Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare's England reveals the complex and unfamiliar forms of friendship that existed between men in the late sixteenth century. Using the unpublished letter archive of the Elizabethan spy Anthony Bacon (1558-1601), it shows how Bacon negotiated a path through life that relied on the support of his friends, rather than the advantages and status that came with marriage. Through a set of case-studies focusing on the Inns of Court, the prison, the aristocratic great house and the spiritual connection between young and ardent Protestants, this book argues that the 'friendship spaces' of early modern England permitted the expression of male same-sex intimacy to a greater extent than has previously been acknowledged.

Imprisoned several times, reviled by enemies, hunted by murderous mobs, and yet sometimes fêted by the country's most powerful leaders, Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) led an extraordinarily exciting life. Above all, he was a creator of fictions. Examining his life from the perspective most important to the modern reader - his writing career - this biography illuminates the thought and personal experience that fed such masterpieces as Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, and Roxana.

Literary scholars, theorists, and historians deploy New Economic techniques to illuminate English Renaissance literature in fresh ways. Contributors variously explore poetry's precarious perch between gift and commodity; the longing for family in The Comedy of Errors as symbolically expressing the alienating pressures of mercantilism; Measure for Measure's representation of singlewomen and the feminization of poverty; the collision between two views of money in a possible collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton; the cultural spread of an accounting mentality and quantitative thinking; and money as it crosses the frontier between price and pricelessness, from early bodily-injury insurance schemes to The Merchant of Venice.

Early narratives have tended to be critiqued as novels, an approach which misses their distinctive Renaissance realism. Alastair Fowler surveys picturing and perspective from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, drawing analogies between literature and visual art. The book is based on the history of the narrative imagination after single-point perspective. The habit of an older, multipoint perspective long continued, accounting for 'anachronism', discontinuous realism, 'double time-schemes', and depiction of different moments as simultaneous.

This book explores the role of government in the governing process of Bangladesh. It primarily focuses on the dilemmas and constraints faced by the successive democratic governments elected since the early 1990s. Bangladesh has had a new democratic beginning since the early 1990s and formally remained a democracy for the last the three decades. Despite impressive performance in the economic and social fields, the country has lagged far behind most of the new democracies in the political realm. This book identifies how representative institutions of governance have gradually declined under democratic governments in Bangladesh, and how disagreements on the 'basic rules of the game' have made the task of governing extremely difficult and democratic consolidation problematic. This book is a significant and comprehensive analysis that identifies and explains the implications of the crises in governance for democratic consolidation in Bangladesh. It will be of interest to academics studying Area Studies, in particular South Asian Studies, and the increasingly researched areas of governance, public policy, and administration.

This book explores the history of women's engagement with writing experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way to participate in such spaces. Experimentation-of style, mode, voice, genre and language-has enabled women writers to be simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from stories and cultures that have so often seen them as 'other'. This collection shows that women writers in English over the past 400 years have challenged those ideas not only through explicit polemic and alternative representations but through disrupting the very modes of representation and story itself.

"Women and Material Culture" comprises twelve illustrated, interdisciplinary essays on gender and material culture across the long eighteenth century. Written by an international group of scholars working in the fields of visual culture, dress history and literary criticism, these essays point to the manifold ways in which gender mediated and was shaped by the consumption and production of goods (from clothing and artworks to books) and elucidate the complex, shifting relationships between material and social practice in the period.

In Spenser's Forms of History, Bart Van Es presents an engaging study of the ways in which Edmund Spenser utilized a number of 'forms of history' - chronicle, antiquarian discourse, secular typology, political prophecy, and others - in both his poetry and his prose, and assesses their collective impact on Elizabethan poetry.

This major new study asks the question, "how much do we know about Shakespeare's collaborations with other dramatists?", and sets out to provide a detailed evaluation of the claims made for Shakespeare's co-authorship of Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Through an examination of the processes of collaboration and the methods used in authorship studies since the early nineteenth century, Brian Vickers identifies a coherent tradition in attribution work on Shakespeare.

This book examines the influence of John Marston, typically seen as a minor figure among early modern dramatists, on his colleague Ben Jonson. While Marston is usually famed more for his very public rivalry with Jonson than for the quality of his plays, this book argues that such a view of Marston seriously underestimates his importance to the theatre of his time. In it, the author contends that Marston's plays represent an experiment in a new kind of satiric drama, with origins in the humanist tradition of serio ludere. His works-deliberately unpredictable, inconsistent and metatheatrical-subvert theatrical conventions and provide confusingly multiple perspectives on the action, forcing their spectators to engage actively with the drama and the moral dilemmas that it presents. The book argues that Marston's work thus anticipates and perhaps influenced the mid-period work of Ben Jonson, in plays such as Sejanus, Volpone and The Alchemist.

With reference to the treatment of mind-body problems in the novels and non-fictional writings of Johann Karl Wezel, Karl Philipp Moritz, and Jean Paul, this impressive study follows the development of, and demonstrates the continuity in, the history of ideas in Germany between the Late Enlightenment and Romanticism.

A. This is the first book systematically to examine the intrusion of personal voice into the poetry of landscape in Britain in the long eighteenth century. B. The argument of the book proceeds from the premise that strong conventions, such as those that inhere in topographical verse of the period, stimulate original writers to overstep those bounds, resulting in verse that engages issues and energies far deeper than those of pictorial description. C. The book makes a strong claim for the autobiographical emphasis of much eighteenth-century poetry of place. D. The book hews to close readings as the soundest way to identify the often subtle shifts of tone and structure that betray the workings of agendae that may be operating under cover of conventional landscape poetry. E. The book supplements traditionally aesthetic and political readings of eighteenth-century British landscape poetry, suggesting not only that the autobiographical impulse is a distinctive and innovative feature of much great eighteenth-century poetry of place but also that the correlation of self and place, a topic of current interest to humanist geographers, is powerfully manifested in the landscape poetry of this period.

"Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain" traces the co-evolution of the essay and the mode of literacy it enabled. Focusing on the interactive processes of reading captured by the form, "Of Essays" offers a new approach to early modern textuality. It shows how the genre served to record, test and disseminate the readerly skills required by a developing print culture, and how the essay was adopted as a mechanism of natural science, the public sphere, and the novel.

Paul Hammond explores how sexual relationships between men were represented in English literature during the seventeenth century. Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester is built around two principal themes: firstly the literary strategies through which writers created imagined spaces for the expression of homosexual desire; and secondly the ways in which such texts were subsequently edited and adapted to remove these references to sex between men. The author begins with a wide-ranging analysis of the forms in which both homosexual desire and homophobic hatred were expressed in the period, focusing on the problems of defining male relationships, the erotic dimension to male friendships, and the uses of classical settings. Subsequent chapters offer four case studies. The first focuses on how Shakespeare adapted his sources to introduce the possibility of sexual relations between male characters, with special attention to Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and the Sonnets, and shows how these elements were removed in later adaptations of his plays and poems. Subsequent chapters chart the often satirical representation of homosexual rulers from James I to William III; the ambiguous sexuality figured in the poetry of Andrew Marvell; and the libertine homoeroticism of the poetry of the Earl of Rochester. Paul Hammond draws on a wide range of poems, plays, letters, and pamphlets, and discusses a substantial amount of previously unknown material from both printed and manuscript sources.

The publication of a bawdy novel, Tristram Shandy (1759-67), dramatically changed the life of Laurence Sterne. An obscure provincial clergyman, emotionally and professionally frustrated, he became the most fashionable writer of his day. Praised and reviled in turn, Sterne enjoyed a celebrity which illuminates the nature of eighteenth-century literary fame.

Reading life writing that runs from Tracey Emin, Faith Ringgold and Judy Chicago to Marie Bashkirtseff, Benvenuto Cellini and beyond, Artists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Renaissance and Back investigates the intriguing doubled truths of artists' autobiographies: truth in life and truth in art; authorial truth/s and the truth of their art as they saw it. However, this book focuses specifically on the truth of sincerity, which here-following classic discussions by Reindert Dhondt, Philippe Lejeune and Lionel Trilling-appears as a truth to self that floats free from facts to link avowal and feeling. From there, this volume merges autobiography studies with a history of ideas approach to art to trace sincerity's constancy and variability across times and cultures. Through this pre-disciplinary dialogue, this book shows that recent and historical artists' autobiographies differ in how, not if, they intertwine sincerity in life and art. Along the way, this volume leverages the foregrounding of sincerity caused by this doubling to explore such key issues of autobiography studies as autobiography's relation to fiction, serial autobiography, "as-told-to" narrative and what happens when liars claim to tell all.

What makes a biographical masterpiece? By decoding the manuscript of Boswell's Life of Johnson, this innovative study reveals the methods and the models that shaped his monumental portrait. The result is a more subtle, more vital assessment of Boswell the designer - and an enhanced awareness of biography's power to make life into art.

During the Renaissance, the most renowned model of epic poetry was Virgil's Aeneid, a poem promoting an influential concept of heroism based on the commitment to one's nation and gods. However, Longinus' theory of the sublime - newly recovered during the Renaissance - contradicted this absolute devotion to nation as a marker of religious piety. Heroic Awe explores how Renaissance epic poetry used the sublime to challenge the assumption that epic heroism was primarily about civic duty and glorification of state. The book demonstrates how the significant investment of Renaissance epic poetry in Longinus' theory of the sublime reshaped the genre of epic. To do so, Kelly Lehtonen examines the intersection between the Longinian sublime and early modern Protestant and Catholic discourses in Renaissance poems such as the Gerusalemme Liberata, Les Semaines, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. In illuminating the role of Longinus along with that of religious discourses, Heroic Awe offers a new perspective on epic heroism in Renaissance epic poetry, redefining heroism as the capacity to be overwhelmed emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually by encounters with divine glory. In considering the links between religion, the sublime, and epic, the book aims to shed new light on several core topics in early modern studies, including epic heroism, Renaissance philosophy, theories of emotion, and the psychology of religion.

This volume explores Shakespeare's interest in pity, an emotion that serves as an important catalyst for action within the plays, even as it generates one of the audience's most common responses to tragic drama in the theater. For Shakespeare, the word "pity" contained a broader range of meaning than it does in modern English, and was often associated with ideas such as mercy, compassion, charity, pardon, and clemency. This cluster of ideas provides Shakespeare's characters with a rich range of possibilities for engaging some of humanity's deepest emotional commitments, in which pity can be seen as a powerful stimulus for fostering social harmony, love, and forgiveness. However, Shakespeare also dramatizes pity's potential for deception, when the appeal to pity is not genuine, and conceals contrary motives of vengeance and cruelty. As Shakespeare's works remain relevant for modern audiences and readers, so too does his dramatization of the powerful ways in which emotions such as pity remain essential to our understanding of our shared humanity and of our awareness of compassion's role in our own private and civic lives.

Postmodern society seems incapable of elaborating an ethical critique of the market economy. Early modern society showed no such reticence. Between 1580 and 1680, Aristotelian teleology was replaced as the dominant mode of philosophy in England by Baconian empiricism. This was a process with implications for every sphere of life: for politics and theology, economics and ethics, and aesthetics and sexuality. Through nuanced and original readings of Shakespeare, Herbert, Donne, Milton, Traherne, Bunyan, and the antitheatrical controversy, David Hawkes sheds light on early modern debates over idolatry, financial value, and trade. Hawkes argues that the people of Renaissance England believed that the decline of telos resulted in a reified, fetishistic mode of consciousness which manifests itself in such phenomena as religious idolatry, commodity fetishism, and carnal sensuality. He suggests that the resulting early modern critique of the market economy has much to offer postmodern society.

Recently discovered ancient silk and bamboo manuscripts have transformed our understanding of classical Chinese thought. In this book, Wang Zhongjiang closely examines these texts and, by parsing the complex divergence between ancient and modern Chinese records, reveals early Chinese philosophy to be much richer and more complex than we ever imagined. As numerous and varied cosmologies sprang up in this cradle of civilization, beliefs in the predictable movements of nature merged with faith in gods and their divine punishments. Slowly, powerful spirits and gods were stripped of their potency as nature's constant order awakened people to the possibility of universal laws, and those laws finally gave birth to an ideally conceived community, objectively managed and rationally ordered.

1798 is a significant date in literary history: in that year the Lyrical Ballads were published anonymously by Joseph Cottle, the Bristol bookseller. But this is a volume not about the Lyrical Ballads , but about their year. It is an attempt to re-create and examine the literary culture of 1798, the culture on which Wordsworth and Coleridge decided to make their 'experiment'. It is a book in which Wordsworth and Coleridge vie for attention, as they did in 1798, with many other writers, including Schleiermacher, John Thelwall, Mary Hays, the Abbe Barruel, Walter Savage Landor, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Malthus, Joanna Baillie, George Canning, Robert Sothey and the Reverend T.J. Mathias. The chapters of this book work together to define a single historical moment that marked the beginning of romanticism in England.

This volume presents a modernised edition of Christopher Marlowe's critical engagement with one of the bloodiest and traumatic episodes of the French Wars of Religion, the wholesale massacre of French Huguenots in Paris in August, 1572. Sensorily shocking and intellectually gripping, the play's dramatic action spans a tumultuous two decades in French history to unfold for its audience the tragic consequences of religious fanaticism, power politics, and dynastic rivalry. Comprehensively introduced and containing full commentary notes, this edition opens up this frequently neglected but historically significant and dramatically powerful play to student and scholar alike. The introduction examines such topics as the history of the massacre, the play's treatment of its sources, the play's dramatisation of trauma, and the play's exploration of notions of religious toleration. -- .

The sermons of John Donne are seen to embody the tensions and pressure on public religious discourse 1621 - 25. This book considers the professional contribution of John Donne to an emerging homiletic public sphere in the last years of the Jacobean English Church (1621-25), arguing that his sermons embody the conflicts, tensions, and pressures on public religious discourse in this period; while they are in no way "typical" of any particular preaching agenda or style, they articulate these crises in their most complex forms and expose fault lines in the late JacobeanChurch. The study is framed by Donne's two most pointed contributions to the public sphere: his sermon defending James I's Directions to Preachers and his first sermon preached before Charles I in 1625. These two sermons emerge from the crises of controversy, censorship, and identity that converged in the late Jacobean period, and mark Donne's clearest professional interventions in the public debate about the nature and direction of the Church of England. In them, Donne interrogates the boundaries of the public sphere and of his conformity to the institutions, authorities, and traditions governing public debate in that sphere, modelling for his audience an actively engagedconformist identity. Professor JEANNE SHAMI teaches in the Department of English at the University of Regina.

Pope's fascination with print - with annotations, illustrations, parallel texts, title-pages, revisions - shapes this reading of his major texts and of his Works 1717 and 1735-6. The book offers fresh insights into Pope's self-presentation and his relation to his readers: he emerges as a figure marginalized socially, politically, and sexually, who gambles with his private life in confronting his opponents.