeare uses terms like "sport" or "dally" for sex, he is speaking directly rather than euphemistically. This chapter argues that our interest in Shakespeare's sexual language actually reveals our ambivalence toward his original sexual frankness: We prefer sex in Shakespeare be hidden, so that we can find it out for ourselves. For us, Shakespeare's sexual language is, in itself, a metaphor for our idea of Shakespeare's text as coded, hiding some essential "truth." 4"Funny" chapter abstractThis chapter explores the "funny" and "unfunny" effects of Modern English on Shakespeare's comedy. Situating Shakespeare's jokes within the context of several dominant, enduring theories of humor in the Western tradition—including "superiority" theories, "arousal" or "release" theories, and "incongruity" theories—the chapter explains why and how it is that some of Shakespeare's comedy falls flat to contemporary ears while other instances have become more funny as a result of the gap between our English and Shakespeare's. 5"Smart" chapter abstractThis chapter examines Shakespeare's "intelligence effects," the ways in which his language gives us a sense of depth and acuity. Shakespeare did not use the word "intelligence" in the way that we do: in Early Modern English, the key terms were "wit" and "discourse of reason." Often, modern readers find Shakespeare's characters' "intelligent" because they demonstrate inwardness and self-consciousness; in the process, however, we miss their many failures of logic, which for Shakespeare's audience would have indicated a failure of reason. The chapter further argues that Shakespeare's poetic syntax makes him sound "smarter" to us. 6"Shakespeare as Modern English" chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on Modern English phrases that derive from Shakespeare's Early Modern English, but have been adapted to more recent forms of the vernacular, either in meaning or form. Modern English includes many idioms that originate in Shakespeare, such as "hoist with his own petard," "one fell swoop," and "primrose path." This chapter divides such idioms into three categories: those whose literal meaning is now obscure to us, those that we hear simply as Modern English, and those that sound antiquated and clichéd. Finally, the chapter returns to our modern obsession with identifying idioms as Shakespearean. Cited so often, in so many contexts, over so many centuries, these phrases have become their own particular suborder of language. They are far more ours than his, not Shakespeare but "Shakespeare."

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Book SynopsisChallenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. Tita Chico shows that early science relied on what she calls literary knowledge to present its experimental findings. More radically, she contends that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, literary knowledge challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.Trade Review"The Experimental Imagination reveals the deep connections between and across the realms of literature and science. Tita Chico shows that literary modes enabled key developments in the new scientific practice, and, reciprocally, that the definition of art itself is based on a profound alliance between aesthetics and experimental philosophy. This is a fertile and important intervention in integrative thinking about the long eighteenth century." -- Laura Brown * Cornell University *"Starting from the elegant assertion that 'science is a literary trope,' Tita Chico offers illuminating, expert readings that fully vindicate her claims to make an original and important contribution to the evolving understanding of British Enlightenment culture." -- Robert DeMaria, Jr. * Vassar College *"Subtle, learned, and inventive at every turn, The Experimental Imagination is essential reading for anyone seeking to rethink the relationship between literature and science in the eighteenth century. The effort to join these histories is one of the great projects of our time. This book is the state of the art." -- Jonathan Kramnick * Yale University *"Tita Chico's The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment does no less than offer a landmark contribution to both literary studies and the history of science and technology....Chico's study offers a timely, relevant, and consistently exciting set of arguments....The Experimental Imagination's theoretical and methodological lenses serve as a call to arms for scholars of these fields to perform more nuanced intersectional work that will productively explore how issues of race, gender, and power amplify, echo, and inform literary-scientific discourse in the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries and beyond." -- Danielle Spratt * Digital Defoe *"Chico sketches out what she calls the "experimental imagination," a mixture of plot forms and rhetorical aesthetics, which underwrites the profound social and cultural transformations of the British Enlightenment. She traces the long, difficult disentanglement of objectivity from poetry and romance—or, really, the construction of objectivity as one creative mode of discourse among others." -- Sean Silver * Los Angeles Review of Books *"[The Experimental Imagination] offers up some rich, highly suggestive texts that confirm the idea that the literary imagination was integral to the development of early science." -- Sharon Ruston * Times Literary Supplement *"The Experimental Imagination constitutes a tremendous addition to scholarship regarding eighteenth-century British literature, science, intellectual history, aesthetics, gender, and Enlightenment as well as the intellectual functions of literature more generally. It usefully extends the archive of what constitutes and concerns scientific writing in the period."––J. Ereck Jarvis, Review of English Studies"Chico powerfully models how literary texts are central to understanding the history of science despite the field's historical resistance to the literary....[Her] framework of affective epistemology opens new avenues for thinking about the unique role of feeling in histories of science."––Travis Chi Wing Lau, Eighteenth-Century Fiction"This is an insightful and enviably disciplined book about a predisciplinary moment." -- Jayne Lewis * Studies in English Literature *"Tita Chico's learned and eloquent book leverages the superior status of literature over science in the Enlightenment by thinking about how literature made natural philosophical knowledge itself possible....Chico's deft recognition of the period's capacious understanding of something like literariness transforms what we think we know about literature and science." -- Richard C. Sha * Eighteenth-Century Studies *"The Experimental Imagination envisions an exciting way forward for literature scholars interested in the history and future of knowledge production....Chico's book is extraordinary, and not to be missed by anyone interested in early modern and Enlightenment literature, history, and natural philosophy." -- Aaron R. Hanlon * Genre *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis introduction challenges the "two cultures" debate about disciplinarity. Critical studies of literature and science have not presented a satisfactory understanding of the two domains' comingling and reciprocity. Early science formulated itself through literary knowledge: natural philosophers relied on literariness not only to present experimental findings but also to imagine the practice of science. The multiplicity and diversity of allusions to science in the long eighteenth-century literary archive reflect an understanding of literary knowledge as epistemologically superior. Natural philosophical practice requires yet obscures the imaginative practice; literary knowledge embraces this impulse as a way of understanding the world at large. The experimental imagination encapsulates the process and effects of literary knowledge as an epistemology. The keywords literary knowledge, science, trope, and gender reveal core concepts that enable myriad writers to posit alternative models of experience, authority, and evidence. 1"Literary Knowledge" chapter abstractNatural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of science as a trope finds support in reflections on language as a scientific tool by Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and other natural philosophers. The two dominant technologies of the experimental imagination are the observed particular and the modest witness. Observed particulars of empirical study are those nuggets of data that disclose themselves and, in their revelation, produce knowledge. The modest witness is the individual who is objective by virtue of erasing himself through his privilege. Tropes are literary tools that not only enable practitioners to describe scientific findings, but also enable an even more fundamental component of experimentalism: literariness makes possible the conceptualization of scientific findings and the individual who produces them. 2"Immodest Witnesses" chapter abstractThe character of the immodest witness embodies the self-interest, sexual desire, and circulation of wealth implicitly bound up with the practice of experimental philosophy. The characterization of Gimcracks in Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso, James Miller's The Humours of Oxford, and Susannah Centlivre's The Basset-Table and coquettes in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator and Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator all represent self-interest. In plays and periodicals, characterization, metaphor, and plot together reveal the logic of self-interest undergirding claims to scientific objectivity. If the ideal natural philosopher removed himself to achieve objectivity, then the Gimcrack and coquette were defined by an inability to overcome prejudice and desires, speaking for themselves rather than for the object. For some, this form of bias leads to self-delusion, eroticism, and social obstruction, but for others, it allows a new form of self-directed agency and social, even moral, improvement. 3"Scientific Seduction" chapter abstractBeginning with Bacon, natural philosophy texts frequently present scientific practice as an erotic quest, establishing a correspondence between sexual seduction and natural philosophical inquiry. Bernard de Fontenelle's and Francesco Algarotti's scientific dialogues, translated by Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Carter, respectively, adopt the literary plot of seduction to explain and promote Cartesianism, Copernicanism, and Newtonianism. Both Behn and Carter embrace the suitability of natural philosophical education for women. For Fontenelle and Algarotti, understanding science necessitates new ways of thinking that are possible only with one's imagination and requires that characters undergo a process of seduction. Learning science is a conversion process, simultaneously rational and affective. Mathematicians, like lovers, are persuasive and persistent, ultimately demanding submission. These scientific dialogues reframe erotic plots to promote intellectual and moral self-improvement, qualities posited as uniquely modern and widely available to the texts' readers. 4"Political Science" chapter abstractLate seventeenth-century natural philosophers inherited the conjunction of politics and science at the core of Francis Bacon's experimental project. Thomas Sprat's The History of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels use the conventions of literary knowledge to express their scientific-political visions, insisting that natural philosophy cannot be understood apart from the political institutions enabling and enabled by its practice and promulgation. These writers use the experimental imagination to envisage, in turn, civil government, absolutist monarchy, and imperialism. Sprat advances scientific triumphalism and a model for schooling gentlemen into civil society. 5"When Science Becomes Literature" chapter abstractThe eighteenth-century aesthetic theories of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson use scientific tropes, consequently revealing the reciprocity of scientific and literary epistemologies. Poets use an expressly aesthetic mode to imagine beyond the limits of experimental knowledge, even though eighteenth-century aesthetics takes shape through unacknowledged appropriation of scientific structures and processes. With this reciprocity obscured, natural philosophy may well disclose sights unseen, but poetry does more. In Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, poems inspired by Queen Caroline's homage to British theological and scientific accomplishments in her Richmond Hermitage, and James Thomson's The Seasons, science becomes literature: aesthetic mediations of natural philosophy draw on but also challenge the intellectual work of science, and mount a case for the epistemological superiority of the literary.

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Book SynopsisIn Networking Print in Shakespeare's England, Blaine Greteman uses new analytical tools to examine early English print networks and the systemic changes that reshaped early modern literature, thought, and politics. In early modern England, printed books were a technology that connected people—not only readers and writers, but an increasingly expansive community of printers, publishers, and booksellers—in new ways. By pairing the methods of network analysis with newly available digital archives, Greteman aims to change the way we usually talk about authorship, publication, and print. As Greteman reveals, network analysis of the nearly 500,000 books printed in England before 1800 makes it possible to speak once again of a "print revolution," identifying a sudden tipping point at which the early modern print network became a small world where information could spread in new and powerful ways. Along with providing new insights into canonical literary figures like Milton and Shakespeare, data analysis also uncovers the hidden histories of key figures in this transformation who have been virtually ignored. Both a primer on the power of network analysis and a critical intervention in early modern studies, the book is ultimately an extended meditation on agency and the complexity of action in context. Trade Review"This book offers rigorous scholarship into print culture, while at the same time all the main terms of network theory appear, meticulously documented, clearly explained, and well illustrated by examples. This interweaving is beautifully accomplished, and the result is as delightful to read as it is deeply engaged in all the relevant scholarship."—Laura Mandell, Texas A&M University"This is an important and much-needed work that provides a blueprint for scholars who wish to adopt network analysis for their own research.Greteman persuasively demonstrates how network analysis can make meaningful contributions to well-established humanistic research fields and questions."—Jessica Otis, George Mason University"The book skillfully shows that network analysis can be incorporated into a serious engagement with the particularities of early modern print culture. The central principle of networks is connection, and the connections Greteman makes among fields of study and among the many agents of early modern print culture are a powerful illustration of the utility of this kind of analysis in literary criticism."—John R. Ladd, Modern Language QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Methods and Data 2. A Small New World: Fire, Infection, and Sudden Change in the English Print Network 3. Hubs in the Network: Nicholas Okes and the Making of Infectious Information 4. Radical Betweenness: Eleanor Davies and Mary Cary 5. Weak Ties and the Making of a Strong Poet: John Milton's Early Publishers Epilogue: Future Directions in Networking the Past

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Book SynopsisIn Networking Print in Shakespeare's England, Blaine Greteman uses new analytical tools to examine early English print networks and the systemic changes that reshaped early modern literature, thought, and politics. In early modern England, printed books were a technology that connected people—not only readers and writers, but an increasingly expansive community of printers, publishers, and booksellers—in new ways. By pairing the methods of network analysis with newly available digital archives, Greteman aims to change the way we usually talk about authorship, publication, and print. As Greteman reveals, network analysis of the nearly 500,000 books printed in England before 1800 makes it possible to speak once again of a "print revolution," identifying a sudden tipping point at which the early modern print network became a small world where information could spread in new and powerful ways. Along with providing new insights into canonical literary figures like Milton and Shakespeare, data analysis also uncovers the hidden histories of key figures in this transformation who have been virtually ignored. Both a primer on the power of network analysis and a critical intervention in early modern studies, the book is ultimately an extended meditation on agency and the complexity of action in context. Trade Review"This book offers rigorous scholarship into print culture, while at the same time all the main terms of network theory appear, meticulously documented, clearly explained, and well illustrated by examples. This interweaving is beautifully accomplished, and the result is as delightful to read as it is deeply engaged in all the relevant scholarship."—Laura Mandell, Texas A&M University"This is an important and much-needed work that provides a blueprint for scholars who wish to adopt network analysis for their own research.Greteman persuasively demonstrates how network analysis can make meaningful contributions to well-established humanistic research fields and questions."—Jessica Otis, George Mason University"The book skillfully shows that network analysis can be incorporated into a serious engagement with the particularities of early modern print culture. The central principle of networks is connection, and the connections Greteman makes among fields of study and among the many agents of early modern print culture are a powerful illustration of the utility of this kind of analysis in literary criticism."—John R. Ladd, Modern Language QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Methods and Data 2. A Small New World: Fire, Infection, and Sudden Change in the English Print Network 3. Hubs in the Network: Nicholas Okes and the Making of Infectious Information 4. Radical Betweenness: Eleanor Davies and Mary Cary 5. Weak Ties and the Making of a Strong Poet: John Milton's Early Publishers Epilogue: Future Directions in Networking the Past

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Book SynopsisAre we unique as individuals, or are we replaceable? Seventeenth-century English literature pursues these questions through depictions of marriage. The writings studied in this book elevate a love between two individuals who deem each other to be unique to the point of being irreplaceable, and this vocabulary allows writers to put affective pressure on the meaning of marriage as Pauline theology defines it. Stubbornly individual, love threatens to short-circuit marriage's function in directing intimate feelings toward a communal experience of Christ's love. The literary project of testing the meaning of marriage proved to be urgent work throughout the seventeenth century. Monarchy itself was put on trial in this century, and so was the usefulness of marriage in linking Christian belief with the legitimacy of hereditary succession. Starting at the end of the sixteenth century with Edmund Spenser, and then exploring works by William Shakespeare, William Davenant, John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aphra Behn, Eric Song offers a new account of how notions of unique personhood became embedded in a literary way of thinking and feeling about marriage.Trade Review"Love Against Substitution ranks among the most thoughtful and thorough works on the meaning of marriage. It's beautifully written and a joy to read."—Will Stockton, Clemson University"Eric Song's excellent new book reveals the central ideologeme of modern love to be 'Embrace me, my irreplaceable you,' a grasping for unique attachment in a world where all else is fungible. Deftly interweaving gender studies, political theology, and affect theory, Love against Substitution elegantly explores the fraught relationship between the individual and communal identities of the liberal subject."—Feisal Mohamed, Yale UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. "Beguiling Love in the Amoretti and the 1590 Faerie Queene" 2. Jealousy against Substitution in Othello and The Winter's Tale 3. "Gondibert and the Biopolitics of Marriage" 4. "Love against Succession in Paradise Lost" 5. "Lucy Hutchinson and the Imperfection of Christian Marriage" 6. "From Remarriage to Tragic Fungibility: Behn's The Forc'd Marriage and Oroonoko" Epilogue

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Book SynopsisThis book is the cultural history of an idea which now seems so self-evident as barely to be worth stating: through writing imaginative literature, an author can accrue significant and lasting economic and cultural power. We take for granted, now, that authority dwells in literature and in being its author. This state of affairs was not naturally occurring, but deliberately invented. This book tells the story of that invention. The story's central figures are Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. But its narrative begins in the 1680s, with the last gasp of the bond linking literary to political authority. While Jacobite poets celebrated (and mourned) the Stuart dynasty, Whig writers traced the philosophical and aesthetic consequences of the accession of William of Orange. Both groups left behind sets of literary devices ready-made to confer and validate authority. Claude Willan challenges the continued reign of the "Scriblerian" model of the period and shows how that reign was engineered. In so doing he historicizes the relationship between "good" and "bad" writing, and suggests how we might think about literature and beauty had Pope and Johnson not taken literary authority for themselves. What might literature have looked like, and what could we use it for, he provocatively asks.Trade Review"This is an important and scholarly treatment of a significant puzzle in literary studies. Compelling, polemical, bold, maybe even dangerous, this is a book that all literary critics should read." —Joseph Hone, Newcastle University"Willan's provocative genealogy shows how prolific were the mutations in literary authority as it migrated across print cultures from the age of Pope to the age of Johnson. An authoritative rethinking of the making of modern literary authority in the eighteenth century."—Joseph Roach, Yale University"This book is an important contribution to the framing of mainstream literary authority and power in the so-called Ages of Pope and Johnson."—Emily C. Friedman, Auburn University"Literary Authority is grounded in both established and recent scholarship; it is densely argued but clearly written and often quotable. It is also thoughtfully organized, so a large argument develops over the course of the book.... Recommended."—J. T. Lynch, CHOICETable of Contents(i): Introduction 1. Whig Prose Cultures 2. I love with all my heart : Jacobite poetry in manuscript 3. Dipt in Ink: Pope without Pope in his early career 4. Pope's Moderate Ascendancy 5. Johnson's Struggle with Pope Coda: Coda

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Book SynopsisAre we unique as individuals, or are we replaceable? Seventeenth-century English literature pursues these questions through depictions of marriage. The writings studied in this book elevate a love between two individuals who deem each other to be unique to the point of being irreplaceable, and this vocabulary allows writers to put affective pressure on the meaning of marriage as Pauline theology defines it. Stubbornly individual, love threatens to short-circuit marriage's function in directing intimate feelings toward a communal experience of Christ's love. The literary project of testing the meaning of marriage proved to be urgent work throughout the seventeenth century. Monarchy itself was put on trial in this century, and so was the usefulness of marriage in linking Christian belief with the legitimacy of hereditary succession. Starting at the end of the sixteenth century with Edmund Spenser, and then exploring works by William Shakespeare, William Davenant, John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aphra Behn, Eric Song offers a new account of how notions of unique personhood became embedded in a literary way of thinking and feeling about marriage.Trade Review"Love Against Substitution ranks among the most thoughtful and thorough works on the meaning of marriage. It's beautifully written and a joy to read."—Will Stockton, Clemson University"Eric Song's excellent new book reveals the central ideologeme of modern love to be 'Embrace me, my irreplaceable you,' a grasping for unique attachment in a world where all else is fungible. Deftly interweaving gender studies, political theology, and affect theory, Love against Substitution elegantly explores the fraught relationship between the individual and communal identities of the liberal subject."—Feisal Mohamed, Yale UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. "Beguiling Love in the Amoretti and the 1590 Faerie Queene" 2. Jealousy against Substitution in Othello and The Winter's Tale 3. "Gondibert and the Biopolitics of Marriage" 4. "Love against Succession in Paradise Lost" 5. "Lucy Hutchinson and the Imperfection of Christian Marriage" 6. "From Remarriage to Tragic Fungibility: Behn's The Forc'd Marriage and Oroonoko" Epilogue

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Book SynopsisAcross the humanities and social sciences, scholars increasingly use quantitative methods to study textual data. Considered together, this research represents an extraordinary event in the long history of textuality. More or less all at once, the corpus has emerged as a major genre of cultural and scientific knowledge. In Literary Mathematics, Michael Gavin grapples with this development, describing how quantitative methods for the study of textual data offer powerful tools for historical inquiry and sometimes unexpected perspectives on theoretical issues of concern to literary studies. Student-friendly and accessible, the book advances this argument through case studies drawn from the Early English Books Online corpus. Gavin shows how a copublication network of printers and authors reveals an uncannily accurate picture of historical periodization; that a vector-space semantic model parses historical concepts in incredibly fine detail; and that a geospatial analysis of early modern discourse offers a surprising panoramic glimpse into the period's notion of world geography. Across these case studies, Gavin challenges readers to consider why corpus-based methods work so effectively and asks whether the successes of formal modeling ought to inspire humanists to reconsider fundamental theoretical assumptions about textuality and meaning. As Gavin reveals, by embracing the expressive power of mathematics, scholars can add new dimensions to digital humanities research and find new connections with the social sciences.Trade Review"Literary Mathematics is a new kind of book. A project of this scope is guaranteed to be controversial, but everyone interested in literary history will find it worth their time."—Ted Underwood, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign"This book is a timely, well-reasoned, and readable contribution to digital humanities and literary studies. Literary Mathematics will help guide the next generation of researchers in quantitative approaches to historical and literary texts."—Mel Evans, University of Leeds"Theoretically, historically, and critically informed, this is the most ambitious, and practical, book I know on the computational revolution in literary studies."—Jonathan Hope, Arizona State University"WithLiterary Mathematics, Gavin achieves what he sets forth to do: demonstrate quantitative models that can be used to describe the relationships between a corpus and its source texts, facilitating insights into the culture from which these historical documents emerged. Gavin's call for 'a curious spirit' that brings 'creative, rather than merely critical, thinking' is a welcome approach. Gavin takes risks in his corpus-level analyses and asks scholars to join him by looking at thousands of texts with an openness to the possibilities of what they may find."—Mary Learner, H-Sci-Med-TechTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Corpus as an Object of Study 1. Networks and the Study of Bibliographical Metadata 2. The Computation of Meaning 3. Conceptual Topography 4. Principles of Literary Mathematics Conclusion: Similar Words Tend to Appear in Documents with Similar Metadata

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Book SynopsisThis book is about a mad king and a mad duke. With original and iconoclastic readings, Richard van Oort pioneers the reading of Shakespeare as an ethical thinker of the "originary scene," the scene in which humans became conscious of themselves as symbol-using moral and narrative beings. Taking King Lear and Measure for Measure as case studies, van Oort shows how the minimal concept of an anthropological scene of origin—the "originary hypothesis"—provides the basis for a new understanding of every aspect of the plays, from the psychology of the characters to the ethical and dialogical conflicts upon which the drama is based. The result is a gripping commentary on the plays. Why does Lear abdicate and go mad? Why does Edgar torture his father with non-recognition? Why does Lucio accuse the Duke in Measure for Measure of madness and lechery, and why does Isabella remain silent at the end? In approaching these and other questions from the perspective of the originary hypothesis, van Oort helps us to see the ethical predicament of the plays, and, in the process, makes Shakespeare new again.Trade Review"This is criticism of the highest order, whose long, careful readings of King Lear and Measure for Measure are in dialogue with the finest readers of Shakespeare for the past century." —Blair Hoxby, Stanford University"A rigorous yet highly readable attempt to understand Shakespeare and neoclassical drama in general in new terms, Shakespeare's Mad Men demonstrates in admirable detail the analytical power of generative anthropology wielded by a powerful intelligence."—Eric Gans, University of California, Los Angeles"Attentive to both the ruses of bad faith and the truths disclosed by Shakespeare's language, van Oort addresses our human predicament as symbol-making creatures whose search for love is troubled by the ceaseless drive for mastery."—Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine"van Oort's reading is nothing less than a stunning provocation."—Amir Khan, Shakespeare Quarterly"[R]eaders... will find value and pleasure in van Oort's compelling readings, and his clear style makes complex concepts pleasingly accessible."—Molly G. Yarp, Times Literary Supplement"Eminently readable, Shakespeare's Man Men attempts to engage and explain the larger questions the plays raise, particularly why characters behave the way they do and make the choices they do. The readings are original and offer exciting ways to engage with the plays. Highly recommended."—K. J. Wetmore Jr., CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The King's Last Potlatch 2. The Judge, the Duke, His Wife, and Her Lover Conclusion

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Book SynopsisAcross the humanities and social sciences, scholars increasingly use quantitative methods to study textual data. Considered together, this research represents an extraordinary event in the long history of textuality. More or less all at once, the corpus has emerged as a major genre of cultural and scientific knowledge. In Literary Mathematics, Michael Gavin grapples with this development, describing how quantitative methods for the study of textual data offer powerful tools for historical inquiry and sometimes unexpected perspectives on theoretical issues of concern to literary studies. Student-friendly and accessible, the book advances this argument through case studies drawn from the Early English Books Online corpus. Gavin shows how a copublication network of printers and authors reveals an uncannily accurate picture of historical periodization; that a vector-space semantic model parses historical concepts in incredibly fine detail; and that a geospatial analysis of early modern discourse offers a surprising panoramic glimpse into the period's notion of world geography. Across these case studies, Gavin challenges readers to consider why corpus-based methods work so effectively and asks whether the successes of formal modeling ought to inspire humanists to reconsider fundamental theoretical assumptions about textuality and meaning. As Gavin reveals, by embracing the expressive power of mathematics, scholars can add new dimensions to digital humanities research and find new connections with the social sciences.Trade Review"Literary Mathematics is a new kind of book. A project of this scope is guaranteed to be controversial, but everyone interested in literary history will find it worth their time."—Ted Underwood, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign"This book is a timely, well-reasoned, and readable contribution to digital humanities and literary studies. Literary Mathematics will help guide the next generation of researchers in quantitative approaches to historical and literary texts."—Mel Evans, University of Leeds"Theoretically, historically, and critically informed, this is the most ambitious, and practical, book I know on the computational revolution in literary studies."—Jonathan Hope, Arizona State University"WithLiterary Mathematics, Gavin achieves what he sets forth to do: demonstrate quantitative models that can be used to describe the relationships between a corpus and its source texts, facilitating insights into the culture from which these historical documents emerged. Gavin's call for 'a curious spirit' that brings 'creative, rather than merely critical, thinking' is a welcome approach. Gavin takes risks in his corpus-level analyses and asks scholars to join him by looking at thousands of texts with an openness to the possibilities of what they may find."—Mary Learner, H-Sci-Med-TechTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Corpus as an Object of Study 1. Networks and the Study of Bibliographical Metadata 2. The Computation of Meaning 3. Conceptual Topography 4. Principles of Literary Mathematics Conclusion: Similar Words Tend to Appear in Documents with Similar Metadata

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Book SynopsisEarly modern thought was haunted by the unknowable character of the fallen world. The sometimes brilliant and sometimes baffling fusion of theological and scientific ideas in the era, as well as some of its greatest literature, responds to this sense that humans encountered only an incomplete reality. Ranging from Paradise Lost to thinkers in and around the Royal Society and commentary on the Book of Job, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought explores how the era of the scientific revolution was in part paralyzed by and in part energized by the paradox it encountered in thinking about the elusive nature of God and the unfathomable nature of the natural world. Looking at writers with scientific, literary and theological interests, from the shoemaker mystic, Jacob Boehme to John Milton, from Robert Boyle to Margaret Cavendish, and from Thomas Browne to the fiery prophet, Anna Trapnel, Kevin Killeen shows how seventeenth-century writings redeployed the rich resources of the ineffable and the apophatic—what cannot be said, except in negative terms—to think about natural philosophy and the enigmas of the natural world.Trade Review"Killeen's work brims with smart scholarship, sharp writing, and surprising discoveries. Deftly threading together the scientific and the mystical, the empirical and the unknowable, this remarkable book provides a new view of science, theology, and the literary forms tying them together."—Jess Keiser, Tufts University"Killeen corrects overly triumphant histories of science, where the new empiricism tames the old vitalism through reason, experiment, et cetera. This is an original book, eccentric in places, which is part of its charm, and full of stylistic flair."—Ryan J. Stark, Corban UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Jobean Apophatic and the Symphonic Unknowability of the World 2. The Theopoetics of Jacob Boehme 3. Thomas Browne's Poetics of the Unspeakable 4. The Bewildering Surface from Boyle to Cavendish 5. Anna Trapnel's Aesthetics of Incoherence 6. Miltonic Vertigo and a Theology of Disorientation Epilogue: Ordinary and Exquisite Bafflement

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Book SynopsisEarly modern thought was haunted by the unknowable character of the fallen world. The sometimes brilliant and sometimes baffling fusion of theological and scientific ideas in the era, as well as some of its greatest literature, responds to this sense that humans encountered only an incomplete reality. Ranging from Paradise Lost to thinkers in and around the Royal Society and commentary on the Book of Job, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought explores how the era of the scientific revolution was in part paralyzed by and in part energized by the paradox it encountered in thinking about the elusive nature of God and the unfathomable nature of the natural world. Looking at writers with scientific, literary and theological interests, from the shoemaker mystic, Jacob Boehme to John Milton, from Robert Boyle to Margaret Cavendish, and from Thomas Browne to the fiery prophet, Anna Trapnel, Kevin Killeen shows how seventeenth-century writings redeployed the rich resources of the ineffable and the apophatic—what cannot be said, except in negative terms—to think about natural philosophy and the enigmas of the natural world.Trade Review"Killeen's work brims with smart scholarship, sharp writing, and surprising discoveries. Deftly threading together the scientific and the mystical, the empirical and the unknowable, this remarkable book provides a new view of science, theology, and the literary forms tying them together."—Jess Keiser, Tufts University"Killeen corrects overly triumphant histories of science, where the new empiricism tames the old vitalism through reason, experiment, et cetera. This is an original book, eccentric in places, which is part of its charm, and full of stylistic flair."—Ryan J. Stark, Corban UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Jobean Apophatic and the Symphonic Unknowability of the World 2. The Theopoetics of Jacob Boehme 3. Thomas Browne's Poetics of the Unspeakable 4. The Bewildering Surface from Boyle to Cavendish 5. Anna Trapnel's Aesthetics of Incoherence 6. Miltonic Vertigo and a Theology of Disorientation Epilogue: Ordinary and Exquisite Bafflement

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Book SynopsisScripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism. In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques—black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)—in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst. Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects.Trade Review"It’s not every day that you read a text that reshapes its field in extraordinary ways while opening exciting perspectives to adjacent fields of study; not every day that you read a document that you know, page after page, will be central for generations to come. Scripts of Blackness is a rigorous, interactive, beautifully-written and generous text that takes from pasts (largely understudied or unknown) to speak of and dialogue with our presents, in order to open windows to multiple futures...Scripts of Blackness is an extraordinary gift for scholars of race in contemporary France. It shines a light on the national and trans-European forges that produced the iron masks currently constraining Afro-French. The book is an exceptional tool for us and for generations to come, in our effort to indigenize and define blackness in French." * H-France *"[A] groundbreaking investigation into three modes of racialization—cosmetic, acoustic, and kinetic—that were produced in the theaters of Spain, France, and England across two centuries. The book enriches existing studies of race and performance by departing from the conventional focus on a single nation and limited period and instead highlighting the correspondences between the racial paradigms produced in these countries...[E]ssential reading for students and scholars of early modern studies." * Shakespeare Bulletin *"[R]ich [and] thought-provoking...This important book issues a compelling call to reassess early modern European performances of blackness in the harsh light of their effects on Afro-descendant subjects." * Journal 18 *"This is the first study to my knowledge that puts English, French, and Spanish early modern literatures in conversation with each other through a comparatist method that discusses the history of the African diaspora in each country’s colonial development. Noémie Ndiaye’s scholarship is the soundest I have seen on the topic of early modern race theory." * Baltasar Fra-Molinero, Bates College *"Studies of blackface performance in the early modern world have focused mostly on English plays, masques, and pageants. As Noémie Ndiaye convincingly demonstrates, those performances did not exist in isolation, and the early modern formation of blackness as a racial category was a transnational European endeavor. Scripts of Blackness is original in that it goes beyond the cosmetics and prosthetics of blackface to consider the ways black characters were made to speak and to move." * Virginia Mason Vaughan, Clark University *Table of ContentsContents Introduction. Performative Blackness in Early Modern Europe Chapter 1. A Brief History of Baroque Black-Up: Cosmetic Blackness and Religion Chapter 2. A Brief Herstory of Baroque Black-Up: Cosmetic Blackness, Gender, and Sexuality Chapter 3. Blackspeak: Acoustic Blackness and the Accents of Race Chapter 4. Black Moves: Race, Dance, and Power Post/Script. Ecologies of Racial Performance Appendix. Selection of Early Modern Plays Featuring Black Characters Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisBad Blood explores representations of race in early modern English and Spanish literature, especially drama. It addresses two different forms of racial ideology: one concerned with racialized religious difference—that is, the notion of having Jewish or Muslim “blood”—and one concerned with Blackness and whiteness. Shakespeare’s Othello tells us that he was “sold to slavery” in his youth, a phrase that evokes the Atlantic triangle trade for readers today. For many years, however, scholars have asserted that racialized slavery was not yet widely understood in early modern England, and that the kind of enslavement that Othello describes is related to Christian-Muslim conflict in the Mediterranean rather than the rise of the racialized enslavement of Afro-diasporic subjects. Bad Blood offers a new account of early modern race by tracing the development of European racial vocabularies from Spain to England. Dispelling assumptions, stemming from Spain’s historical exclusion of Jews and Muslims, that premodern racial ideology focused on religious difference and purity of blood more than color, Emily Weissbourd argues that the context of the Atlantic slave trade is indispensable to understanding race in early modern Spanish and English literature alike. Through readings of plays by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and their contemporaries, as well as Spanish picaresque fiction and its English translations, Weissbourd reveals how ideologies of racialized slavery as well as religious difference come to England via Spain, and how both notions of race operate in conjunction to shore up fantasies of Blackness, whiteness, and “pure blood.” The enslavement of Black Africans, Weissbourd shows, is inextricable from the staging of race in early modern literature.Trade Review"Essential, bracing, inspiring reading, brimming with fresh and surprising insights and groundbreaking discoveries, many hiding in plain sight but—like whiteness itself—long rendered invisible, requiring a comparative, transnational approach to race studies and the rigor, shrewdness, measure, and skepticism of Emily Weissbourd to reveal them." * Robert B. Hornback, Oglethorpe University *"Bad Blood provides the first meaningful analysis of how literary presentations of blood purity and blackness in Spain were mistranslated in an English context. Emily Weissbourd exhibits an impressive breadth and depth in her engagement with primary and secondary sources." * Christina H. Lee, Princeton University *

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Book SynopsisDeath and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel demonstrates that archives continually speak to the period’s rising funeral and mourning culture, as well as the increasing commodification of death and mourning typically associated with nineteenth-century practices. Drawing on a variety of historical discourses—such as wills, undertaking histories, medical treatises and textbooks, anatomical studies, philosophical treatises, and religious tracts and sermons—the book contributes to a fuller understanding of the history of death in the Enlightenment and its narrative transformation. Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel not only offers new insights about the effect of a growing secularization and commodification of death on the culture and its productions, but also fills critical gaps in the history of death, using narrative as a distinct literary marker. As anatomists dissected, undertakers preserved, jewelers encased, and artists figured the corpse, so too the novelist portrayed bodily artifacts. Why are these morbid forms of materiality entombed in the novel? Jolene Zigarovich addresses this complex question by claiming that the body itself—its parts, or its preserved representation—functioned as secular memento, suggesting that preserved remains became symbols of individuality and subjectivity. To support the conception that in this period notions of self and knowing center upon theories of the tactile and material, the chapters are organized around sensory conceptions and bodily materials such as touch, preserved flesh, bowel, heart, wax, hair, and bone. Including numerous visual examples, the book also argues that the relic represents the slippage between corpse and treasure, sentimentality and materialism, and corporeal fetish and aesthetic accessory. Zigarovich’s analysis compels us to reassess the eighteenth-century response to and representation of the dead and dead-like body, and its material purpose and use in fiction. In a broader framework, Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel also narrates a history of the novel that speaks to the cultural formation of modern individualism.

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Book SynopsisIn Sex Lives, Joseph Gamble draws from literature, art, and personal testimonies from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe to uncover how early moderns learned to have sex. In the early modern period, Gamble contends, everyone from pornographers to Shakespeare recognized that sex requires knowledge of both logistics (how to do it) and affect (how to feel about it). And knowledge, of course, takes practice. Gamble turns to a wide range of early modern texts and images from England, France, and Italy, ranging from personal accounts to closet dramas to visual art in order to excavate and analyze a variety of sexual practices in early modernity. Using an intersectional, phenomenological approach to bring historical light to the quotidian sexual experiences of early modern subjects, the book develops the critical concept of the “sex life”—a colloquialism that opens up methodological avenues for understanding daily lived experience in granular detail, both in the distant past and today. Through this lens, Gamble explores how sex organized and permeated everyday life and experiences of gender and race in early modernity. He shows how affects around sex structure the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, revealing the role of sexual feeling and sexual racism in early modern English drama. Sex Lives reshapes how we understand Renaissance literature, the history of sexuality, and the meaning of sex in both early modern Europe and our own moment.Trade Review"With verve and exactitude, Sex Lives unpacks the epistemological and affective infrastructures that undergird a ‘sex life.’ Boldly moving beyond the discursive paradigm that has long governed the history of sexuality, it lingers on the process of learning how to have sex—exploring both sexual ‘know-how’ and sexual ‘feel-how’ through an impassioned commitment to queer thriving." * Valerie Traub, author of Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns *"Original, wry, and winningly earnest, Sex Lives reveals a highly provocative truth often made invisible, that sex, like other quotidian acts that shape our experience and sense of self, is a learned practice." * Patricia Akhimie, author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference *

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Book SynopsisFour years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a "collected works" of William Shakespeare, not in an imposingly large format but as a series of more humble quarto pamphlets. For mysterious reasons, perhaps involving Shakespeare's playing company, the King's Men, the project ran into trouble. In an attempt to salvage it, information on the title pages of some of the playbooks was falsified, making them resemble leftover copies of earlier editions. The deception worked for nearly three hundred years, until it was unmasked by scholars in the early twentieth century. The discovery of these "Pavier Quartos," as they became known, was a landmark success for the New Bibliography and played an important role in establishing the validity and authority of that method of analysis. While more recent scholars have reassessed the traditional narrative that the New Bibliographers wrote, no one has gone back to look at the primary evidence: the quartos themselves. In Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes Zachary Lesser undertakes a completely fresh study of these playbooks. Through an intensive bibliographical analysis of over three hundred surviving quartos, Lesser reveals evidence that has gone entirely unseen before: "ghosts" (faint, oily impressions produced when one book is bound next to another); "holes" (the tiny remains of the first simple stitching that held pamphlets together); and "rips and scrapes" (post-production alterations of title pages). This new evidence-much of it visible only with the aid of enhanced photographic methods-suggests that the "Pavier Quartos" are far more mysterious, with far more consequential ramifications for book history and Shakespeare scholarship than we have thought.

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Book SynopsisOver the course of the long eighteenth century, a network of some fifty women writers, working in French, English, Dutch, and German, staked out a lasting position in the European literary field. These writers were multilingual and lived for many years outside of their countries of origin, translated and borrowed from each others'' works, attended literary circles and salons, and fashioned a transnational women''s literature characterized by highly recognizable codes. Drawing on a literary geography of national types, women writers across Western Europe read, translated, wrote, and rewrote stories about exceptional young women, literary heroines who transcend the gendered destiny of their distinctive cultural and national contexts. These transcultural heroines struggle against the cultural constraints determining the sexualized fates of local girls.In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women''s writing as a distinct, transnational category in

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Book SynopsisA fascinating analysis of anonymous publication centuries before the digital ageEverywhere and Nowhere considers the ubiquity of anonymity and mediation in the publication and circulation of eighteenth-century British literature—before the Romantic creation of the “author”—and what this means for literary criticism. Anonymous authorship was typical of the time, yet literary scholars and historians have been generally unable to account for it as anything more than a footnote or curiosity. Mark Vareschi shows the entangled relationship between mediation and anonymity, revealing the nonhuman agency of the printed text. Drawing richly on quantitative analysis and robust archival work, Vareschi brings together philosophy, literary theory, and media theory in a trenchant analysis, uncovering a history of textual engagement and interpretation that does not hinge on the known authorial subject.In discussing anonymous poetry, drama, and the novel along with anonymously published writers such as Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, and Walter Scott, he unveils a theory of mediation that renews broader questions about agency and intention. Vareschi argues that textual intentionality is a property of nonhuman, material media rather than human subjects alone, allowing the anonymous literature of the eighteenth century to speak to contemporary questions of meaning in the philosophy of language. Vareschi closes by exploring dubious claims about the death of anonymity and the reexplosion of anonymity with the coming of the digital. Ultimately, Everywhere and Nowhere reveals the long history of print anonymity so central to the risks and benefits of the digital culture.Trade Review"Literary critics, asked to summarize their research, are often asked, ‘Who are your authors?’ Everywhere and Nowhere cleverly baffles this question and turns our attention to anonymity. Bracketing out the author, Mark Vareschi brings into sight other features of publication: namely, networks of writing and reception and a complex of print and performance. He works impressively with bibliographic records, booksellers’ catalogs, advertisements, and paratextual material, like tables of contents. His careful bibliometric work establishes changing percentages of anonymous publication across decades and genres. This is fresh, compelling, detail-rich scholarship and essential reading."—Brad Pasanek, author of Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary"Everywhere and Nowhere is that rare thing: a genuinely interdisciplinary study, capacious and illuminating, of how anonymous authorship impacts meaning across genres and media. In Mark Vareschi’s hands, anonymity is transformed into a lens for reexamining the most fundamental literary concepts (authorship and intention, medium, textuality) and renovating them—not just in the domain of print, but across the rich media ecologies of the eighteenth century."—Michael Gamer, University of Pennsylvania"Vareschi’s intelligent and well-argued book opens up intriguing questions about the relationships between authors, texts, and readers, and he makes excellent use of bibliometric data to support his claims. It serves as a valuable reminder that eighteenth-century conceptions of authorship were often very different from our own and provides a wealth of data that should help to recontextualize the decisions of so many canonical eighteenth-century authors to publish at least some of their works anonymously."—Journal of British Studies"This revelatory study provides a new interdisciplinary examination of the notion of anonymity in the eighteenth century."—Modern Language Notes"Even as it defines anonymous and attributed works as part of a shared discourse, criticism often cordons them off from one another by making anonymous works serve as examples of a discourse that then warrants a more extensive reading in the attributed text. By drawing attention to the literary networks in which anonymous publication was enmeshed, Everywhere and Nowhere convincingly illustrates how much we miss about the eighteenth century when we treat anonymous works as second-class citizens."—Eighteenth Century Fiction"Vareschi’s book employs a variety of tools and disciplines to consider how authorial anonymity sheds light on processes of mediation in the long eighteenth century."—The BARS Review Table of ContentsIntroduction: Everywhere and Nowhere1. Anonymous as Author2. “Acting Plays” and “Reading Plays”: Intermediation and Anonymity3. Attribution, Circulation, and “Defoe”4. Motive, Intention, AnonymityEpilogue: Anonymity and Media ShiftAcknowledgmentsAppendixNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA fascinating analysis of anonymous publication centuries before the digital ageEverywhere and Nowhere considers the ubiquity of anonymity and mediation in the publication and circulation of eighteenth-century British literature—before the Romantic creation of the “author”—and what this means for literary criticism. Anonymous authorship was typical of the time, yet literary scholars and historians have been generally unable to account for it as anything more than a footnote or curiosity. Mark Vareschi shows the entangled relationship between mediation and anonymity, revealing the nonhuman agency of the printed text. Drawing richly on quantitative analysis and robust archival work, Vareschi brings together philosophy, literary theory, and media theory in a trenchant analysis, uncovering a history of textual engagement and interpretation that does not hinge on the known authorial subject.In discussing anonymous poetry, drama, and the novel along with anonymously published writers such as Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, and Walter Scott, he unveils a theory of mediation that renews broader questions about agency and intention. Vareschi argues that textual intentionality is a property of nonhuman, material media rather than human subjects alone, allowing the anonymous literature of the eighteenth century to speak to contemporary questions of meaning in the philosophy of language. Vareschi closes by exploring dubious claims about the death of anonymity and the reexplosion of anonymity with the coming of the digital. Ultimately, Everywhere and Nowhere reveals the long history of print anonymity so central to the risks and benefits of the digital culture.Trade Review"Literary critics, asked to summarize their research, are often asked, ‘Who are your authors?’ Everywhere and Nowhere cleverly baffles this question and turns our attention to anonymity. Bracketing out the author, Mark Vareschi brings into sight other features of publication: namely, networks of writing and reception and a complex of print and performance. He works impressively with bibliographic records, booksellers’ catalogs, advertisements, and paratextual material, like tables of contents. His careful bibliometric work establishes changing percentages of anonymous publication across decades and genres. This is fresh, compelling, detail-rich scholarship and essential reading."—Brad Pasanek, author of Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary"Everywhere and Nowhere is that rare thing: a genuinely interdisciplinary study, capacious and illuminating, of how anonymous authorship impacts meaning across genres and media. In Mark Vareschi’s hands, anonymity is transformed into a lens for reexamining the most fundamental literary concepts (authorship and intention, medium, textuality) and renovating them—not just in the domain of print, but across the rich media ecologies of the eighteenth century."—Michael Gamer, University of Pennsylvania"Vareschi’s intelligent and well-argued book opens up intriguing questions about the relationships between authors, texts, and readers, and he makes excellent use of bibliometric data to support his claims. It serves as a valuable reminder that eighteenth-century conceptions of authorship were often very different from our own and provides a wealth of data that should help to recontextualize the decisions of so many canonical eighteenth-century authors to publish at least some of their works anonymously."—Journal of British Studies"This revelatory study provides a new interdisciplinary examination of the notion of anonymity in the eighteenth century."—Modern Language Notes"Even as it defines anonymous and attributed works as part of a shared discourse, criticism often cordons them off from one another by making anonymous works serve as examples of a discourse that then warrants a more extensive reading in the attributed text. By drawing attention to the literary networks in which anonymous publication was enmeshed, Everywhere and Nowhere convincingly illustrates how much we miss about the eighteenth century when we treat anonymous works as second-class citizens."—Eighteenth Century Fiction"Vareschi’s book employs a variety of tools and disciplines to consider how authorial anonymity sheds light on processes of mediation in the long eighteenth century."—The BARS Review Table of ContentsIntroduction: Everywhere and Nowhere1. Anonymous as Author2. “Acting Plays” and “Reading Plays”: Intermediation and Anonymity3. Attribution, Circulation, and “Defoe”4. Motive, Intention, AnonymityEpilogue: Anonymity and Media ShiftAcknowledgmentsAppendixNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisExploring forms of desire unaccounted for in previous histories of sexuality What can the Renaissance tell us at our present moment about who and what is “queer,” as well as the political consequences of asking? In posing this question, The Shapes of Fancy offers a powerful new method of accounting for ineffable and diffuse forms of desire, mining early modern drama and prose literature to describe new patterns of affective resonance.Starting with the question of how and why readers seek traces of desire in texts from bygone times and places, The Shapes of Fancy demonstrates a practice of critical attunement to the psychic and historical circulations of affect across time within texts, from texts to readers, and among readers. Closely reading for uncharted desires as they recur in early modern drama, witchcraft pamphlets, and early Atlantic voyage narratives and demonstrating how each is structured by qualities of secrecy, impossibility, and excess, Christine Varnado follows four “shapes of fancy”: the desire to be used to others’ ends; indiscriminate, bottomless appetite; paranoid self-fulfilling suspicion; and melancholic longings for impossible transformations and affinities. These affective dynamics go awry in atypical and perverse ways. In other words, argues Varnado, these modes of feeling are recognizable on the page or stage as “queer” because of how, and not by whom, they are expressed.This new theorization of desire expands the notion of queerness in literature, decoupling the literary trace of queerness from the binary logics of same-sex versus opposite-sex and normative versus deviant that have governed early modern sexuality studies. Providing a set of methods for analyzing affect and desire in texts from any period, The Shapes of Fancy stages an impassioned defense of the inherently desirous nature of reading, making a case for readerly investment and identification as vital engines of meaning making and political insight.Trade Review"The Shapes of Fancy pursues an innovative expansion of the lexicon of queer desire. Christine Varnado forges links between early modern and contemporary thinkers, and she engages a constellation of affective modes, from mediation and consumption to paranoia and melancholia. Her supple analyses illuminate the intricate, often unexpected vectors, artifacts, and afterlives of erotic connection."—Kathryn Schwarz, Vanderbilt University"Christine Varnado’s book makes a surprising and incisive intervention into early modern studies. In its queerest moments, The Shapes of Fancy argues for a capacious theory of desire, expanding scholarly understanding of sexuality in the past to include forgotten, ambivalent, and challenging forms of pleasure."—Holly Dugan, The George Washington University"An incredibly useful touchstone for queer studies."—Modern Philology "This powerful book brings important and fresh insight to the literature." —CHOICETable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Reading for Desire1. Getting Used, and Liking It: Erotic Instrumentality and the Go-Between2. Everything That Moves: Promiscuous Fancy and Carnival Longing3. It Takes One to Know One: Paranoid Suspicion and the Witch Hunt4. Lost Worlds, Lost Selves: Queer Colonial MelancholiaConclusion: The Persistence of FancyAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisExploring forms of desire unaccounted for in previous histories of sexuality What can the Renaissance tell us at our present moment about who and what is “queer,” as well as the political consequences of asking? In posing this question, The Shapes of Fancy offers a powerful new method of accounting for ineffable and diffuse forms of desire, mining early modern drama and prose literature to describe new patterns of affective resonance.Starting with the question of how and why readers seek traces of desire in texts from bygone times and places, The Shapes of Fancy demonstrates a practice of critical attunement to the psychic and historical circulations of affect across time within texts, from texts to readers, and among readers. Closely reading for uncharted desires as they recur in early modern drama, witchcraft pamphlets, and early Atlantic voyage narratives and demonstrating how each is structured by qualities of secrecy, impossibility, and excess, Christine Varnado follows four “shapes of fancy”: the desire to be used to others’ ends; indiscriminate, bottomless appetite; paranoid self-fulfilling suspicion; and melancholic longings for impossible transformations and affinities. These affective dynamics go awry in atypical and perverse ways. In other words, argues Varnado, these modes of feeling are recognizable on the page or stage as “queer” because of how, and not by whom, they are expressed.This new theorization of desire expands the notion of queerness in literature, decoupling the literary trace of queerness from the binary logics of same-sex versus opposite-sex and normative versus deviant that have governed early modern sexuality studies. Providing a set of methods for analyzing affect and desire in texts from any period, The Shapes of Fancy stages an impassioned defense of the inherently desirous nature of reading, making a case for readerly investment and identification as vital engines of meaning making and political insight.Trade Review"The Shapes of Fancy pursues an innovative expansion of the lexicon of queer desire. Christine Varnado forges links between early modern and contemporary thinkers, and she engages a constellation of affective modes, from mediation and consumption to paranoia and melancholia. Her supple analyses illuminate the intricate, often unexpected vectors, artifacts, and afterlives of erotic connection."—Kathryn Schwarz, Vanderbilt University"Christine Varnado’s book makes a surprising and incisive intervention into early modern studies. In its queerest moments, The Shapes of Fancy argues for a capacious theory of desire, expanding scholarly understanding of sexuality in the past to include forgotten, ambivalent, and challenging forms of pleasure."—Holly Dugan, The George Washington University"An incredibly useful touchstone for queer studies."—Modern Philology "This powerful book brings important and fresh insight to the literature." —CHOICETable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Reading for Desire1. Getting Used, and Liking It: Erotic Instrumentality and the Go-Between2. Everything That Moves: Promiscuous Fancy and Carnival Longing3. It Takes One to Know One: Paranoid Suspicion and the Witch Hunt4. Lost Worlds, Lost Selves: Queer Colonial MelancholiaConclusion: The Persistence of FancyAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisNo matter when or where one starts telling the story of the battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir (August 4, 1578), the precipitating event for the formation of the Iberian Union, one always stumbles across dead bodies—rotting in the sun on abandoned battlefields, publicly displayed in marketplaces, exhumed and transported for political uses. A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean proposes an approach to understanding how dead bodies anchored the construction of knowledge within early modern Mediterranean historiography. A Grammar of the Corpse argues that the presence of the corpse in historical narrative is not incidental. It fills a central gap in testimonial narrative: providing tangible evidence of the narrator’s reliability while provoking an affective response in the audience. The use of corpses as a source of narrative authority mobilizes what cultural historians, philosophers, and social anthropologists have pointed to as the latent power of the dead for generating social and political meaning and knowledge. A Grammar of the Corpse analyzes the literary, semiotic, and epistemological function these bodies serve within text and through language. It finds that corpses are indexically present and yet disturbingly absent, a tension that informs their fraught relationship to their narrators’ own bodies and makes them useful but subversive tools of communication and knowledge. A Grammar of the Corpse complements recent work in medieval and early modern Iberian and Mediterranean studies to account for the confessional, ethnic, linguistic, and political diversity of the region. By reading Arabic texts alongside Portuguese and Spanish accounts of this key event, the book responds to the fundamental provocation of Mediterranean studies to work beyond the linguistic limitations of modern national boundaries.Table of ContentsPreface | vii Introduction: Necroepistemology | 1 1 Presence: Here Are the Dead | 25 2 Absence: Disappearing the Royal Dead | 45 3 Vitality: Wounded Narrators and the Living Dead | 69 4 Assemblage: Recovering Diplomatic Power with Corpses | 89 5 Erasure: Corpse Desecration for Narrative Control | 110 Epilogue | 135 Acknowledgments | 141 Notes | 145 Bibliography | 195 Index | 215

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Book SynopsisNo matter when or where one starts telling the story of the battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir (August 4, 1578), the precipitating event for the formation of the Iberian Union, one always stumbles across dead bodies—rotting in the sun on abandoned battlefields, publicly displayed in marketplaces, exhumed and transported for political uses. A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean proposes an approach to understanding how dead bodies anchored the construction of knowledge within early modern Mediterranean historiography. A Grammar of the Corpse argues that the presence of the corpse in historical narrative is not incidental. It fills a central gap in testimonial narrative: providing tangible evidence of the narrator’s reliability while provoking an affective response in the audience. The use of corpses as a source of narrative authority mobilizes what cultural historians, philosophers, and social anthropologists have pointed to as the latent power of the dead for generating social and political meaning and knowledge. A Grammar of the Corpse analyzes the literary, semiotic, and epistemological function these bodies serve within text and through language. It finds that corpses are indexically present and yet disturbingly absent, a tension that informs their fraught relationship to their narrators’ own bodies and makes them useful but subversive tools of communication and knowledge. A Grammar of the Corpse complements recent work in medieval and early modern Iberian and Mediterranean studies to account for the confessional, ethnic, linguistic, and political diversity of the region. By reading Arabic texts alongside Portuguese and Spanish accounts of this key event, the book responds to the fundamental provocation of Mediterranean studies to work beyond the linguistic limitations of modern national boundaries.Table of ContentsPreface | vii Introduction: Necroepistemology | 1 1 Presence: Here Are the Dead | 25 2 Absence: Disappearing the Royal Dead | 45 3 Vitality: Wounded Narrators and the Living Dead | 69 4 Assemblage: Recovering Diplomatic Power with Corpses | 89 5 Erasure: Corpse Desecration for Narrative Control | 110 Epilogue | 135 Acknowledgments | 141 Notes | 145 Bibliography | 195 Index | 215

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