Why are there so few 'happily ever afters' in the Romantic-period verse romance? Why do so many poets utilise the romance and its parts to such devastating effect? Why is gender so often the first victim? The Romantic Paradox investigates the prevalence of death in the poetic romances of the Della Cruscans, Coleridge, Keats, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Byron, and posits that understanding the romance and its violent tendencies is vital to understanding Romanticism itself.

The appearance in 1609 of Shakespeare's Sonnets is cloaked in mystery and controversy, while the poems themselves are masterpieces of silence and deception. The intervening four centuries have done little to diminish either their mystique or their appeal, and recent years have witnessed an upsurge in interest in these brilliant and contentious lyrics. John Blades' penetrating study of the Sonnets is a highly lucid introduction to Shakespeare's subjects and poetic craft, involving detailed insights on the major themes, together with a comprehensive exploration of the Rival Poet and Dark Mistress sequences. Shakespeare: The Sonnets: - draws on an extensive range of sonnets, offering a line-by-line analysis that engages with the poems as masterworks in their own right, as well as registering their relationship with Shakespeare's dramas - locates the Sonnets in their Elizabethan and humanist framework, with a survey of the history of the sonnet form and rhetorical conventions within the context of the early modern period - concludes with a brief assessment of critical attitudes towards the Sonnets over the four centuries since their publication and an indepth examination of four important critics. Providing students with the critical and analytical skills with which to approach the Sonnets, and featuring a helpful glossary and suggestions for further study, this fascinating book is an indispensable guide.

The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700-1830 is a major new study of the place of the 'natural sublime' in the cultural history of the eighteenth century and Romantic period. Drawing on a range of scholarship on the eighteenth century and Romantic period, on the wider category of 'the sublime' in Western and European thought, and on the praxis of literary and historical exegesis, the book generates new cultural histories of the different species of the 'natural sublime' encountered by British and European travellers and explorers, including: the Alps; the Italian volcanoes, Vesuvius and Etna; the Arctic and the Antarctic; the deserts of central and southern Africa; and the universe being revealed by the new astronomy.

This innovative collection brings together a group of leading theatre historians to identify and exemplify a variety of productive new approaches to the investigation of plays, players, playwrights, playhouses and other aspects of theatre in the long eighteenth century. Their inquiries are multi-faceted, ranging from stage censorship and anti-theatricalism to the investigation of playhouse finances, from the performance representation of Othello and Oroonoko to the political resonances of adultery comedy, and from Garrick's vocal art to the interpretation of contemporary paintings of actors and actresses.

This book illuminates how the 'long eighteenth century' (1660-1800) persists in our present through screen and performance media, writing and visual art. Tracing the afterlives of the period from the 1980s to the present, it argues that these emerging and changing forms stage the period as a point of origin for the grounding of individual identity in personal memory, and as a site of foundational traumas that shape cultural memory.

Contents:
THE EARLY YEARS

Barker, Arthur. 'Milton's Schoolmasters.' Modern Language Review 32 (1937).

Miller, Leo. 'Milton's Clash with Chappell: A Suggested Reconstruction.' Milton Quarterly 14 (1980).

Hale, John K. 'Milton Plays the Fool: The Christ's College Salting 1628.' Classical and Modern Literature 20 (2000).

Rumrich, John. 'The Erotic Milton.' Texas Studies in Language and Literature 41 (1999).

Hill, John Spencer. 'Poet-Priest: Vocational Tension in Milton's Early Development.' Milton Studies 8 (1975).

Hanford, James Holly. 'Milton in Italy.' Annuale Mediaevale 5 (1964).

Friedman, Donald. 'Galileo and the Art of Seeing.' In Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradiction, edited by Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991).

THE MATURE YEARS

Miller, Leo. 'John Milton's 'Lost' Sonnet to Mary Powell.' Milton Quarterly 25 (1990).

Sirluck, Ernest. 'Milton's Idle Right Hand.' Journal of English and German Philology 60 (1961).

Corns, Thomas. 'Milton's Quest for Respectability.' Modern Language Research 77 (1982).

Woolrych, Austin. 'Milton and Cromwell: 'A Short but Scandalous Night of Interruption'.' In Achievements of the Left Hand, edited by Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974).

Hughes, Merritt Y. 'Milton as a Revolutionary.' English Literary History 10 (1943).

Hunter, William B. 'Some Speculations on the Nature of Milton's Blindness.' Journal of the History of Medicine 17 (1962).

Baruch, Franklin R. 'Milton's Blindness: The Conscious and Unconscious Patterns of Autobiography.' English Literary History 42 (1975).

Davies, Godfrey. 'Milton in 1660.' Huntington Library Quarterly 18 (1955).

Kermode, Frank. 'Milton in Old Age.' Southern Review 11 (1975).

MILTON'S LITERARY AFTERLIFE

Frank, Marcia. 'Staging Criticism, Staging Milton: John Dryden's The State of Innocence.' The Eighteenth Century 34 (1993).

Bostich, June. 'Miltonic Influence in 'The Rape of the Lock'.' Enlightenment Essays 4 (1973).

Wittreich, Joseph A. 'The Illustrious Dead: Milton's Legacy and Romantic Prophecy.' Milton and the Romantics 4 (1980).

Grundy, Joan. 'Hardy and Milton.' Thomas Hardy Annual 3 (1985).

Jenkins, Hugh. 'Jefferson (Re)Reading Milton.' Milton Quarterly 32 (1998).

Herron, Carolivia. 'Milton and Afro-American Literature.' In Re-Membering Milton, edited by Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987).

Drawing on the extraordinary wealth of scholarly and critical material on John Milton's life, works and influence, this collection of reprinted articles brings together the most illuminating scholarship that has been written about Milton in the last hundred years.
Volume five addresses some of the crucial issues in Milton's last two poems, published together in 1671.
Each volume contains articles exemplifying a wide range of critical approaches and scholarly methods offering the reader not only a broad introduction to one of England's greatest poets but also a vade mecum to the incredible diversity of literary critical activity that has characterized the field of Milton studies over the past century.

There are many 'Shakespeares', argue the contributors to this, the second volume of Alternative Shakespeares and the different versions emerge in a wide variety of cultural contexts: race, gender, sexuality and politics amongst others. Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 consists of entirely new essays by some of the world's leading Shakespearean critics. The topics covered include: Sexuality and Gender, Language and Power, Textualilty and Printing, Race and Shakespeare's Britain, New Historicist Criticism and the 'Gaze' of the Audience. In abandoning the search for any final and definitive 'meaning' in any of Shakepeare's plays, the contributors to Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 present an exciting and ultimately liberating challeneg to Shakespeare studies.

Drawing on the extraordinary wealth of scholarly and critical material on John Milton's life, works and influence, this collection of reprinted articles brings together the most illuminating scholarship that has been written about Milton in the last hundred years.
Volume three deals with the great polemical tracts that Milton composed during the Puritan Commonwealth on the liberty of the church, the liberty of the state, the liberty of the press and the liberty of the individual.
Each volume contains articles exemplifying a wide range of critical approaches and scholarly methods offering the reader not only a broad introduction to one of England's greatest poets but also a vade mecum to the incredible diversity of literary critical activity that has characterized the field of Milton studies over the past century.

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.

British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility argues that participants in the late eighteenth-century slavery debate developed a distinct sentimental rhetoric, using the language of the heart to powerful effect in the most important political and humanitarian battle of the time. Examining both familiar and unfamiliar texts, including poetry, novels, journalism, and political writing, Carey shows that salve-owners and abolitionists alike made strategic use of the rhetoric of sensibility in the hope of influencing a reading public thoroughly immersed in the 'cult of feeling'.

Product Note:
Volume 1 of the 5 volume facsimile collection Key Writings on Subcultures, 1535-1727: Classics from the Underworld [0-415-28675-1]

When it first appeared, The English Rogue was declared a forbidden book on account of its gross indecency. Copies were printed secretly and sold furtively at alehouses until 1665 when it was properly licensed. When requested, the author, Richard Head, declined to produce a second volume as it was his belief that the text had been interpreted as autobiographical and his reputation had suffered as a consequence. Francis Kirkman, who had acquired the rights to the work, set about the endeavour himself and wrote the remaining volumes, publishing them in 1671.
This is a reprint of the 1928 reissue containing Head's original book and two of Kirkman's added volumes.

Product Note:
Volume 4 of the 5 volume facsimile collection Key Writings on Subcultures, 1535-1727: Classics from the Underworld [0-415-28675-1]

Series Information:
Routledge Literary Sourcebooks

In this first study of the role of scepticism in literature, Fred Parker offers a lively and stimulating introduction to key issues in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy. Parker traces the presence of sceptical thinking in works by Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson, relates it more broadly to the social self-consciousness of eighteenth-century culture, and discusses its source in Locke and its inspiration in Montaigne.

This volume brings together new essays on the relations between fiction and the economy by eleven academics, all established or emergent scholars from different fields of expertise. The essays range widely in their respective foci, extending beyond purely literary studies to encompass history, the history of language, studies in the visual arts, and philosophy. Including essays from leading (and in some cases multilingual) academics in Europe as well as the UK, Fiction and Economy is genuinely international, distinctive, and broad in its scope.

The Critical Heritage series collects together criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a particular writer, showing students the formation of critical attitudes to the writer's work and its place within a literary tradition. Selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included to demonstrate posthumous fluctuations in the writer's reputation.
This new volume includes criticism the work of William Wordsworth between 1793 and 1820. Over 250 diary extracts, letters, reviews, comments, and opinions by and about Wordsworth are gathered together here for the first time. This is an invaluable addition to any literary library.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203169026

David and Bathsheba presents a modernised edition of George Peele's explosive biblical drama about the tangled lives, deadly liaisons, and twisted histories of Ancient Israel's royal family. Martin's critical edition is the first modern single-volume edition of the play since 1912 and opens up this unduly neglected gem of English Renaissance drama to student and scholar alike. The introduction examines such topics as the play's treatment of its biblical and poetic sources, its engagement with Elizabethan politics, and its forceful representations of religious fanaticism, genocide, and sexual violence. Its commentary notes clarify the text's meaning and staging, guide the reader through the play's dramatisation of the turbulent Davidic period of Ancient Israel's history, and place the play in its broader cultural and artistic milieu. Martin's edition aims to encourage new contemporary critical study of Peele's powerful and disturbing drama. -- .

During the 19 years of her play-writing career, Aphra Behn had far more new plays staged than anyone else. This book is the first to examine all her theatrical work. It explains her often dominant place in the complex theatrical culture of Charles II's reign, her divided political sympathies, and her interests as a free-thinking intellectual. It also reveals her to be a brilliant theatrical practitioner who used the seen as richly and significantly as the spoken.

This six-volume anthology documents the history of women's drama throughout the 18th century, starting with the emergence in 1695-6 of the second generation of women dramatists in succession to Aphra Benn. Containing a representative selection of newly edited and annotated texts by leading woman dramatists of the period from 1696 to 1800, the anthology reflects the changes in Britain's global realignment in class models and perception of other peoples.

Vitalism is usually associated with Romantic theories of nature, but the supposition of a 'vital principle' or life-force recurred throughout eighteenth-century natural philosophy, to counter the inadequacy of mechanism to understand the operation of natural life. This book traces the persistent presence of a language of vital nature not only in eighteenth-century science, but in literary and philosophical writing too: in moral philosophy, theories of sensibility and political economy, and in the radical journalism and women's writing of the 1790s. It explores the influence of the Scottish vitalist physiology of Robert Whytt and others on writers and thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith, David Hume, Erasmus Darwin, John Hunter, John Thelwall and Mary Wollstonecraft. In doing so, it shows the centrality of vitalism to eighteenth-century accounts of the body, nature, matter and life, and offers a new way of understanding the relationship between eighteenth-century science and culture and that of the Romantic period.

For this edition David Norbrook has provided an extensive introduction which gives an overview of developments in methodology and research since the first edition in 1984, responds to some criticisms, and points the way to further inquiry. Footnotes have been updated to take account of the current state of knowledge, and a chronological table has been provided for ease of reference. Norbrook brings out the range and adventurousness of early modern poets' engagements with the public world The first part of the book establishes the more radical currents of thought shaping Renaissance poetry: civic humanism and apocalyptic Protestantism. Norbrook then shows how such leading Elizabethan poets as Sidney and Spenser, often seen as conservative monarchists, responded powerfully though sometimes ambivalently to more radical ideas. A chapter on Fulke Greville shows how that ambivalence reaches an extreme in some remarkable poetry.

Empire's Children places classic British children's fictional texts into the cultural context of imperial Britain, focusing on themes of patriotism and imperialism from 1895 to about 1945. The book begins with Rudyard Kipling and ends with Arthur Ransome, examining the crucial years from the height of Britain's empire at the end of the nineteenth century to its waning years prior to the Second World War.Empire's Children explores the way that British imperialist tendencies lingered into children's texts well into the 1980s.
Other writers examined include Frances Hodgson Burnett, E. Nesbitt, A.A. Milne and Hugh Lofting, all of whom continue in print and all of whom were enormously popular and well-regarded authors of their time.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203906853

Key Features: * Study methods * Introduction to the text * Summaries with critical notes * Themes and techniques * Textual analysis of key passages * Author biography * Historical and literary background * Modern and historical critical approaches * Chronology * Glossary of literary terms