This collection of essays examines Austen in relation to her business. Many of these essays, including those by Julia Prewitt Brown, Margaret Drabble, Jan Fergus, Isobel Grundy, Gary Kelly, and Elaine Showalter, were first delivered as papers at the Lake Louise conference on "Persuasion". The collection's culmination is a short story by Margaret Drabble that aims to bring Austen's "Elliots of Kellynch Hall" into the 20th century.

This collection of thirteen essays by an international group of scholars focuses on the impact of the Protestant Reformation on Donne's life, theology, poetry, and prose. The early transition from Catholicism to Protestantism was a complicated journey for England, as individuals sorted out their spiritual beliefs, chose their political allegiances, and confronted an array of religious differences that had sprung forth in their society since the reign of Henry VIII. Inner anxieties often translated into outward violence. Amidst this turmoil the poet and Protestant preacher John Donne (1572-1631) emerged as a central figure, one who encouraged peace among Christians. Raised a Catholic but ordained in 1615 as an Anglican clergyman, Donne publicly identified himself with Protestantism, and yet scholars have long questioned his theological orientation. Drawing upon recent scholarship in church history, the authors of this collection reconsider Donne's relationship to Protestantism and clearly demonstrate the political and theological impact of the Reformation on his life and writings. The collection includes thirteen essays that together place Donne broadly in the context of English and European traditions and explore his divine poetry, his prose work, the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and his sermons. It becomes clear that in adopting the values of the Reformation, Donne does not completely reject everything from his Catholic background. Rather, the clash of religion erupts in his work in both moving and disconcerting ways. This collection offers a fresh understanding of Donne's hardwon irenicism, which he achieved at great personal and professional risk.

The Jew of Malta, written around 1590, can present a challenge for modern audiences. Hugely popular in its day, the play swings wildly and rapidly in genre, from pointed satire, to bloody revenge tragedy, to melodramatic intrigue, to dark farce and grotesque comedy. Although set in the Mediterranean island of Malta, the play evokes contemporary Elizabethan social tensions, especially the highly charged issue of London's much-resented community of resident merchant foreigners. Barabas, the enormously wealthy Jew of the play's title, appears initially victimized by Malta's Christian Governor, who quotes scripture to support the demand that Jews cede their wealth to pay Malta's tribute to the Turks. When he protests, Barabas is deprived of his wealth, his means of livelihood, and his house, which is converted to a nunnery. In response to this hypocritical extortion, Barabas launches a horrific (and sometimes hilarious) course of violence that goes well beyond revenge, using murderous tactics that include everything from deadly soup to poisoned flowers. The play's sometimes complex treatment of anti-Semitism and its relationship to Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice remain matters of continuing scholarly reflection. This new edition is expertly edited with an accompanying introduction that addresses issues of performance, cultural and historical context, interpretation and the key themes explored by the play. Arden Early Modern Drama editions offer the best in contemporary scholarship, providing a wealth of helpful and incisive commentary and guiding the reader to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the play. This edition provides: A clear and authoritative text Detailed on-page commentary notes A comprehensive, illustrated introduction to the play's historical, cultural and performance contexts A bibliography of references and further reading

This chronology, like others in the series, presents the story of Dr Johnson's life in a readily accessible format to provide scholar and general reader alike with a quick guide to dates, people and places together with supplementary indexes.

Analyses the relationships among the socio-historical contexts, generic forms, and rhetorical strategies of British West Indian slave narratives. Grounded by the syncretic theories of creolisation and testimonio it breaks new ground by reading these dictated and fragmentary narratives on their own terms as examples of 'creole testimony'.

This is the first book to deploy the methods and ensemble of questions from Afro-pessimism to engage and interrogate the methods of Early Modern English studies. Using contemporary Afro-pessimist theories to provide a foundation for structural analyses of race in the Early Modern Period, it engages the arguments for race as a fluid construction of human identity by addressing how race in Early Modern England functioned not only as a marker of human identity, but also as an a priori constituent of human subjectivity. Chapman argues that Blackness is the marker of social death that allows for constructions of human identity to become transmutable based on the impossibility of recognition and incorporation for Blackness into humanity. Using dramatic texts such as Othello, Titus Andronicus, and other Early Modern English plays both popular and lesser known, the book shifts the binary away from the currently accepted standard of white/non-white that defines "otherness" in the period and examines race in Early Modern England from the prospective of a non-black/black antagonism. The volume corrects the Afro-pessimist assumption that the Triangle Slave Trade caused a rupture between Blackness and humanity. By locating notions of Black inhumanity in England prior to chattel slavery, the book positions the Triangle Trade as a result of, rather than the cause of, Black inhumanity. It also challenges the common scholarly assumption that all varying types of human identity in Early Modern England were equally fluid by arguing that Blackness functioned as an immutable constant. Through the use of structural analysis, this volume works to simplify and demystify notions of race in Renaissance England by arguing that race is not only a marker of human identity, but a structural antagonism between those engaged in human civil society opposed to those who are socially dead. It will be an essential volume for those with interest in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Shakespeare, Contemporary Performance Theory, Black Studies, and Ethnic Studies.

Whenever Shakespeare wrote a 'shrew' into one of his plays he created a character who challenged ideas about acceptable behaviour for a woman. This is as true today as when the plays were first performed. A shrew is a woman who refuses to be quiet when she is told to be, who says things that people do not want to hear. She is constructed to alleviate male anxieties through ridicule, but like so many objects of comedy or derision, she is full of power because of her very ability to generate these anxieties. 'Shrew' is supposed to be an insult, but has often been used to describe women enacting behaviour that can be brave, clever, noble or just. This book marries an examination of Shakespeare's shrews in his plays with their history in recent performance, to investigate our own attitudes to hearing women with defiant voices.

Covering a wide range of authors, among them Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Clare, Mary Shelley, and Disraeli, Cronin brings light and order to one of the murkiest quarters in recent British literary history. Brimming with intelligent and original perceptions about authors or works that have fallen through literary-historical cracks, Romantic Victorians offers shrewd assessments of their formal and tactical designs. This is a literary period in which literature fully entered the marketplace, and in which an ideology was constitued - civic, domestic, Christian and imperial - that was to inform British society for more than a century. These are among the issues that Cronin addresses and, in so doing, successfully restructures nineteenth-century literary studies.

This book offers an original account of the development of literary biography in the long eighteenth century and reveals different ways in which biographers probed the inner life through writers' melancholy. The first half tracks the unstable status of melancholy in biographical writing from Walton to Johnson in the context of changing medical and theological understanding of the condition.The second half focuses on biographical experimentation of the 1790s. Two case studies, Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft and Currie's Life of Burns, are examples of a significant if short-lived genre: philosophical biography. The dispassionate exploration of melancholy in these new secular biographies renders obsolete older notions of the 'dignity' of biography. Anxieties about the increasingly intrusive nature of the genre intensify over Hayley's Life of Cowper, coming to a head in 1816 with Wordsworth's impassioned critique of literary biography and the scandal caused by Cowper's posthumously published conversion narrative Adelphi.

This volume discusses the lives and writings of five nonconformist women who comprised the heart of a vibrant literary circle in England between 1760 and 1840. Whelan shows these women's keen awareness and often radical viewpoints on contemporary issues connected to politics, religion, gender, and the Romantic sensibility.

Through the prism of intimacy, Burleigh sheds light on eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century American texts. This insightful study shows how the trope of the family recurred to produce contradictory images - both intimately familiar and frighteningly alienating - through which Americans responded to upheavals in their cultural landscape.

McMaster's lively study looks at the various codes by which eighteenth-century novelists made the minds of their characters legible through their bodies. She tellingly explores the discourses of medicine, physiognomy, gesture and facial expression, completely familiar to contemporary readers but not to us, in ways that enrich our reading of such classics as "Clarissa" and "Tristram Shandy," as well as of novels by Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.

"Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture" explores the conjunction of authorship and family life as a distinctive cultural formation of Romantic-era Britain. Through examination of the practices and texts of literary families, the book traces an alternative history of Romantic authorship, one that lies on the cusp between a vanishing manuscript culture and the dominance of print; that reflects a struggle in Romantic self-identity between communities of feeling and individual genius; and that grapples with an evolving tension between the private and public spheres.

Early modern drama is steeped in biblical language, imagery and stories. This collection examines the pervasive presence of scripture on the early modern stage. Exploring plays by writers such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton, and Webster, the contributors show how theatre offers a site of public and communal engagement with the Bible.

Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World explores a range of images and texts that shed light on the complexity of the European reception and interpretation of the New World. Jonathan Hart examines Columbus's first representation of the natives and the New World, the representation of him in subsequent ages, the portrayal of America in sexual terms, the cultural intricacies brought into play by a variety of translators and mediators, the tensions between the aesthetic and colonial in Shakespeare's The Tempest, and a discussion of cultural and voice appropriation that examines the colonial in the postcolonial. This book brings the comparative study of the cultural past of the Americas and the Atlantic world into focus as it relates to the present.

'Linguistic' theories in the eighteenth-century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as 'aesthetic' theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question 'what is beauty?' Edward Nye charts the way in which a wide range of language theorists answer this question, and how their ideas complement contemporary literary debates about poetry, prose, preciosity, style, and artistic representation in general.

Material Culture and Sedition, 1688-1760 is a groundbreaking study of the ways in which material culture was used to avoid prosecution for treason and sedition in the eighteenth century. Challenging existing accounts of the public sphere and consumer culture, it argues that the birth of modern Britain was accompanied by political repression which helped develop a counter-culture of treacherous objects and secret societies. Though set in the Jacobite period in the British Isles, it considers transnational evidence and sets out an approach which can be applied in a wide variety of other contexts.

How did Spanish-American writers and veterans in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century use epic poetry to search for ethical solutions to the violent conflicts of their age? Winner of the 2017-18 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize The Epic Mirror studies how Spanish-American writers and veterans in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century used epic poetry to search for ethical solutions to the violent conflicts of their age. The wars about which they wrote took place at the frontiers of the Spanish empire, where new political communities were emerging: fiercely independent Amerindian republics, rebellious Spanish settlers, maroon kingdoms of fugitive African slaves. This colonial reality generated a distinctive vision of just warfare and political community. Working across the fields of Hispanic literature, the history of political thought, and studies of empire, colonialism and globalisation, Choi reinterprets three major works of colonial Latin American literature: Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana (1569-90), Pedro de Ona's Arauco domado (1596), and Juan de Miramontes Zuazola's Armas antarticas (1608-9). She argues that these works provide a rare insight into the development of political thought in Viceregal Peru. Through the imaginative mirrors of epic, the reader is forced to ask the same questions of the unfinished conquests of the Americas as of those in Africa, Asia or Europe: when conflicting forces are divided by irreconcilable world views, even if the war is won, how is it possible to achieve peace?

If the first phase of feminist criticism of English Renaissance studies unduly stressed women's victimization, the revisionist trend, this collection argues, is in denial about gender inequality altogether. This exciting volume represents the newest, post-revisionist phase of feminist criticism, which tries to integrate the vital insights of both earlier phases of scholarship and to establish a more accurate and nuanced picture of women's relation to early modern English culture. Features an Afterword by Gail Kern Paster and contributions from Jean Howard, Kate Chedgzoy and Grace Ioppolo, amongst others.

Dubbed 'the English Virgil' in his own lifetime, Spenser has been compared to the Augustan laureate ever since. He invited the comparison, expecting a readership intimately familiar with Virgil's works to notice and interpret his rich web of allusion and imitation, but also his significant departures and transformations.This volume considers Spenser's pastoral poetry, the genre which announces the inception of a Virgilian career in The Shepheardes Calender, and to which he returns in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, throwing the 'Virgilian career' into reverse. His sustained dialogue with Virgil's Eclogues bewrays at once a profound debt to Virgil and a deep-seated unease with his values and priorities, not least his subordination of pastoral to epic. Drawing on the commentary tradition and engaging with current critical debates, this study of Spenser's interpretation, imitation and revision of Virgil casts new light on both poets-and on the genre of pastoral itself. -- .

"Historicizing Blake" puts Blake back into the cultural context of his times. These essays by both established and younger scholars re-address Blake's contemporary milieu after the neglect of ten years of post-structuralist, reader-orientated, methodology. By employing notions of history wider than the purely 'literary', and featuring an important new essay by the period's foremost subcultural historian, lain McCalman, "Historicizing Blake" represents a significant contribution towards the re-historicizing of Romanticism.

What constituted the 'private' in the eighteenth-century? In Representing private lives of the Enlightenment authors look beyond a simple equation of the private and the domestic to explore the significance of the individual and its constructions of identity and environment. Taking case studies from Russia, France, Italy and England, specialists from a range of disciplines analyse descriptions of the private situated largely outside the familial context: the nobleman at the theatre or in his study, the woman in her boudoir, portraitists and their subject, the solitary wanderer in the public garden, the penitent at confession. This critical approach provides a comparative framework that simultaneously confirms the Enlightenment as a pan-European movement, both intellectually and socially, whilst uncovering striking counterpoints. What emerges is a unique sense of how individuals from different classes and cultures sought to map their social and domestic sphere, and an understanding of the permeable boundaries separating private and public.

A thorough and scholarly study of Spenser and Shakespeare and their contrary artistry, covering themes of theology, psychology, the depictions of passion and intellect, moral counsel, family hierarchy, self-love, temptation, folly, allegory, female heroism, the supernatural and much more. Renaissance psychologies examines the distinct and polarised emphasis of these two towering intellects and writers of the early modern period. It demonstrates how pervasive was the influence of Spenser on Shakespeare, as in the "playful metamorphosis of Gloriana into Titania" in A Midsummer Night's Dream and its return from Spenser's moralizing allegory to the Ovidian spirit of Shakespeare's comedy. It will appeal to students and lecturers in Spenser studies, Renaissance poetry and the wider fields of British literature, social and cultural history, ethics and theology. -- .

In this study, Kathryn Walls challenges the standard identification of Una with the post-Reformation English Church, arguing that she is, rather, Augustine's City of God - the invisible Church, whose membership is known only to God. Una's story (its Tudor resonances notwithstanding) therefore embraces that of the Synagogue before the Incarnation as well as that of the Church in the time of Christ and thereafter. It also allegorises the redemptive process that sustains the true Church. Una is fallible in canto I. Subsequently, however, she comes to embody divine perfection. Her transformation depends upon the intervention of the lion as Christ. Convinced of the consistency and coherence of Spenser's allegory, Walls offers fresh interpretations of Abessa (as Synagoga), of the fauns and satyrs (the Gentiles), and of Una's dwarf (adiaphoric forms of worship). She also reinterprets Spenser's marriage metaphor, clarifying the significance of Red Cross as Una's spouse in the final canto. -- .