The Shakespeare Book is the perfect primer to the works of William Shakespeare, packed with witty illustrations and inspirational quotes.

This bold book covers every work, from the comedies of Twelfth Night and As You Like It to the tragedies of Julius Caesar and Hamlet, plus lost plays and less well-known works of poetry. Easy-to-understand graphics and illustrations bring the themes, plots, characters and language of Shakespeare to life, including illustrated timelines which offer an at-a-glance summary of the action for each play. With detailed plot summaries and an in-depth analysis of the major characters and themes, this is a brilliant, innovative exploration of the entire canon of Shakespeare plays, sonnets and poetry.

Whether you're a Shakespeare scholar or a student of the great Bard, The Shakespeare Book offers a fuller appreciation of his phenomenal talent and lasting legacy.

Challenging existing narratives of the relationship between China and Europe, this study establishes how modern English identity evolved through strategies of identifying with rather than against China. Through an examination of England's obsession with Chinese objects throughout the long eighteenth century, A Taste for China argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity.
Informed by sources as diverse as the writings of John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Mary Wortley Montagu, Zuroski Jenkins begins with a consideration of how literature transported cosmopolitan commercial practices into a model of individual and collective identity. She then extends her argument to the vibrant world of Restoration comedy-most notably the controversial The Country Wife by William Wycherley-where Chinese objects are systematically associated with questionable tastes and behaviors. Subsequent chapters draw on Defoe, Pope, and Swift to explore how adventure fiction and satirical poetry use chinoiserie to construct, question, and reimagine the dynamic relationship between people and things. The second half of the eighteenth century sees a marked shift as English subjects anxiously seek to separate themselves from Chinese objects. A reading of texts including Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Jonas Hanway's Essay on Tea shows that the enthrallment with chinoiserie does not disappear, but is rewritten as an aristocratic perversion in midcentury literature that prefigures modern sexuality. Ultimately, at the century's end, it is nearly disavowed altogether, which is evinced in works like Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.
A persuasively argued and richly textured monograph on eighteenth-century English culture, A Taste for China will interest scholars of cultural history, thing theory, and East-West relations.

Writing the Rebellion presents a cultural history of loyalist writing in early America. There has been a spate of related works recently, but Philip Gould's narrative offers a completely different view of the loyalist/patriot contentions than appears in any of these accounts. By focusing on the literary projections of the loyalist cause, Gould dissolves the old legend that loyalists were more British than American, and patriots the embodiment of a new sensibility drawn from their American situation and upbringing. He shows that both sides claimed to be heritors of British civil discourse, Old World learning, and the genius of English culture. The first half of Writing Rebellion deals with the ways "political disputation spilled into arguments about style, form, and aesthetics, as though these subjects could secure (or ruin) the very status of political authorship." Chapters in this section illustrate how loyalists attack patriot rhetoric by invoking British satires of an inflated Whig style by Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Another chapter turns to Loyalist critiques of Congressional language and especially the Continental Association, which was responsible for radical and increasingly violent measures against the Loyalists. The second half of Gould's book looks at satiric adaptations of the ancient ballad tradition to see what happens when patriots and loyalists interpret and adapt the same text (or texts) for distinctive yet related purposes. The last two chapters look at the Loyalist response to Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the ways the concept of the author became defined in early America. Throughout the manuscript, Gould acknowledges the purchase English literary culture continued to have in revolutionary America, even among revolutionaries.

In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of ideal manhood. Theatre-going was the primary source of entertainment for working people of the early Republic and the Jacksonian period, and plays implicitly and explicitly addressed the risks and rewards of citizenship. Ranging from representations of the heroes of the American Revolution to images of doomed Indians to plays about ancient Rome, Chinn unearths dozens of plays rarely read by critics. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as workers, and as Americans.

The site of William Penn's 'Holy Experiment' in religious toleration and representative government, Philadelphia was home to one of the largest and most influential 'free' African American communities in the United States. The city was seen as a laboratory for social experimentation, one with international consequences. While historians such as Gary B. Nash and Julie Winch have chronicled the distinctive social and political space of early national Philadelphia, no sustained attempt has been made to understand how writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Brockden Brown, George Lippard, and others were creating a distinctive literary tradition, one shaped by the city itself. Analyzing a sequence of texts written in and about Philadelphia between the Constitution and the Civil War, Otter shows how literary discourse intervened significantly in the period's intense debates about character, race, and nation. The book advances chronologically from the 1790s to the 1850s, and it is organized around the volatile issues the Philadelphia writing tradition responded to: contagion, riots, manners, and freedom. Throughout this exemplary work, Otter reveals how historical events produced a literature that wrestles with specific concerns: the city as specimen, the diagnosis and proper treatment for urban disorder, the effects of position on interpretation, the trials of character, the substance of action, the nature of human difference and similarity, and the vehemence of prejudice. Philadelphia Stories is a work that reveals (1) how the writers of Philadelphia defined the edge between freedom and slavery, altering the course of America's intellectual and national history, and (2) how the figure 'Philadelphia' stands for a place, a history, a tradition of the 'literary' that enriches and even clarifies the whole of American literary history.

Queer Virgins examines the creation and theatrical performance of queer puns in Renaissance London. Its argument--that a small theatre known as the Whitefriars was run by a community of playwrights who self-consciously targeted an audience sympathetic to homoerotic desire and to homoerotic puns in particular--revises the current scholarly belief that early modern Londoners did not form self-conscious communities based on erotic desire. This book is for students of the early modern theatre; those who are interested in the history of erotic relations between men, and all who delight in puns and bawdy.

The John Donne volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers a wholly new edition of Donne's verse and prose. It consists of a selection of the compositions that circulated in manuscript or in print form during Donne's lifetime. In keeping with the approach of the series, the texts are presented in chronological order and the text chosen is, wherever possible, the text of the first published version. Each text is paired with a generous complement of historical and textual annotation, which enables the present day reader to access the excitement with which Donne's contemporaries, his first readers, discovered his famous and incomparable originality, audacity, ingenuity, and wit. The edition incorporates new directions and emphases in scholarly editing that are foregrounded in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series, such as the history of readership and the history of texts as material objects.

This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established prescriptive mandates for female use of space, concentrating especially on the liminal spaces of the home. This work traces literary prostitution in the Spanish Mediterranean through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the rise of courtesan culture in several key areas through the shift from tolerance of prostitution toward repression. Kuffner's analysis pairs canonical and noncanonical works of fiction with didactic writing, architectural treatises, and legal mandates, tying the literary practice of prostitution to increasing control over female sexuality during the Counter Reformation. By tracing erotic negotiations in the female picaresque novel from its origins through later manifestations, she demonstrates that even as societal attitudes towards prostitution shifted dramatically, a countervailing tendency to view prostitution as an essential part of the social fabric undergirds many representations of literary prostitutes. Kuffner's analysis reveals that the semblance of domestic enclosure figures as a primary erotic strategy in female picaresque fiction, allowing readers to assess the variety of strategies used by authors to comment on the relationship between unruly female sexuality and social order.

This introductory guide to "Othello" in performance offers a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key productions, a survey of screen adaptations, a sampling of critical opinion and further reading.

Dublin-born Thomas Southerne has long been admired by scholars as one of the most important dramatists of the Restoration, but the lack of a modern edition has prevented his plays from taking their deserved place alongside those of Congreve, Wycherly, and Etherege. This two-volume collection--based on an exhaustive study of the earliest editions--brings together his ten plays and the small surviving body of non-dramatic writing. Volume Two features two of Southerne's best known tragedies, The Fatal Marriage and Oroonoko, based on stories by Aphra Behn, and the variants between the censored and uncensored texts of his political tragedy The Spartan Dame. In addition, the introduction contains the first biography of Southerne based on a comprehensive study of the surviving documentary records, and the editors have incorporated generous notes to clarify the many contemporary allusions and to relate Southerne's work to its sources and models.

The Oxford Handbook of John Donne presents scholars with the history of Donne studies and provides tools to orient scholarship in this field in the twenty-first century and beyond. Though profoundly historical in its orientation, the Handbook is not a summary of existing knowledge but a resource that reveals patterns of literary and historical attention and the new directions that these patterns enable or obstruct.
Part I -- Research resources in Donne Studies and why they they matter -- emphasizes the heuristic and practical orientation of the Handbook, examining prevailing assumptions and reviewing the specialized scholarly tools available. This section provides a brief evaluation and description of the scholarly strengths, shortcomings, and significance of each resource, focusing on a balanced evaluation of the opportunities and the hazards each offers.
Part II -- Donne's genres -- begins with an introduction that explores the significance and differentiation of the numerous genres in which Donne wrote, including discussion of the problems posed by his overlapping and bending of genres. Essays trace the conventions and histories of the genres concered and study the ways in which Donne's works confirm how and why his "fresh invention" illustrates his responses to the literary and non-literary contexts of their composition.
Part III -- Biographical and historical contexts -- creates perspective on what is known about Donne's life; shows how his life and writings epitomized and affected important controversial issues of his day; and brings to bear on Donne studies some of the most stimulating and creative ideas developed in recent decades by historians of early modern England.
Part IV -- Problems of literary interpretation that have been traditionally and generally important in Donne Studies -- introduces students and researchers to major critical debates affecting the reception of Donne from the 17th through to the 21st centuries.

The funeral elegy is in some ways the quintessential English Renaissance genre. This book demonstrates how the hospitality of elegy to different styles, genres and modes, alongside the primary formal obligation to fit the poem decorously to the subject, gave a special value to ingenuity. The elegist, like the sonneteer, had to prove (or at least protest) that the ingenuity was grounded in the subject and not merely indulged in as a species of self-advertisement or display. By the time Milton came to write "Lycidas", the vernacular funeral elegy had developed into a form - or rather a variety of possible forms - in which any educated person could perform. For younger poets the elegy eventually constituted a kind of laboratory in which they could put into notice what they had learned about composition. It also became, during the period covered in this study, a means of learning about decorum, of investigating, exploring, analyzing, representing, anatomizing social (and political) relationships on the occasion of the subject's death. "Melodious Tears" charts the history of the elegy from the time in the mid-16th century when it was exclusively the province of professional writers, the

This study provides a detailed account of the "Fables," including humour, the representation of animals, the literary qualities and the "moraliste" core. Dr Slater brings to light veiled satirical attacks, allusion to forgotten works and literature, and traces the obscure currents of thought, all this in the service of explicating the "fable" element.

Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions restores a lost chapter in the history of feminism and illuminates the complexity of the rights debates of the eighteenth century. As the English language followed the routes of trade and colonialism to become the lingua franca of much of the Atlantic world, women who experienced dispossession and violence on the one hand, and new freedoms and opportunities on the other, wrote about their experiences. English, Scots and Irish women; colonists and indigenous women; Loyalists and Patriots; religious leaders and scandal-dogged actresses; slaves and free women of color-this anthology puts all these eighteenth-century voices in conversation with one another in an unprecedented archive of primary sources that will become indispensable to students and scholars of the eighteenth century in English, history, and women's and gender studies.

From Milton and Donne to Anne Locke and Aemilia Lanyer, this guide to Renaissance poetry and prose explores key texts, contexts and connections and contains essential information on historical and cultural contexts and relevant literary criticism.

From Milton and Donne to Anne Locke and Aemilia Lanyer, this guide to Renaissance poetry and prose explores key texts, contexts and connections and contains essential information on historical and cultural contexts and relevant literary criticism.

• This book contains a wealth of essential information to create a complete guide to the period and is part of the first series to offer a comprehensive and accessible overview to the period
• June Waudby is extremely well known in the field, and has over ten years of teaching experience
• The book contains features to improve the reader's understanding, including annotated timelines, bibliographies, and further reading

This original and innovative study is the first systematic exploration of Racine's theatricality. It is based on a close examination of all Racine's plays and on evidence for performance of them from the seventeenth century to the present day. David Maskell considers, with the help of illustrations, the relationship between verbal and visual effects. He shows how the decor in plays such as Andromaque, Britannicus and Berenice is significant for the action, and indicates the rich, often symbolic implication of stage properties and physical gestures, particularly in Mithridate, Phedre, and Athalie. Racine's usually neglected single comedy, Les Plaideurs, is shown to cast light on the theatrical language of his eleven tragedies. Some familiar topics of tragedy - moral ambiguity, error, and transcendence - emerge in a fresh light, and the concept of the tragic genre is critically examined from the theatrical standpoint. This study challenges many long-established views of Racine and lays the foundation for a reassessment of his role in French drama. It also opens new perspectives on his relationship with dramatists writing in other languages.

Written by a team of international experts, the forty-two essays in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser examine the entire canon of Spenser's work and the social and intellectual environments in which it was produced, providing new readings of the texts, extensive analysis of former criticism, and up-to-date bibliographies. Section I, 'Contexts', elucidates the circumstances in which the poetry and prose were written, and suggests some of the major political, social, and professional issues with which the work engages. Section 2, 'Works', presents a series of new readings of the canon informed by the most recent scholarship. Section 3, 'Poetic Craft', provides a detailed analysis of what Spenser termed the poet's 'cunning', the linguistic, rhetorical, and stylistic skills that distinguish his writing. Section 4, 'Sources and Influences', examines a wide range of subtexts, intertexts, and analogues that contextualise the works within the literary conventions, traditions and genres upon which Spenser draws and not infrequently subverts. Section 5, 'Reception', grapples with the issue of Spenser's effect on succeeding generations of editors, writers, painters, and book-illustrators, while also attempting to identify the most salient and influential strands in the critical tradition. The volume serves as both companion and herald to the Oxford University Press edition of Spenser's Complete Works. No 'agreed' view of Spenser emerges from this work or is intended to. The contributors approach the texts from a variety of viewpoints and employ diverse methods of critical interpretation with a view to stimulating informed discussion and future scholarship.

This bracing and far-ranging study compares modern (post-1492) literary treatments of millenarian narratives--"end of the world" stories charting an ultimate battle between good and evil that destroys previous social structures and rings in a lasting new order. While present in many cultures for as long as tales have been told, these accounts take on a profound dramatic resonance in the context of Europe's centuries-long colonization of the American hemisphere.
With an impressive interdisciplinary approach that employs insights from history, ethnography, and theology, Thomas O. Beebee provides nuanced readings of the apocalyptic vision in a diverse group of forms and writers, stretching from the letters of Christopher Columbus to the lyrics of Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, the poetry of Ernesto Martinez, and the bestselling novels of the Left Behind franchise, among other works. Throughout, he pointedly illustrates how millennial discourse has been used as a technology of control to further national and imperial agendas while paradoxically, often simultaneously, serving the forces of resistance. Drawing on a wide variety of records, his analysis shows that repeated eruptions of imagined, epochal conflicts reveal native populations fighting against the eradication of traditional ways of life, making sense of unprecedented violence, and searching for sources of origin. It seems that Americans--North, South, Middle, and Caribbean--tend to define themselves by narrating their End.
Informed by extensive research and an imaginative marshalling of diverse insights, Beebee presents a comprehensive comparative treatment of millennial themes in works from English, French, Portuguese, andSpanish. In so doing, he illustrates that prophesies of telos, and the literature that imagines them, provide a vital context for understanding the connected yet distinct cultures that have shaped the American hemisphere.

This book seeks to isolate the special factors that generate Wordsworth's greatness as a poet. Setting out from a dissatisfaction with the current trend towards New Historicism in Wordsworthian criticism, it endeavours to qualify the social and political bias of that criticism by a renewed assertion of the poetic primacy of the personal and the qualitative. Taking Marjorie Levinson's reading of `Tintern Abbey' as the book's starting point, McFarland sets forth a different way of approaching the poem, and then identifies `intensity' as the secret of Wordsworth's power. The permutations of that quality are illustrated by careful examinations of `Ruth', of the `spots of time', and of `Home at Grasmere', which is revealed as containing the incandescent centre of Wordsworth's values. There follow chapters on Wordsworth's dessication, which is seen as precisely the absence of intensity; and on the aspiration of The Recluse, which is seen to fail largely because the personal intensity necessary to complete the venture had been used up in the opening of `Home at Grasmere'. McFarland then discusses the special way in which Wordsworth assumed the prophetic stance which was essential to his poetic vision and was adopted in the intense personal confidence that he possessed the truth. The book concludes with a reading of The Borderers, not as a successful play but as a disposal chamber for the dark matter of Wordsworth's cosmos; the writing of the play is seen as necessary to clear the way for the purified current of Wordsworthian intensity to flow towards supreme poetic achievement.

The Face of Mammon studies the gold and silver coins of sixteenth-century England as they are articulated in literary writing. Landreth argues that the coinage of the sixteenth century is a very different object from the money that we know-- not only formally but conceptually, in that modern money is the object proper to a discourse, economics, that had not yet taken shape in the sixteenth century. Instead, a Renaissance coin is an arena contested among multiple early modern discourses that each seek to encompass it, such as ontology, ethics, and politics. The writers central to this study--among them Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Nashe, and Donne--use the coin to demonstrate the interdependence of these competing discourses as they converge upon a single, ubiquitous object. For these authors, an understanding of the world that humans make for themselves relies upon understanding how the material world is made. The small circumference of the coin brings these contending worlds into contact.

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Foreword by George C. Schoolfield>

A scholarly edition of works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.