The New Milton Criticism seeks to emphasize ambivalence and discontinuity in Milton's work and interrogate the assumptions and certainties in previous Milton scholarship. Contributors to the volume move Milton's open-ended poetics to the centre of Milton studies by showing how analysing irresolvable questions - religious, philosophical and literary critical - transforms interpretation and enriches appreciation of his work. The New Milton Criticism encourages scholars to embrace uncertainties in his writings rather than attempt to explain them away. Twelve critics from a range of countries, approaches and methodologies explore these questions in these new readings of Paradise Lost and other works. Sure to become a focus of debate and controversy in the field, this volume is a truly original contribution to early modern studies.

This book examines how Methodism and popular review criticism intersected with and informed each other in the eighteenth century. Methodism emerged at a time when the idea of a 'public square' was taking shape, a process facilitated by the periodical press. Perhaps more so than any previous religious movement, Methodism, and the publications associated with it, received greater scrutiny largely because of periodical literature and the emergence of popular review criticism. The book considers in particular how works addressing Methodism were discussed and critiqued in the era's two leading literary periodicals - The Monthly Review and The Critical Review. Focusing on the period between 1749 and 1789, the study encompasses the formative years of popular review criticism and some of the more dramatic moments in the textual culture of early Methodism. The author illustrates some of the specific ways these review journals diverged in their critical approaches and sensibilities as well as their politics and religious opinions. The Monthly's and the Critical's responses to the Methodists' own publishing efforts as well as the anti-Methodist critique are shown to be both multifaceted and complex. The book critically reflects on the pretended neutrality, reasonableness, and objectivity of reviewers, who at times found themselves negotiating between the desire to regulate literary tastes and the impulse to undermine the Methodist revival. It will be relevant to scholars of religion, history and literary studies with an interest in Methodism, print culture, and the eighteenth century.

This is the first comprehensive study of the Renaissance commonplace-book. Commonplace-books were the information-organizers of Early Modern Europe, notebooks of quotations methodically arranged for easy retrieval. From their first introduction to the rudiments of Latin to the specialized studies of leisure reading of their later years, the pupils of humanist schools were trained to use commonplace-books, which formed an immensely important element of Renaissance education. The common-place book mapped and resourced Renaissance culture's moral thinking, its accepted strategies of argumentation, its rhetoric, and its deployment of knowledge. In this ground-breaking study Ann Moss investigates the commonplace-book's medieval antecedents, its methodology and use as promulgated by its humanist advocates, its varieties as exemplified in its printed manifestations, and the reasons for its gradual decline in the seventeenth century. The book covers the Latin culture of Early Modern Europe and its vernacular counterparts and continuations, particularly in France. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought is much more than an account of humanist classroom practice: it is a major work of cultural history.

First published in this Cambridge edition during 1910, as the second of two volumes making up The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, this book contains the original texts of The Glasse of Governement, The Princely Pleasures at Kenelworth Castle and The Steele Glas, together with other poems and prose works. Appendices and illustrative figures are also included, along with an index of titles and first lines. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Gascoigne's works and Renaissance literature in general.

Originally published in this Cambridge edition during 1907, as the first of two volumes making up The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, this book contains the 1575 text of The Posies of George Gascoigne, Esquire in its totality. An index of titles and first lines is also included, together with a short appendix section. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Gascoigne's works and Renaissance literature in general.

Paul Keen explores how a consumer revolution which reached its peak in the second half of the eighteenth century shaped debates about the role of literature in a polite modern nation, and tells the story of the resourcefulness with which many writers responded to these pressures. From dream reveries which mocked their own entrepreneurial commitments, such as Oliver Goldsmith's account of selling his work at a 'Fashion Fair' on the frozen Thames, to the Microcosm's mock plan to establish 'a licensed warehouse for wit', writers insistently tied their literary achievements to a sophisticated understanding of the uncertain complexities of a modern transactional society. This book combines a new understanding of late eighteenth-century literature with the materialist and sociological imperatives of book history and theoretically inflected approaches to cultural history.

Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice develops new approaches to reading literature that are informed by the insights of scholars working in affect studies across many disciplines, with essays that consider works of fiction, drama, poetry and memoir ranging from the medieval to the postmodern. While building readings of representative texts, contributors reflect on the value of affect theory to literary critical practice, asking: what explanatory power is affect theory affording me here as a critic? what can the insights of the theory help me do with a text? Contributors work to incorporate lines of theory not always read together, accounting for the affective intensities that circulate through texts and readers and tracing the operations of affectively charged social scripts. Drawing variously on queer, feminist and critical race theory and informed by ecocritical and new materialist sensibilities, essays in the volume share a critical practice founded in an ethics of relation and contribute to an emerging postcritical moment.

"Romantic Cosmopolitanism" shows how cosmopolitanism in the early nineteenth century offers a non-unified formulation of the nation that stands in contrast to more unified models such as Edmund Burke's which found nationality in, among other things, language, history, blood and geography.

John Donne's Language of Disease reveals the influence of medical knowledge -- a rapidly changing field in early modern England -- on Donne's thinking and writing. This knowledge played a crucial role in shaping how Donne understood his everyday experiences, and how he conveyed those experiences in his work. Examining a wide range of his texts through the lens of medical history, this study contends that Donne was both a product of his period and a remarkable exception to it. He used medical language in unexpected and striking ways that made his ideas resonate with his original audience, and that can illuminate his ideas for readers today.

Cervantes' now mythical character of Don Quixote began far differently from the altruistic righter of wrongs we know today. The transformation from mad highway robber to secular saint took place in the Romantic Era, but how and where it began has just begun to be understood. France and England played major roles, but, contrary to earlier literary historians, Pascal, Racine, Rousseau and the Jansenists scooped Henry and Sarah Fielding. Jansenism, a persecuted puritanical and intellectual group linked to Pascal, identified itself with Don Quixote's virtues, excused his vices, and wrote a game-changing sequel mediated by the transformative powers of a sorcerer from Commedia dell'Arte. As an early Romantic, Rousseau was attracted to the hero's fertile imagination and tender love for Dulcinea, foregrounding the would-be knight's quest in a play and his best-selling novel, Julie. Sarah Fielding reacted similarly, basing her utopian novel David Simple on the Jansenist concept of quixotic trust in others. Colahan here reproduces and explains for the first time the extremely rare original illustrations of the French sequel to Cervantes' novel, and documents the fortunes in French culture of the magician at the heart of the Romantic Quixote.

This volume revisits Genette's definition of the printed book's liminal devices, or paratexts, as 'thresholds of interpretation' by focussing specifically on translations produced in Britain in the early age of print (1473-1660). At a time when translation played a major role in shaping English and Scottish literary culture, paratexts afforded translators and their printers a privileged space in which to advertise their activities, display their social and ideological affiliations, influence literary tastes, and fashion Britain's representations of the cultural 'other'. Written by an international team of scholars of translation and material culture, the ten essays in the volume examine the various material shapes, textual forms, and cultural uses of paratexts as markers (and makers) of cultural exchange in early modern Britain. The collection will be of interest to scholars of early modern translation, print, and literary culture, and, more broadly, to those studying the material and cultural aspects of text production and circulation in early modern Europe.

Holger Syme presents a radically new explanation for the theatre's importance in Shakespeare's time. He portrays early modern England as a culture of mediation, dominated by transactions in which one person stood in for another, giving voice to absent speakers or bringing past events to life. No art form related more immediately to this culture than the theatre. Arguing against the influential view that the period underwent a crisis of representation, Syme draws upon extensive archival research in the fields of law, demonology, historiography and science to trace a pervasive conviction that testimony and report, delivered by properly authorised figures, provided access to truth. Through detailed close readings of plays by Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare - in particular Volpone, Richard II and The Winter's Tale - and analyses of criminal trial procedures, the book constructs a revisionist account of the nature of representation on the early modern stage.

Originally published by Goethe's friend and personal secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann (1792 1854), in German in 1836, this work comprises Eckermann's recollections of his conversations with the German writer and philosopher during the last nine years of his life. Eckermann published a further volume in 1848 using both his own memories and material from the journals of Swiss scientist Fr d ric Soret, who was also a close acquaintance of Goethe. The work initially sold poorly in Germany, but quickly became popular internationally, and contributed to the rehabilitation of Goethe's scholarly reputation both within Germany and throughout the world. This edition, translated by British playwright and translator John Oxenford (1812 77) was published in two volumes in London in 1850. Oxenford combined the original three volumes, putting the conversations in chronological order. The topics discussed include religion, politics, literature, poetry and natural sciences. Volume 2 runs from September 1827 to 1832.

This book takes a closer look at the diversity of fiction writing from Diderot to Markson and by so doing call into question the notion of a singular "theory of fiction," especially in relation to the novel. Unlike Forster's approach to "Aspects of the Novel," which implied there is only one kind of novel to which there may be an aspect, this book deconstructs how one approach to studying something as protean as the novel cannot be accomplished. To that end, the text uses Diderot's This Is Not A Story (1772) and David Markson's This Is Not A Novel (2016) as a frame and imbedded within are essays on De Maistre's Voyage Around My Room (1829), Machado de Assis's Posthumous Memoirs Of Braz Cubas (1881), Andre Breton's Nadja (1928) and Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept (1945).

At the start of the seventeenth century a distinction emerged between 'public', outdoor, amphitheatre playhouses and 'private', indoor, hall venues. This book is the first sustained attempt to ask: why? Theatre historians have long acknowledged these terms, but have failed to attest to their variety and complexity. Assessing a range of evidence, from the start of the Elizabethan period to the beginning of the Restoration, the book overturns received scholarly wisdom to reach new insights into the politics of theatre culture and playbook publication. Standard accounts of the 'public' and 'private' theatres have either ignored the terms, or offered insubstantial explanations for their use. This book opens up the rich range of meanings made available by these vitally important terms and offers a fresh perspective on the way dramatists, theatre owners, booksellers, and legislators, conceived the playhouses of Renaissance London.

Devils, witches and evil - the insubstantial but terrifying world of the supernatural as it was seen by Robert Burns and his contemporaries is examined in this new book, brought out for the 250th anniversary of the poet's birth. Several of Burns' poems dealt with the supernatural, the most famous of which, "Tam o Shanter", is examined in detail. It is from this poem that the book's title comes: 'And roars out, "Weel done, Cutty-sark!" And in an instant all was dark And scarcely had he Maggie rallied When out the hellish legion sallied.' In contrast with the 'other world' was the everyday lives of the country people and the nature of the material world in which they lived; the book also examines this and the changes that were taking place in Burns' time.

Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt and Charles Dickens all worked as parliamentary reporters, but their experiences in the press gallery have not received much scrutiny. Nikki Hessell's study is the first work to consider all four of these canonical writers as gallery reporters, providing a detailed picture of this intriguing episode in their careers. Hessell challenges preconceived notions about the role that emergent literary genius played in their success as reporters, arguing instead that they were consummate gallery professionals who adapted themselves to the journalistic standards of their day. That professional background fed in to their creative work in unexpected ways. By drawing on a wealth of evidence in letters, diaries and the press, this study provides fresh insights into the ways in which four great writers learnt the craft of journalism and brought those lessons to bear on their career as literary authors.

New essays revealing the enduring significance of the story made famous in the 1587 Faustbuch and providing insights into the forces that gave the sixteenth century its distinct character. The Reformation and Renaissance, though segregated into distinct disciplines today, interacted and clashed intimately in Faust, the great figure that attained European prominence in the anonymous 1587 Historia von D. Johann Fausten. The original Faust behind Goethe's great drama embodies a remote culture. In his century, Faust evolved from an obscure cipher to a universal symbol. The age explored here as "the Faustian century" invested the Faustbuch and its theme with a symbolic significance still of exceptional relevance today. The new essays in this volume complement one another, providing insights into the tensions and forces that gave the century its distinctcharacter. Several essays seek Faust's prototypes. Others elaborate the symbolic function of his figure and discern the resonance of his tale in conflicting allegiances. This volume focuses on the intersection of historical accounts and literary imaginings, on shared aspects of the work and its times, on concerns with obedience and transgression, obsessions with the devil and curiosity about magic, and quandaries created by shifting religious and worldlyauthorities. Contributors: Marguerite de Huszar Allen, Kresten Thue Andersen, Frank Baron, Gunther Bonheim, Albrecht Classen, Urs Leo Gantenbein, Karl S. Guthke, Michael Keefer, Paul Ernst Meyer, J. M. van der Laan, Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, Andrew Weeks. J. M. van der Laan is Professor of German and Andrew Weeks is Professor of German and Comparative Literature, both at Illinois State University.

The early Stuart funeral elegy was a copious and digressive genre, and exceptional deaths pressed elegists to stretch beyond the usual rhetoric of grief and commemoration. This book engages in a broad reading of the period's rich trove of funeral elegies, in both manuscript and print, and by poets ranging from the canonical to the anonymous. The book stands apart from earlier studies by its greater focus upon the subjects of funeral elegies (rather than the poets), and how the particular circumstances of death and the immediate contexts affected the poetic response. Individual deaths are understood in relation to each other and other prominent events of the time. While the book covers the period 1603 to 1640, the 1620s stand out as a tumultuous decade in which the genre most fully engaged in matters of political controversy and satire. -- .

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. -- .

Recent criticism is now fully appreciating the nuanced and complex contribution made by Dissenters to the culture and ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain. This is the first sustained study of a Dissenting family - the Aikins - from the 1740s to the 1860s. Essays by literary critics, historians of religion and science, and geographers explore and contextualize the achievements of this remarkable family, including John Aikin senior, tutor at the celebrated Warrington Academy, and his children, poet Anna Letitia Barbauld, and John Aikin junior, literary physician and editor. The latter's children in turn were leading professionals and writers in the early Victorian era. This study provides new perspectives on the social and cultural importance of the family and their circle - an untold story of collaboration and exchange, and a narrative which breaks down period boundaries to set Enlightenment and Victorian culture in dialogue.

Ruling Women is a two-volume study devoted to an analysis of the conflicting discourses concerning government by women in seventeenth-century France. In this second volume, Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama, Conroy analyzes over 30 plays published between 1637 and 1691, examining the range of constructions of queenship that are thrown into relief. The analysis focuses on the ways in which certain texts strive to manage the cultural anxiety produced by female rule and facilitate the diminution of the uneasy cultural reality it represents, while others dramatize the exercise of political virtue by women, explode the myth of gender-differentiated sexual ethics, and suggest alternative constructions of gender relations to those upheld by the normative discourses of sexual difference. The approach is underpinned by an understanding of theatre as fundamentally political, a cultural institution implicated in the maintenance of, and challenge to, societal power relations. Innovative and stimulating, Conroy's work will appeal to scholars of seventeenth-century drama and history of ideas, in addition to those interested in the history of women in political thought and the history of feminism.

This volume offers the first in-depth investigation of Thomas Heywood's engagement with the classics. Its introduction and twelve essays trace how the classics shaped Heywood's work in a variety of genres across a writing career of over forty years, ranging from drama, epic and epyllion, to translations, compendia and the design of a warship for Charles I. Close readings demonstrate the influence of a capaciously conceived classical tradition that included continental editions and translations of Latin and Greek texts, early modern mythographies and the medieval tradition of Troy. They attend to Heywood's thought-provoking imitations and juxtapositions of these sources, his use of myth to interrogate gender and heroism, and his turn to antiquity to celebrate and defamiliarise the theatrical or political present. Heywood's better-known works are discussed alongside critically neglected ones, making the collection valuable for undergraduates and researchers alike. -- .

This book is about mapping the future of eighteenth-century women's writing and feminist literary history, in an academic culture that is not shy of declaring their obsolescence. It asks: what can or should unite us as scholars devoted to the recovery and study of women's literary history in an era of big data, on the one hand, and ever more narrowly defined specialization, on the other? Leading scholars from the UK and US answer this question in thought-provoking, cross-disciplinary and often polemical essays. Contributors attend to the achievements of eighteenth-century women writers and the scholars who have devoted their lives to them, and map new directions for the advancement of research in the area. They collectively argue that eighteenth-century women's literary history has a future, and that feminism was, and always should be, at its heart. Featuring a Preface by Isobel Grundy, and a Postscript by Cora Kaplan.

The successful performance of a particular kind of masculinity was critical to political life during the eighteenth century, when men who claimed membership of the public sphere were expected to be men of honour as well as property. By the 1770s, however, the transformative effects of commerce and the claims of politeness complicated older certainties. Robert Jones examines how the parliamentary Opposition and their literary allies responded to political pressures and the emergencies of a disastrous war by fashioning a new mode of politics based on a more flexible range of masculinities. Basing his study on close readings of Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the trials of General Burgoyne and Admiral Keppel, and the Whig appropriation of Thomas Chatterton, Jones explores how Opposition discourse risked the charge of effeminacy in order to fuse the languages of honour and sensibility.