Cupid became a popular figure in the literary and visual culture of post-Reformation England. He served to articulate and debate the new Protestant theory of desire, inspiring a dark version of love tragedy in which Cupid kills. But he was also implicated in other controversies, as the object of idolatrous, Catholic worship and as an adversary to female rule: Elizabeth I's encounters with Cupid were a crucial feature of her image-construction and changed subtly throughout her reign. Covering a wide variety of material such as paintings, emblems and jewellery, but focusing mainly on poetry and drama, including works by Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, Kingsley-Smith illuminates the Protestant struggle to categorise and control desire and the ways in which Cupid disrupted this process. An original perspective on early modern desire, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the literature, drama, gender politics and art history of the English Renaissance.

This book examines the trope of echo in early modern literature and drama, exploring the musical, sonic, and verbal effects generated by forms of repetition on stage and in print. Focusing on examples where Echo herself appears as a character, this study shows how echoic techniques permeated literary, dramatic, and musical performance in the period, and puts forward echo as a model for engaging with sounds and texts from the past. Starting with sixteenth century translations of myths of Echo from Ovid and Longus, the book moves through the uses of echo in Elizabethan progress entertainments, commercial and court drama, Jacobean court masques, and prose romance. It places the work of well-known dramatists, such as Ben Jonson and John Webster, in the context of broader cultures of performance. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of early modern drama, music, and dance.

This title offers an introduction to the political and historical context to Shakespeare's tragedy and history plays, written in an accessible, jargon-free style."Shakespeare's Politics" is an invaluable introduction to the political world of Shakespeare's plays. It includes passages from the plays together with extracts from contemporary historical and political documents. The clear, jargon-free narrative introduces and explains the extracts and provides an overview of the key political issues that were debated in late Elizabethan and early Stuart England.The introduction outlines the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote and explains the intellectual principles that informed early modern thinking about politics. By reading Shakespeare alongside contemporary documents students will be able to develop their own informed critical interpretations of the plays. "Shakespeare's Politics" is essential for anyone studying Shakespeare while tutors and postgraduate students will find the book's up-to-date survey of modern Shakespeare criticism useful and provocative.

This invaluable guide offers readers an accessible and imaginative approach to the literature of early modern Britain. Exploring the poetry, drama, and prose of the period, Marion Wynne-Davies combines theory and practice, providing a helpful introduction to key theoretical concepts and close readings of individual texts by both canonical and less well-known authors. Amongst other things, Wynne-Davies discusses 16th and 17th century poetry in its political and cultural contexts, considers Renaissance drama in terms of performance space, and uses the early modern map to explain the prose works of writers such as Bunyan and Cavendish.

Jean-Francois Gounard's examination of the writings of Richard Wright and James Baldwin achieves a balance between the fiery Wright and the placid Baldwin. Gounard's two studies convincingly prove a complementary relationship between the works of these two American writers. Both reflect the profound desire of black Americans to be recognized as first class citizens: Wright aroused white America's conscience, Baldwin made that conscience experience guilt. According to Gounard, this complementary relationship, and their leading roles in American race relations, make their work seminal. Understanding the evolution of Wright's and Baldwin's ideas is essential to understanding the evolution of the American race problem. This analytical study covers both the literary works and the political and philosophical essays of these two men. It is a valuable study for courses in Afro-American studies and African literature. American society has not yet given definitive, hopeful, answers to the questions raised by this study. Gounard relies on biographical elements and textual analysis to retrace meticulously the careers of these two writers who deeply influenced their era. This study stresses the evolution of their ideas in their essays, articles, and interviews. Emphasis is also placed on how those ideas were applied in their novels, short stories, plays, and poems. Gounard also introduces the points of view of various critics. This in-depth study follows a chronological path covering a thirty year period (1940-1970), concluding with a comprehensive bibliography of the two authors' works--a most valuable resource tool.

This pioneering exploration of Georgian men and women's experiences as readers explores their use of commonplace books for recording favourite passages and reflecting upon what they had read, revealing forgotten aspects of their complicated relationship with the printed word. It shows how indebted English readers often remained to techniques for handling, absorbing and thinking about texts that were rooted in classical antiquity, in Renaissance humanism and in a substantially oral culture. It also reveals how a series of related assumptions about the nature and purpose of reading influenced the roles that literature played in English society in the ages of Addison, Johnson and Byron; how the habits and procedures required by commonplacing affected readers' tastes and so helped shape literary fashions; and how the experience of reading and responding to texts increasingly encouraged literate men and women to imagine themselves as members of a polite, responsible and critically aware public.

The Americas appear as an evocative setting in more than half of Daniel Defoe's novels, and often offer a new beginning for his characters. In the first full-length study of Defoe and colonialism, Dennis Todd explores why the New World loomed so large in Defoe's imagination. By focusing on the historical contexts that informed Defoe's depiction of American Indians, African slaves, and white indentured servants, Dennis Todd investigates the colonial assumptions that shaped his novels and, at the same time, uncovers how Defoe used details of the American experience in complex, often figurative ways to explore the psychological bases of the profound conversions and transformations that his heroes and heroines undergo. And by examining what Defoe knew and did not know about America, what he falsely believed and what he knowingly falsified, Defoe's America probes the doubts, hesitancies, and contradictions he had about the colonial project he so fervently promoted.

What did it mean to be British, and more specifically to feel British, in the century following the parliamentary union of Scotland and England? Juliet Shields departs from recent accounts of the Romantic emergence of nationalism by recovering the terms in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers understood nationhood. She argues that in the wake of the turmoil surrounding the Union, Scottish writers appealed to sentiment, or refined feeling, to imagine the nation as a community. They sought to transform a Great Britain united by political and economic interests into one united by shared sympathies, even while they used the gendered and racial connotations of sentiment to differentiate sharply between Scottish, English, and British identities. By moving Scotland from the margins to the center of literary history, the book explores how sentiment shaped both the development of British identity and the literature within which writers responded creatively to the idea of nationhood.

Writing on the cusp of modern botany and during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals, Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works and makes countless allusions to horticultural and botanical practices. Shakespeare's Botanical Imagination moves plants to the foreground of analysis and brings together some of the rich and innovative ways that scholars are expanding the discussion of plants and botany in Shakespeare's writings. The essays gathered here all emphasize the interdependence and entanglement of plants with humans and human life, whether culturally, socially, or materially, and vividly illustrate the fundamental role plants play in human identity. As they attend to the affinities and shared materiality between plants and humans in Shakespeare's works, these essays complicate the comfortable Aristotelian hierarchy of human-animal-plant. And as they do, they often challenge the privileged position of humans in relation to non-human life.

Treatment of and reference to the Song of Songs by a variety of authors including Spenser and Milton. Many English Renaissance texts offer readings of the Song of Songs, by both well-known authors, such as Shakespeare, and the long neglected (William Baldwin, Robert Aylett, Abiezer Coppe and Lawrence Clarkson). This new study looks at the different traditions they represent, and most notably the balance in the tension of the Song of Songs as oral and written, carnal and spiritual. The introduction presents a historical and theoretical discussion of Canticles, using a Rabbinic model for juxtaposing orality and textuality; the author goes on to argue that from the time of ancient Sumer through medieval England motifs found in the Song of Songs are simultaneously sexual and spiritualjust as they are likewise oral and textual. By attempting to recover oral approaches to any text, we encounter a series of forces that act to balance an open, oral, and sexual understanding of the erotic biblical text against a more closed, textual and spiritual reading. This balance is then traced through works by Baldwin, Spenser, Aylett, Coppe, Clarkson and Milton. NOAM FLINKER is currently Chairperson at the Department of English, University of Haifa.

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.

Gothic Romanticism: Wordsworth, Architecture, Politics, Form offers a revisionist account of both Wordsworth and the politics of antiquarianism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a historically-driven study that develops a significant critique and revision of genre- and theory-based approaches to the Gothic, it covers many key works by Wordsworth and his fellow "Lake Poets" Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. The second edition incorporates new materials that develop the argument in new directions opened up by changes in the field over the last decade. The book also provides a sustained reflection upon Romantic conservatism, including the political thought and lasting influence of Edmund Burke. New material places the book in wider and longer context of the political and historical forms seen developing in Wordsworth, and proposes Gothic Romanticism as the alternative line of cultural development to Victorian Medievalism.

In this book the eighteenth century Enlightenment receives an important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artefacts from India and China, West Africa and Polynesia. A series of authoritative essays written by experts in the field explores the full range of material culture in the long eighteenth century, raising crucial questions about notions of property and invention, homely and commercial lives. The book also includes a series of well-illustrated exhibits, a startling and provocative assemblage of objects from the Enlightenment world, each accompanied by expert commentaries. The collection of essays and exhibits is the result of collaborative debate by scholars from Europe and north America, who have together worked on the cross-disciplinary importance of material history in making sense of how past society was fundamentally transformed through the world of goods.

This volume considers the influential revival of ancient philosophical skepticism in the 16th and early 17th centuries and investigates, from a comparative perspective, its reception in early modern English, Spanish and French drama, dedicating detailed readings to plays by Shakespeare, Calderon, Lope de Vega, Rotrou, Desfontaines, and Cervantes. While all the plays employ similar dramatic devices for "putting skepticism on stage", the study explores how these dramas, however, give different "answers" to the challenges posed by skepticism in relation to their respective historico-cultural and "ideological" contexts.

Samuel Johnson is often represented as primarily antagonistic or antipathetic to Milton. Yet his imaginative and intellectual engagement with Milton's life and writing extended across the entire span of his own varied writing career. As essayist, poet, lexicographer, critic and biographer - above all as reader - Johnson developed a controversial, fascinating and productive literary relationship with his powerful predecessor. To understand how Johnson creatively appropriates Milton's texts, how he critically challenges yet also confirms Milton's status, and how he constructs him as a biographical subject, is to deepen the modern reader's understanding of both writers in the context of historical continuity and change. Christine Rees's insightful study will be of interest not only to Milton and Johnson specialists, but to all scholars of early modern literary history and biography.

The Oxford History of the Irish Book is a major new series that charts the development of the book in Ireland from its origins within an early medieval manuscript culture to its current incarnation alongside the rise of digital media in the twenty-first century.
Volume III: The Irish Book in English, 1550-1800 contains a series of groundbreaking essays that seek to explain the fortunes of printed word from the early Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century. The essays in section one explain the development of print culture in the period, from its first incarnation in the small area of the English Pale around Dublin, dominated by the interests of the English authorities, to the more widespread dispersal of the printing press at the close of the eighteenth century, when provincial presses developed their own character and style either alongside or as a challenge to the dominant intellectual culture. Section two explains the crucial developments in the structure and technical innovation of the print trade; the role played by private and public collections of books; and the evidence of changing reading practices throughout the period. The third and longest section explores the impact of the rise of print. Essays examine the effect that the printed book had on religious and political life in Ireland, providing a case study of the impact of the French Revolution on pamphlets and propaganda in Ireland; the transformations illustrated in the history of historical writing, as well as in literature and the theatre, through the publication of play texts for a wide audience. Others explore the impact that print had on the history of science and the production of foreign language books.The volume concludes with an authoritative bibliographical essay outlining the sources that exist for the study of the book in early modern Ireland. This is an authoritative volume with essays by key scholars that will be the standard guide for many years to come.

The study of Jonathan Swift's works has most often focused on print publication, with less scholarly attention devoted to manuscript circulation. Based on extensive research into the manuscript versions of Swift's poetry, Stephen Karian's analysis breaks new ground in suggesting new ways of interpreting the different choices Swift made to circulate his texts in either print or manuscript form. He explains Swift's relationships with his publishers in England and Ireland; the ways in which his writings circulated in hand-written form; and the effect that political censorship had on the manner in which his most outspoken political poems were published. Working at the intersection of book history, bibliography, and textual and literary criticism, this book will open up new areas of study for Swift scholars, as well as developing an important methodology for the study of the distribution and reception of literary texts in the eighteenth century.

Originally published in 1958, and based on The Sandars Lectures for 1957, this volume provides a historical study of the library belonging to eighteenth-century man of letters Horace Walpole (1717-1797). The book is divided into three chapters: the first focuses on the library itself; the second on Walpole's reading; the third on the dispersal of the library following Walpole's death. This is a highly informative text, containing numerous illustrative examples, that will be of value to anyone with an interest in bibliography and eighteenth-century British history.

The influence of the Roman poet Horace on Ben Jonson has often been acknowledged, but never fully explored. Discussing Jonson's Horatianism in detail, this study also places Jonson's densely intertextual relationship with Horace's Latin text within the broader context of his complex negotiations with a range of other 'rivals' to the Horatian model including Pindar, Seneca, Juvenal and Martial. The new reading of Jonson's classicism that emerges is one founded not upon static imitation, but rather a lively dialogue between competing models an allusive mode that extends into the seventeenth-century reception of Jonson himself as a latter-day 'Horace'. In the course of this analysis, the book provides fresh readings of many of Jonson's best known poems - including 'Inviting a Friend to Dinner' and 'To Penshurst' - as well as a new perspective on many lesser known pieces, and a range of unpublished manuscript material.

In this concise critical survey, Professor Donoghue looks at Swift's whole output, and expresses a fresh sense of his literary character. In particular, he questions the widespread view that Swift is to be understood in terms of irony, persona or mask. He points out, for instance, that Swift's irony is not continuous, and that his sense of form is not ours. We should not see him as producing elaborate artistic structures, but as meeting particular needs which forced themselves upon him. We need also to identify the 'gestures' through which Swift revealed his characteristic mental attitudes, and behind them to sense his general life-stance; to understand his devices - such as the choice and change of perspective; his deeper pre-occupations - such as the relationship between the body, the mind and the soul; his attitude to and use of language; his conception of the nature of humanity; the characteristics of his verse.

The group volume distinguishes itself by its multidisciplinary, comparative approach and by the network of relationships it weaves between the various European languages and cultures. The study takes shape from its different viewpoints and in its diverse contexts, to chart a detailed historical-conceptual map of the basic role theater played in forging the modern European consciousness. The thematic core of ‘theatermania’ lay in the authentic theatrical passion that manifested itself in different ways from one country to another throughout the 18th century. While the aesthetic, social and political value of theater took a variety of forms, its central feature was the privileged place it gave to collective and individual social revolutions, phenomena that could be defined as upheavals of the collective imagination, which found in theater a source of nourishment, mediation or control. The volume offers not just a series of historical-theatrical studies, but a view of history that foregrounds the passions that were regularly sparked by theater. It adds an essential feature to the profile of the century that redefined the role and importance of theater, and that led to its full re-evaluation in the Romantic age.

Richard Savage was a minor eighteenth-century poet, known chiefly today for his associations with Pope and Johnson, whose Life of Savage is a masterpiece. But his poetry is not merely valuable for the light it throws on Johnson and the tastes of the first half of the eighteenth century. It gives a clear picture of Savage's own somewhat sensational character and career, and is far more readable in its own right than has been suggested in the past. It epitomizes all the varying poetical styles of the time, but is much more personal and autobiographical than most Augustan verse. This definitive edition of Savage's poetry was the first to appear since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and earlier editions were neither complete nor reliable. Professor Tracy is the recognized expert on Savage and in his introduction he gives a clear account of Savage's reputation during his lifetime, and suggests why he should be given more recognition.

Originally published in 1988, John Ford: Critical Re-Visions offers a wholesale reconsideration of the reputation of a major Caroline playwright. The volume takes an historical perspective and offers a better understanding of Ford's achievement in the light of the theatrical and social conditions of his own day. The collection of essays was assembled for the 400th anniversary of the playwright's birth. The contributors, well known scholars in the field, work from a variety of critical positions: insights associated with a new historicist, feminist, structuralist and post-structuralist theory are represented, together with more traditional approaches. The essays range from detailed readings of the individual plays, including 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Perkin Warbeck, Love's Sacrifice and The Lady's Trial to more wide-ranging studies of imagery and theatrical convention; several help to illuminate our understanding of Ford's plays in the theatre of his own time, while another offers a detailed account of post-war stage, film and television productions.

A study of numerology in Elizabethan poetry, with some background studies which base the subject in classical learning, the works of Dante and Petrarch, and the esoteric traditions of the humanists. The central assumption of numerological criticism is that there exist works written in this tradition which show a correspondence between structure and meaning on a numerical plane; that is, one in which the number of the constituent parts (lines, stanzas, sonnets in a sequence) expresses a major aspect of the meaning. For instance parts of the whole can be arranged to represent months of the year and so on. Such structures of time and the triumphal form, in which the most important 'sovereign' element is placed at the centre, are the two main numerological patterns discussed by Dr Fowler. Critics have tended to regard numerology as an isolated phenomenon, rare after the Middle Ages but Dr Fowler demonstrates its persistence in the works of Spenser, Sidney, Chapman, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Dryden and others.