Reading the Early Modern Diary traces the historical genealogy, formal characteristics, and shifting cultural uses of the early modern English diary. It explores the possibilities and limitations the genre held for the self-expression of a writer at a time which considerably pre-dated the Romantic cult of the individual self. The book analyzes the connections between genre and self-articulation: How could the diary come to be associated with emotional self-expression given the tedium and repetitiveness of its early seventeenth-century ancestors? How did what were once mere lists of daily events evolve into narrative representations of inner emotions? What did it mean to write on a daily basis, when the proper use of time was a heavily contested issue? Reading the Early Modern Diary addresses these questions and develops new theoretical frameworks for discussing interiority and affect in early modern autobiographical texts.

This study considers how a range of prose texts register, and help to shape, the early modern cultural debate between theoretical and experiential forms of knowledge as centered on the subject of travel.

"Divided into three sections on cosmetics, clothes and hairstyling, this book explores how early modern women regarded beauty culture and in what waysskin, clothes and hair could be used to represent racial, class and gender identities, and to convey political, religious and philosophical ideals"--

An analysis of the presentation of social reality in France during the final years of the ancien regime and the Revolution.

This edition presents Jonathan Swift's most important Irish writings in both prose and verse, together with an introduction, head notes and annotations that shed new light on the full context and significance of each piece. Familiar works such as "Gulliver's Travels" and "A Tale of a Tub" acquire new and deeper meanings when considered within the Irish frameworks presented in the edition. Differing in noteworthy ways from the more traditional, canonical, Anglocentric picture conveyed by other published volumes, the Swift that emerges from these pages is a brilliant polemicist, popular satirist, political agitator, playful versifier, tormented Jeremiah, and Irish patriot.

Leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic explore translations as a key agent of change in the wider religious, cultural and literary developments of the early modern period. They restore translation to the centre of our understanding of the literature and history of Tudor England.

This rich and varied collection of essays by scholars and interviews with artists approaches the fraught topic of book destruction from a new angle, setting out an alternative history of the cutting, burning, pulping, defacing and tearing of books from the medieval period to our own age.

This book explores literary culture in England between 1630 and 1700, focusing on connections between material, epistemic, and political conditions of literary writing and reading. In a number of case studies and close readings, it presents the seventeenth century as a period of change that saw a fundamental shift towards a new cultural configuration: neoclassicism. This shift affected a wide array of social practices and institutions, from poetry to politics and from epistemology to civility.

Why have scholars located the emergence of the novel in eighteenth-century England? What historical forces and stylistic developments helped to turn a disreputable type of writing into an eminent literary form?
This Reader's Guide explores the key critical debates and theories about the rising novel, from eighteenth-century assessments through to present day concerns. Nicholas Seager:

surveys major criticism on authors such as Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Jane Austen
covers a range of critical approaches and topics including feminism, historicism, postcolonialism and print culture
demonstrates how critical work is interrelated, allowing readers to discern trends in the critical conversation.
Approachable and stimulating, this is an invaluable introduction for anyone studying the origins of the novel and the surrounding body of scholarship.

Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century explores the impact of print on conflicting cultural notions about romantic love in the sixteenth century. This popularization of romantic love led to profound transformations in the rhetoric, ideology, and social function of love - transformations that continue to shape cultural notions about love today.

In Shakespeare studies, 'Romance' is widely understood to refer to the plays composed and performed in the waning days of the playwright's career. Romance on the Early Modern Stage introduces a new history for the genre, one that dates back to the first years of the commercial theatre in London. These early plays drew on popular stories depicting adventurous travel, imperial conquest, and exploration of new realms. Their staging also altered the practices of the theatre, as playwrights embraced a dramatic poetics to accommodate the extravagant narratives of these stories. Romance on the Early Modern Stage aligns such formal alterations in stagecraft with an array of materials drawn from early modern global exploration to argue that dramatic fantasies both reflected and informed England's overseas ambitions. The book revises how romance is understood within the dramatic canon - from romance enabling empire in Henry V and Milton's Comus, to the 'anti-romance' staged in The Tempest.

This study shows how poets worked within and against the available forms of nature writing to challenge their place within physical, political, and cultural landscapes. Looking at the treatment of different ecosystems, it argues that writing about the environment allowed labouring-class poets to explore important social and aesthetic questions.

Historical Writing in Britain, 1688-1830 explores a series of debates concerning the nature and value of the past in the long eighteenth century. The essays investigate a diverse range of subjects including art history, biography, historical poetry, and novels, as well as addressing more conventional varieties of historical writing.

Approaching the writings of Mary Wroth through a fresh 21st-century lens, this volume accounts for and re-invents the literary scholarship of one of the first "canonized" women writers of the English Renaissance. Essays present different practices that emerge around "reading" Wroth, including editing, curating, and digital reproduction.

This study sets Mozart, especially his four most celebrated operas - "Il Seraglio", "Cosi Fan Tutte", "Don Giovanni" and "The Magic Flute", in the context of Enlightenment literature and thought. For this new edition, the author has revised a number of passages and has focused on "Idomeneo" and "La Clemenza di Tito".

Frances E. Dolan examines the puzzling pronouns and puns, the love poetry, mischief, and disguises of "Twelfth Night," exploring its themes of grief, obsessive love, social climbing and gender identity, and helping you towards your own close-readings.

Through its rich foray into popular literary culture and medical history, this book investigates representations of regular and irregular medical practice in early modern England. Focusing on the prolific figures of the barber, surgeon and barber-surgeon, the author explores what it meant to the early modern population for a group of practitioners to be associated with both the trade guilds and an emerging professional medical world. The book uncovers the differences and cross-pollinations between barbers and surgeons' practices which play out across the literature: we learn not only about their cultural, civic, medical and occupational histories but also about how we should interpret patterns in language, name choice, performance, materiality, acoustics and semiology in the period. The investigations prompt new readings of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Beaumont, among others. And with chapters delving into early modern representations of medical instruments, hairiness, bloodletting procedures, waxy or infected ears, wart removals and skeletons, readers will find much of the contribution of this book is in its detail, which brings its subject to life.

Born in 1749, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the giants of world literature and the last European to embody the multi-faceted expertise of the Renaissance personality. Assembled to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his death, the essays included here are appropriately written from a variety of perspectives-- literary, humanistic, and scientific. A genuinely interdisciplinary collection, this volume is witness to the powerful influence Goethe's works have had on a wide range of subjects from fiction, drama, and art to physics, psychology, and psychiatry. The collection also demonstrates the extent to which his ideas have transcended national boundaries, as well as historic ones.

Scholarly interest in 'the Irish Gothic' has grown at a rapid pace in recent years, but the debate over exactly what constitutes this body of literature remains far from settled. This collection of essays explores the rich complexities of the literary gothic in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland.

This book reveals that seventeenth-century women's very marginality to traditional institutions of church and state made them catalysts for imagining an expanded public culture beyond these institutions. Women authors such as the conduct writer Dorothy Leigh, the prophet Sarah Wight, and the poet Katherine Philips recast sites of private dialogue--the extended family, the religious coventicle, and the poetic coterie--as the bases of public debate that crossed national borders. By revealing women writers' key role in the heated controversies of this period, Gray offers a new reading of those struggles as fractured by private affiliation and extended by transnational alliance.

Romantic Englishness investigates how narratives of localised selfhood in English Romantic writing are produced in relation to national and transnational formations. This book focuses on autobiographical texts by authors such as John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and William Wordsworth.

Transparency and Dissimulation analyses the configurations of ancient neoplatonism in early modern English texts. In looking closely at poems and prose writings by authors as diverse as Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Edward Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Traherne, Thomas Browne and, last not least, Aphra Behn, this study attempts to map the outlines of a neoplatonic aesthetics in literary practice as well as to chart its transformative potential in the shifting contexts of cultural turbulency and denominational conflict in 16th- and 17th-century England. As part of a "new", contextually aware, aesthetics, it seeks to determine some of the functions neoplatonic structures - such as forms of recursivity or certain modes of apophatic speech - are capable of fulfilling in combination and interaction with other, heterogeneous or even ideologically incompatible elements. What emerges is a surprisingly versatile poetics of excess and enigma, with strong Plotinian and Erigenist accents. This appears to need the traditional ingredients of petrarchism or courtliness only as material for the formation of new and dynamic wholes, revealing its radical metaphysical potential above all in the way it helps to resist the easy answers - in religion, science, or the fashions of libertine love.

This book examines four seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers concerned with the ways in which the commercial print trade was transforming traditional models of literary authority and immortality. While all were excited by the memorial potential of the printed book, they also betray a profound anxiety about how the new conditions of authorship would effect the transmission of cultural memory, and their ability to participate in and even control that process. This study contributes to the current pursuit--in both literary studies and the social sciences--of histories of memory in Western culture, employing current scholarship from the social and natural sciences to delineate the nature of modern memory.

This collection is the first to historicise the term ephemera and its meanings for early modern England and considers its relationship to time, matter, and place. It asks: how do we conceive of ephemera in a period before it was routinely employed (from the eighteenth century) to describe ostensibly disposable print? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-when objects and texts were rapidly proliferating-the term began to acquire its modern association with transitoriness. But contributors to this volume show how ephemera was also integrally related to wider social and cultural ecosystems. Chapters explore those ecosystems and think about the papers and artefacts that shaped homes, streets, and cities or towns and their attendant preservation, loss, or transformation. The studies here therefore look beyond static records to think about moments of process and transmutation and accordingly get closer to early modern experiences, identities, and practices.

The different versions of Hamlet constitute one of the most vexing puzzles in Shakespeare studies. In this groundbreaking work, Shakespeare scholar Terri Bourus argues that this puzzle can only be solved by drawing on multiple kinds of evidence and analysis, including book and theatre history, biography, performance studies, and close readings.