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.

McMaster's lively study looks at the various codes by which eighteenth-century novelists made the minds of their characters legible through their bodies. She tellingly explores the discourses of medicine, physiognomy, gesture and facial expression, completely familiar to contemporary readers but not to us, in ways that enrich our reading of such classics as "Clarissa" and "Tristram Shandy," as well as of novels by Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.

"Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture" explores the conjunction of authorship and family life as a distinctive cultural formation of Romantic-era Britain. Through examination of the practices and texts of literary families, the book traces an alternative history of Romantic authorship, one that lies on the cusp between a vanishing manuscript culture and the dominance of print; that reflects a struggle in Romantic self-identity between communities of feeling and individual genius; and that grapples with an evolving tension between the private and public spheres.

In September 1666 the Great Fire destroyed four-fifths of the ancient City of London within three days. All that had been familiar, settled, known, was suddenly and entirely swept away. Londoners faced an emptiness that was not only physical but also historical, social, financial and conceptual. The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London is the first study to situate the literature of Restoration and early Augustan England within the historical and cultural contexts of the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Cynthia Wall relates the marked topographical specificity of plays, poems and novels to a wider cultural network of responses to changing perceptions of urban space, and she shows how the literatures of the period - along with the surveying, mapping, rebuilding and official redescribing of the city - attempt to reinvest the city with comprehensible meaning and create new spaces for new genres.

Early modern drama is steeped in biblical language, imagery and stories. This collection examines the pervasive presence of scripture on the early modern stage. Exploring plays by writers such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton, and Webster, the contributors show how theatre offers a site of public and communal engagement with the Bible.

Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World explores a range of images and texts that shed light on the complexity of the European reception and interpretation of the New World. Jonathan Hart examines Columbus's first representation of the natives and the New World, the representation of him in subsequent ages, the portrayal of America in sexual terms, the cultural intricacies brought into play by a variety of translators and mediators, the tensions between the aesthetic and colonial in Shakespeare's The Tempest, and a discussion of cultural and voice appropriation that examines the colonial in the postcolonial. This book brings the comparative study of the cultural past of the Americas and the Atlantic world into focus as it relates to the present.

'Linguistic' theories in the eighteenth-century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as 'aesthetic' theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question 'what is beauty?' Edward Nye charts the way in which a wide range of language theorists answer this question, and how their ideas complement contemporary literary debates about poetry, prose, preciosity, style, and artistic representation in general.

Material Culture and Sedition, 1688-1760 is a groundbreaking study of the ways in which material culture was used to avoid prosecution for treason and sedition in the eighteenth century. Challenging existing accounts of the public sphere and consumer culture, it argues that the birth of modern Britain was accompanied by political repression which helped develop a counter-culture of treacherous objects and secret societies. Though set in the Jacobite period in the British Isles, it considers transnational evidence and sets out an approach which can be applied in a wide variety of other contexts.

How did Spanish-American writers and veterans in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century use epic poetry to search for ethical solutions to the violent conflicts of their age? Winner of the 2017-18 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize The Epic Mirror studies how Spanish-American writers and veterans in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century used epic poetry to search for ethical solutions to the violent conflicts of their age. The wars about which they wrote took place at the frontiers of the Spanish empire, where new political communities were emerging: fiercely independent Amerindian republics, rebellious Spanish settlers, maroon kingdoms of fugitive African slaves. This colonial reality generated a distinctive vision of just warfare and political community. Working across the fields of Hispanic literature, the history of political thought, and studies of empire, colonialism and globalisation, Choi reinterprets three major works of colonial Latin American literature: Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana (1569-90), Pedro de Ona's Arauco domado (1596), and Juan de Miramontes Zuazola's Armas antarticas (1608-9). She argues that these works provide a rare insight into the development of political thought in Viceregal Peru. Through the imaginative mirrors of epic, the reader is forced to ask the same questions of the unfinished conquests of the Americas as of those in Africa, Asia or Europe: when conflicting forces are divided by irreconcilable world views, even if the war is won, how is it possible to achieve peace?

If the first phase of feminist criticism of English Renaissance studies unduly stressed women's victimization, the revisionist trend, this collection argues, is in denial about gender inequality altogether. This exciting volume represents the newest, post-revisionist phase of feminist criticism, which tries to integrate the vital insights of both earlier phases of scholarship and to establish a more accurate and nuanced picture of women's relation to early modern English culture. Features an Afterword by Gail Kern Paster and contributions from Jean Howard, Kate Chedgzoy and Grace Ioppolo, amongst others.

Dubbed 'the English Virgil' in his own lifetime, Spenser has been compared to the Augustan laureate ever since. He invited the comparison, expecting a readership intimately familiar with Virgil's works to notice and interpret his rich web of allusion and imitation, but also his significant departures and transformations.This volume considers Spenser's pastoral poetry, the genre which announces the inception of a Virgilian career in The Shepheardes Calender, and to which he returns in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, throwing the 'Virgilian career' into reverse. His sustained dialogue with Virgil's Eclogues bewrays at once a profound debt to Virgil and a deep-seated unease with his values and priorities, not least his subordination of pastoral to epic. Drawing on the commentary tradition and engaging with current critical debates, this study of Spenser's interpretation, imitation and revision of Virgil casts new light on both poets-and on the genre of pastoral itself. -- .

"Historicizing Blake" puts Blake back into the cultural context of his times. These essays by both established and younger scholars re-address Blake's contemporary milieu after the neglect of ten years of post-structuralist, reader-orientated, methodology. By employing notions of history wider than the purely 'literary', and featuring an important new essay by the period's foremost subcultural historian, lain McCalman, "Historicizing Blake" represents a significant contribution towards the re-historicizing of Romanticism.

What constituted the 'private' in the eighteenth-century? In Representing private lives of the Enlightenment authors look beyond a simple equation of the private and the domestic to explore the significance of the individual and its constructions of identity and environment. Taking case studies from Russia, France, Italy and England, specialists from a range of disciplines analyse descriptions of the private situated largely outside the familial context: the nobleman at the theatre or in his study, the woman in her boudoir, portraitists and their subject, the solitary wanderer in the public garden, the penitent at confession. This critical approach provides a comparative framework that simultaneously confirms the Enlightenment as a pan-European movement, both intellectually and socially, whilst uncovering striking counterpoints. What emerges is a unique sense of how individuals from different classes and cultures sought to map their social and domestic sphere, and an understanding of the permeable boundaries separating private and public.

A thorough and scholarly study of Spenser and Shakespeare and their contrary artistry, covering themes of theology, psychology, the depictions of passion and intellect, moral counsel, family hierarchy, self-love, temptation, folly, allegory, female heroism, the supernatural and much more. Renaissance psychologies examines the distinct and polarised emphasis of these two towering intellects and writers of the early modern period. It demonstrates how pervasive was the influence of Spenser on Shakespeare, as in the "playful metamorphosis of Gloriana into Titania" in A Midsummer Night's Dream and its return from Spenser's moralizing allegory to the Ovidian spirit of Shakespeare's comedy. It will appeal to students and lecturers in Spenser studies, Renaissance poetry and the wider fields of British literature, social and cultural history, ethics and theology. -- .

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.

William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England offers a thorough re-appraisal of William Cobbett (1763-1835), situating his journalism and rural radicalism in relation to contemporary political debates.

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, the edition demonstrates the breadth of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature. Lauded by writers ranging from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf, from Borges to W.G. Sebald, Browne's distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne's range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct. His writings include the hauntingly meditative Urn-Burial, and the elaborate The Garden of Cyrus, a work that borders on a madness of infinite pattern. Religio Medici, probably Browne's most famous work, is at once autobiography, intricate religious-scientific paradox, and a monument of tolerance in the era of the English civil war. This volume also includes his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, an encyclopaedia of error which contains within its vast remit the entire intellectual landscape of the seventeenth centuryits science, its natural history, its painting, its history, its geography and its biblical oddities. The volume enables students to experience the ways in which Browne brings his lucid, baroque and stylish prose to bear across this range of diverse material, together with a carefully poised wit. This volume contains almost all of the author's work that was published in his lifetime, as well as a selection of writings published after his death. Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Browne.

This anthology is the sister volume to The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama. It contains sixteen of the most important, innovative, and dramatically exciting plays from the long Tudor century (1485-1603) newly edited in accessible modern spelling from original manuscripts or printed texts. Unlike previous anthologies, which have tended to divide the period by selecting examples of only 'medieval' or 'Renaissance' drama, and so eliding the continuities between the two, this volume gives readers an overview of the whole period. For in reality 'medieval' plays such as the magnificent York mystery cycle and the interludes of John Heywood were being performed through much of the sixteenth century, alongside 'Renaissance' works such as the comedy Gammer Gurton's Needle and Jasper Heywood's English re-imagining of Seneca's tragedy of blood, Thyestes. Tudor audiences clearly did not share the assumptions of modern editors, who have seen the plays produced before the 1590s as 'primitive', didactic stuff, soon swept away by the genius of Marlowe and Shakespeare. They enjoyed all of the works printed here, some anthologised in a readily available collection for the first time, seeing in each of them elements of dramatic action, character, and emotional engagement that moved and entertained them. This anthology will allow modern readers to see why, offering a chronological arrangement of the best Tudor plays that allows them to see for themselves the ways in which the traditions and tropes that would characterise the Shakespearean stage were tried and tested through a century of innovation and experiment. With the riches of a century of Tudor drama before them in a single volume, readers and performers will be able to judge both what was gained in the long century from the 1480s to the 1600s and also what was lost as drama moved from the streets and halls of the early Tudor period to the professional playhouses of the Elizabethan age.