This book challenges the status quo of studies in literature and religion by returning to "experience" as a bridge between theory and practice. Essays focus on keywords of religious experience and demonstrate their applications in drama, fiction, and poetry. Each chapter explores the broad significance of its keyword as a category of psychological and social behavior and tracks its unique articulation by individual authors, including Conrad, Beecher Stowe and Melville. Together, the chapters construct a critical foundation for studying literature not only from the perspectives of theology and historicism but from the ways that literary experience reflects, reinforces, and sometimes challenges religious experience.

"Blake, Nation and Empire" challenges the orthodoxy of the politics of William Blake as exclusively radical, defined by his participation in the revolutionary ferment of the 1790s. It examines his work in the context of emergent discourses of nation and empire, and of the construction of a public sphere, and restores the longevity to his artistic career by placing particular emphasis on his output in the 1820s. Relevant contexts include technology, sentimentalism, Ireland and Catholic Emancipation, missionary prospectuses and body politics. Blake's work is shown not only to be complexly embedded in the culture of his time but also to prefigure and contest the imperial century of pax Britannica.

This book explores the use of the Biblical text of the Song of Songs in seventeenth-century England. It charts the period's fascination with the idea of the mystical marriage, and shows how this image was implicated in the conflicts and political struggles of the time. It investigates the appeal of the Song of Songs to women authors and popular writers, and helps to explain some of the extraordinary developments in seventeenth-century English culture.

Responding to recent historical analyses of Post-Reformation English Catholicism, the essays in this collection by both literary scholars and historians focus on polemical, devotional, political, and literary texts that dramatize the conflicts between context-sensitive Catholic and anti-Catholic discourses in early modern England. They foreground some major literary authors and canonical texts, but also examine non-canonical literature as well as other writings that embody ideological fantasies connecting the political and religious discourses of the time with their literary manifestations.

Focusing on a burgeoning area of interest, this new study illustrates relations between legal and theatrical discourses in a range of plays. The essays focus on four general areas of interest to establish the vital connections between early modern drama and law during this seminal period in their professionalization: legal language and its construction of social norms and realities, positive law and the status of nature; the concept of property and its contractual guarantees; and the creation of power and authority under the law.

Ruling Women is the first study of its kind devoted to an analysis of the debate concerning government by women in seventeenth-century France. Drawing on a wide range of political, feminist and dramatic texts, Conroy sets out to demonstrate that the dominant discourse which upholds patriarchy at the time is frequently in conflict with alternative discourses which frame gynaecocracy as a feasible, and laudable reality, and which reconfigure (wittingly or unwittingly) the normative paradigm of male authority. Central to the argument is an analysis of how the discourse which constructs government as a male prerogative quite simply implodes when juxtaposed with the traditional political discourse of virtue ethics. In Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century France, the first volume of the two-volume study, the author examines the dominant discourse which excludes women from political authority before turning to the configuration of women and rulership in the pro-woman and egalitarian discourses of the period. Highly readable and engaging, Conroy's work will appeal to those interested in the history of women in political thought and the history of feminism, in addition to scholars of seventeenth-century literature and history of ideas.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Tonsons were the pre-eminent literary publishers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It is difficult to estimate their contribution to the formation of English literature accurately. Nevertheless, it is clear that they carried Shakespeare into the eighteenth century and started the practice of modern editing of him. Without Rowe's life and without the Pope-Theobald controversy, the history of Shakespeare studies would have been different, perhaps much less illustrious. The same is true of Milton, a figure who through his political sympathies was in disrepute, but on whom Jacob Tonson the elder (and his nephew after him) decided to lavish the care, eventually including illustration and annotation, usually reserved for the classics. Later they issued an edition of Spenser by John Hughes, thus creating the triumvirate who for many years were to dominate the study of English renaissance literature. It is not unreasonable to claim that the house of Tonson invented English literature as matter for repeated reading and study. In addition, of course, the Tonsons were Dryden's main publisher, the first to publish Pope, and the consistent supporters of Addison and Steele and their early periodicals, while Jacob Tonson the elder had earlier shaped the miscellany, the translation of classical poetry into English, the pocket Elzevier series, and the luxury edition - practices carried on by the Tonson firm throughout the eighteenth century. They were at the forefront of the creation of a Whig literary culture and Jacob Tonson the elder was the founder of the famous Whig Kit-Cat Club which, it has been said, saved the nation. This edition brings together the correspondences of the Tonsons for the first time and represents a major intervention in the field of the history of the book and literary production. It includes 158 letters, with translations where necessary, from major authors, politicians, and men and women of letters of the period, discussing their work and the role that the Tonsons played in getting literature to the press and the reading nation. The letters are accompanied by generous and insightful annotation, as well as brief biographies of each of the Tonsons, and special sections on publishing, patronage, and retirement.

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 provides a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Focusing on the relationship between the repertory system and the conventions and content of the plays, Jeremy Lopez proposes that understanding the potential for theatrical failure (the way playwrights anticipated it and audiences responded to it) is crucial for understanding the way in which the drama succeeded on the stage.

This book investigates the critical importance of women to the eighteenth-century debate on property as conducted in the fiction of the period. April London argues that contemporary novels advanced several, often conflicting, interpretations of the relation of women to property, ranging from straightforward assertions of equivalence between women and things to subtle explorations of the self-possession open to those denied a full civic identity. Two contemporary models for the defining of selfhood through reference to property structure the book, one historical (classical republicanism and bourgeois individualism), and the other literary (pastoral and georgic). These paradigms offer a cultural context for the analysis of both canonical and less well-known writers, from Samuel Richardson and Henry Mackenzie to Clara Reeve and Jane West. While this study focuses on fiction from 1740-1800, it also draws on the historiography, literary criticism and philosophy of the period, and on recent feminist and cultural 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.

As the notion of government by consent took hold in early modern England, many authors used childhood and maturity to address contentious questions of political representation - about who has a voice and who can speak on his or her own behalf. For John Milton, Ben Jonson, William Prynne, Thomas Hobbes and others, the period between infancy and adulthood became a site of intense scrutiny, especially as they examined the role of a literary education in turning children into political actors. Drawing on new archival evidence, Blaine Greteman argues that coming of age in the seventeenth century was a uniquely political act. His study makes a compelling case for understanding childhood as a decisive factor in debates over consent, autonomy and political voice, and will offer graduate students and scholars a new perspective on the emergence of apolitical children's literature in the eighteenth century.

This book shows that the sounds of the early modern stage do not only signify but are also significant. Sounds are weighted with meaning, offering a complex system of allusions. Playwrights such as Jonson and Shakespeare developed increasingly experimental soundscapes, from the storms of King Lear (1605) and Pericles (1607) to the explosive laboratory of The Alchemist (1610). Yet, sound is dependent on the subjectivity of listeners; this book is conscious of the complex relationship between sound as made and sound as heard. Sound effects should not resound from scene to scene without examination, any more than a pun can be reshaped in dialogue without acknowledgement of its shifting connotations. This book listens to sound as a rhetorical device, able to penetrate the ears and persuade the mind, to influence and to affect. -- .

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.