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 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.

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.

Through an incisive analysis of the emerging debates surrounding urbanization in the Romantic period, together with close readings of poets including William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stephen Tedeschi explores the notion that the Romantic poets criticized the historical form that the process of urbanization had taken, rather than urbanization itself. The works of the Romantic poets are popularly considered in a rural context and often understood as hostile to urbanization - one of the most profound social transformations of the era. By focusing on the urban aspects of such writing, Tedeschi re-orientates the relationship between urbanization and English Romantic poetry to deliver a study that discovers how the Romantic poets examined not only the influence of urbanization on poetry but also how poetry might help to reshape the form that urbanization could take.

This 1991 book examines the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the literature of the French Renaissance by exploring the issues of gender, the body, and repression in many of the key literary texts of the period, including Sceve, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, and Montaigne. By means of detailed readings of individual texts, Lawrence Kritzman examines how sexuality functions as a rhetorical trope through which desire is represented. Professor Kritzman's study concentrates on three major objectives: the issues of gender identity and sexual difference in French Renaissance texts; the question of how the body is represented in the blasons, love poetry and prose of the period; and the way in which figural language depicts the libidinal, political and social tensions at work in texts. It was the first wide-ranging theoretical study to provide reading models to investigate the taboo subject of sexuality underlying literary production in the French Renaissance.

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.

When Hamlet complains that Guildenstern 'would pluck out the heart of [his] mystery', he imagines an encounter that recurs insistently in the discourses of early modern England. The struggle by one man to discover the secrets in another's heart is rehearsed not only in plays but in legal records, correspondence, philosophical writing and contemporary social description. In this book Elizabeth Hanson argues that the construction of other people as objects of discovery signalled a reconceptualizing of the 'subject' in both the political and philosophical sense of the term. She examines the records of state torture, plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, 'cony-catching' pamphlets and Francis Bacon's philosophical writing, to demonstrate that the subject was both under suspicion and empowered in this period. Her account revises earlier attempts to locate the emergence of modern subjectivity in the Renaissance, arguing for a more nuanced and localized understanding of the relationship with its medieval past.

Jonathan Swift was the most influential political commentator of his time, in both England and Ireland. His writings are a major source for historians of the eighteenth century, as well as including some of the greatest works of satire in verse and prose. This volume presents wide-ranging new perspectives on Swift's literary and political achievement in its English and Irish contexts, bringing together some of the most energetic current scholarship on the subject in both historical and literary studies. The essays consider Swift's attitude to Dissenters, his relationship with Walpole, and his place in, and understanding of, the political demography of colonial Ireland. They also examine Swift's poems and pamphlets, and his hoaxes and satires, showing his extraordinary versatility in a wide variety of genres. Full of original insights, this volume offers a rich and important new treatment of Swift's central role in eighteenth-century political and literary culture.

In 1642 an ordinance closed the theatres of England. Critics and historians have assumed that the edict was to be firm and inviolate. Susan Wiseman challenges this assumption and argues that the period 1640 to 1660 was not a gap in the production and performance of drama nor a blank space between 'Renaissance drama' and the 'Restoration stage'. Rather, throughout the period, writers focused instead on a range of dramas with political perspectives, from republican to royalist. This group included the short pamphlet dramas of the 1640s and the texts produced by the writers of the 1650s, such as William Davenant, Margaret Cavendish and James Shirley. In analysing the diverse forms of dramatic production of the 1640s and 1650s, Wiseman reveals the political and generic diversity produced by the changes in dramatic production, and offers insights into the theatre of the Civil War.

Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600 81) is Spain's most important early modern dramatist. His varied career as a playwright, courtier, soldier and priest placed him at the heart of Spanish culture, and he reflected on contemporary events in his plays, most famously La vida es sueno (Life is a Dream). In this 2009 scholarly biography of Calderon in English, Don Cruickshank uses his command of the archival sources and his unparalleled understanding of Calderon's work to chart his life and his political, literary and religious contexts. In addition, the book includes much fresh research into Calderon's writings and their attributions. This elegant, erudite work will bring Calderon to a new audience both within and beyond Spanish studies. With illustrations, extensive notes and a detailed index, this is the most comprehensive English-language book on Calderon, and it will long remain the key work of reference on this important author.

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.