Shakespare and Montaigne are the English and French writers of the sixteenth century who have the most to say to modern readers. Shakespeare certainly drew on Montaigne's essay 'On Cannibals' in writing The Tempest and debates have raged amongst scholars about the playwright's obligations to Montaigne in passages from earlier plays including Hamlet, King Lear and Measure for Measure. Peter Mack argues that rather than continuing the undeterminable quarrel about how early in his career Shakespeare came to Montaigne, we should focus on the similar techniques they apply to shared sources. Grammar school education in the sixteenth century placed a special emphasis on reading classical texts in order to reuse both the ideas and the rhetoric. This book examines the ways in which Montaigne and Shakespeare used their reading and argued with it to create something new. It is the most sustained account available of the similarities and differences between these two great writers, casting light on their ethical and philosophical views and on how these were conveyed to their audience.

"English Mercuries" examines war and literature through the writings of veterans who came home from their deployments to pursue literary careers. From their often neglected writings emerges a new picture of the Elizabethan world at war. For centuries Elizabethan England has been characterized by booming patriotism and martial energy, and the literature of this period, epitomized in works like Shakespeare's "Henry V," has been seen as celebrating a proud and defiant kingdom unified around its wars with Spain. Beneath this patriotic veneer, however, was a country withering under the costs of seemingly endless military commitments and ripped apart by doubts about the purpose of war and mistrust of state officials who advanced their own political interests through war at the expense of the people who had to fight and pay for it.

These misgivings are a powerful undercurrent in much of the literature of the period, even the most ostensibly patriotic works, but it is in the writings on war by soldier poets where they are most clearly pronounced. Fashioning themselves as servants of both Mars and Mercury (the god of war and the god of writing), Elizabethan soldier poets focused their war stories on the gritty realities of military campaigning, the price individuals paid for serving the state, and the difficulties of returning to civilian life. The book reconsiders some familiar writers like John Donne and Ben Jonson in the context of their military experiences and provides comprehensive studies of some important but underappreciated soldier poets like Thomas Churchyard, George Gascoigne, and John Harington.

This book is the first complete study of the translations of Machiavelli's "Prince "made in Europe and the Mediterranean countries during the period from the sixteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century: the first, unpublished French translation by Jacques de Vintimille (1546), the first Latin translation by Silvestro Tegli (1560), as well as the first translations in Dutch (1615), German (1692), Swedish (1757) and Arabic (1824). The first translation produced in Spain - dated somewhere between the end of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth century - remained in manuscript form, while there was a second vernacular Spanish version around 1680. The situation in Great Britain was different from the rest of Europe, as it could boast four manuscript translations by the end of the sixteenth century.

Although Smollett's obvious masculine sensibility has become a commonplace in criticism of the 18th-century novel, the basis and particularities of that sensibility have never been examined. In actuality, his treatment of women--heroines, victims, and comic or grotesque--proves far more complex than conventional commentary suggests. This study attempts to show that in each category Smollett's treatment depends on the fictional purposes that these characters serve in his novels.

Best known for his landmark version of the Protestant Bible, James VI (1566-1625) of Scotland, who succeeded Elizabeth I to the English throne, was truly a monarch of the word. From religious prose and verse, to political treatises and social works, to love poems and witty doggerel, James used writing and the print media to inspire his subjects, govern them, keep his enemies at bay, and even examine his own authority. Until now, the full span of James's work has received little critical attention by political and literary historians. In Royal Subjects, sixteen leading scholars explore the richness of his oeuvre from a variety of perspectives, and in so doing seek to establish monarchic writing as an important genre in its own right.

As religious reformers, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had produced devotional works, but James VI and I saw writing as central to his rule overall, even though he knew it could invite criticism. He wrote, for example, a treatise on kingship, a controversial argument against tobacco, and an epic poem encouraging ecumenism among Christians. In many cases, his use of genre revealed a sensitivity to cultural power, while his decisions whether or not to print reflected an emergent understanding of writing as a commodity.

By examining such topics, these essays delve into central issues of critical debate, including questions of authorship and authority, representation and power, receptions and appropriations of text, and politics of genres and material forms. Through its unprecedented look at monarchic writing, Royal Subjects not only enriches our understanding of the reign of James VI and I, but also offers fruitful suggestions for approaches to otherRenaissance texts and other periods.

What does it mean for a woman to write an elegy, ode, epic, or blazon in the seventeenth century? How does their reading affect women's use of particular poetic forms and what can the physical appearance of a poem, in print and manuscript, reveal about how that poem in turn was read? Forms of Engagement shows how the aesthetic qualities of early modern women's poetry emerge from the culture in which they write. It reveals previously unrecognized patterns of influence between women poets Katherine Philips, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish and their peers and predecessors: how Lucy Hutchinson responded to Ben Jonson and John Milton, how Margaret Cavendish responded to Thomas Hobbes and the scientists of the early Royal Society, and how Katherine Philips re-worked Donne's lyrics and may herself have influenced Abraham Cowley and Andrew Marvell. This book places analysis of form at the centre of an historical study of women writers, arguing that reading for form is reading for influence. Hutchinson, Philips, and Cavendish were immersed in mid-seventeenth century cultural developments, from the birth of experimental philosophy, to the local and state politics of civil war and the rapid expansion of women's print publication. For women poets, reworking poetic forms such as elegy, ode, epic, and couplet was a fundamental engagement with the culture in which they wrote. By focusing on these interactions, rather than statements of exclusion and rejection, a formalist reading of these women can actually provide a more nuanced historical view of their participation in literary culture.

Places the warrior-poet Aldana in the appropriate poetic and philosophical context of the Spanish Golden Age and the European Renaissance. This study explores the love lyric of one of the greatest, yet oft-neglected, warrior-poets of the Spanish Golden Age - Francisco de Aldana (1537-78). Hailed for his skill by Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, and the Generation of27's Cernuda alike, Aldana's lyric is the unique result of his Florentine education and interactions with the Medici family as well as Benedetto Varchi's literary circle. Aldana died young, fighting in the Battle of Alcazaquivirin the service of Portugal's Sebastian I. His brother, Cosme, subsequently edited and published his poetry in three volumes between 1589-93. Perhaps the most alluring aspect of Aldana's poetry is his exploration of the natureof love via the reconciliation of seemingly opposing and discordant elements of physical love with the Neoplatonic spirituality more common to sixteenth-century poetry, especially as portrayed by the Petrarchan tradition. Throughclose examination of Aldana's lyric -religious, philosophical, pastoral, and mythological- this study reveals how Aldana exploits the gaps in Petrarchism, Neoplatonism, and contemporary poetic models to communicate his belief inthe importance of the physical in our search for those fleeting moments of transcendental bliss on the earthly plane. Paul Joseph Lennon is Lecturer in Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews,UK.

Returning to Spain after fighting in the Battle of Lepanto and other Mediterranean campaigns against the Turks, the soldier Miguel de Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates and taken captive to Algiers. The five years he spent in the Algerian bagnios or prison-houses (1575-1580) made an indelible impression on his works. From the first plays and narratives written after his release to his posthumous novel, the story of Cervantes's traumatic experience continuously speaks through his writings. "Cervantes in Algiers" offers a comprehensive view of his life as a slave and, particularly, of the lingering effects this traumatic experience had on his literary production.

No work has documented in such vivid and illuminating detail the socio-political world of sixteenth-century Algiers, Cervantes's life in the prison-house, his four escape attempts, and the conditions of his final ransom. Garces's portrait of a sophisticated multi-ethnic culture in Algiers, moreover, is likely to open up new discussions about early modern encounters between Christians and Muslims. By bringing together evidence from many different sources, historical and literary, Garces reconstructs the relations between Christians, Muslims, and renegades in a number of Cervantes's writings.

The idea that survivors of captivity need to repeat their story in order to survive (an insight invoked from Coleridge to Primo Levi to Dori Laub) explains not only Cervantes's storytelling but also the book that theorizes it so compellingly. As a former captive herself (a hostage of Colombian guerrillas), the author reads and listens to Cervantes with another ear.

Nelson provides a study of the ways in which Anglo-American authors constructed "race" in their works from the time of the first British colonists through the period of the Civil War. She focuses on some eleven texts, ranging from widely-known to little-considered, that deal with the relations among Native, African, and Anglo-Americans, and places her readings in the historical, social, and material contexts of an evolving U.S. colonialism and internal imperialism. Nelson shows how a novel such as The Last of the Mohicans sought to reify the Anglo historical past and simultaneously suggested strategies that would serve Anglo-Americans against Native Americans as the frontier pushed further west. Concluding her work with a reading of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Nelson shows how that text undercuts the racist structures of the pre-Civil War period by positing a revised model of sympathy that authorizes alternative cultural perspectives and requires Anglo-Americans to question their own involvement with racism.

Widely regarded as the most important narrative of seventeenth-century New England, William Bradford's "Of Plimmoth Plantation" is one of the founding documents of American literature and history. In "William Bradford's Books" this portrait of the religious dissenters who emigrated from the Netherlands to New England in 1620 receives perhaps its sharpest textual analysis to date--and the first since that of Samuel Eliot Morison two generations ago. Far from the gloomy elegy that many readers find, Bradford's history, argues Douglas Anderson, demonstrates remarkable ambition and subtle grace, as it contemplates the adaptive success of a small community of religious exiles. Anderson offers fresh literary and historical accounts of Bradford's accomplishment, exploring the context and the form in which the author intended his book to be read.

A LONG THE KROMMERUN offers a selection of the best papers delivered at the XXIV International James Joyce Symposium hosted by Utrecht University, the Netherlands, June 2014. The essays offer fresh insights into Joyce and De Stijl aesthetic movement which originated in the Netherlands, Joyce's (language) politics, his use of multilingualism and dialects, and, by way of close readings and genetic approaches of Finnegans Wake, the intricate ways Joyce communicates with his readers. Contributors: Boriana A. Alexandrova, Stephanie Boland, Austin Briggs, Tim Conley, Catherine Flynn, Philip Keel Geheber, Robbert-Jan Henkes, Maria Kager, Katherine O'Callaghan, So Onose, David Pascoe, Sam Slote, David Spurr, and Dirk Van Hulle.

Many Victorian and Edwardian fantasy stories began as extemporaneous oral tales told for the delight of children and, like "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Wind in the Willows," were written down by chance. These fanciful stories, told with child-like spontaneity, are analyzed here to argue their role in the revolution not only of children's literature, but of the general conception of childhood. In contrast to the traditional moral tales of the 18th century that were written with the express purpose of instructing children how to become adults, this literature that Sandner identifies as the fantastic sublime reveled in the imagination and the enjoyment of reading. By looking at the structure of the Romantic sublime and inventing and exploring the structure of the fantastic sublime, this work offers a completely new way to examine 19th-century children's fantasy literature, and perhaps, fantastic literature in general.

The study begins with a look at works by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, focusing on the 18th-century view of childhood and fantasy. This book expands on the notion that English Romanticism played a significant role in preparing adults to accept fantasy literature for children. Connections are made to the works of Kenneth Grahame, George MacDonald, and Christina Rossetti.

This guide to eighteenth-century literature and culture provides students with the ideal introduction to literature and its context from 1688-1789, including: the historical, cultural and intellectual background including the expansion of cultural production and the growth of 'print culture'; major writers, genres and groups; concise explanations of key terms needed to understand the literature and criticism; an overview of key critical approaches; and a chronology mapping historical events and literary works and further reading including websites and electronic resources."Introductions to British Literature and Culture" provide practical guides to key literary periods. Guides in the series help to orientate students as they begin a new module or area of study, providing concise information on the historical, cultural, literary and critical context and acting as an initial map of the knowledge needed to study the literature and culture of a specific period. Each guide includes an overview of the historical period, intellectual contexts, major genres, critical approaches and a guide to original research and resource materials in the area, enabling students to progress confidently to further study.

Comparatively little is known about Shakespeare's first audiences. This study argues that the Elizabethan audience is an essential part of Shakespeare as a site of cultural meaning, and that the way criticism thinks of early modern theatregoers is directly related to the way it thinks of, and uses, the Bard himself.

Within the historical literary genre, stylistics is widely applicable but as yet under deployed. This book acts as a showcase for the range of analysis possible. Although the analytic focus within the genre has traditionally been on literary criticism, stylistics has much to offer. Bringing together text and context, Patricia Canning synthesizes stylistic models with literary theory and critical theory. The historical and contextual focus throughout the book is on religious, political and ideological issues that animated and defined Reformation England. Each chapter interrogates the dichotomous concept of 'word' and 'image' by considering the ways in which writers of this period deal with these contentious subjects in their dramatic and poetic works. 'Representation' is proposed not just as a matter of semiotics but of ideology.

In 1796 when Mary Lamb, in a sudden attack of violent frenzy, killed her mother, her brother Charles pledged himself to be responsible for her care, thus sparing her from threatened incarceration in Bedlam. For the next thirty odd years they lived, and wrote, together. Informed by feminist and psychoanalytic literary theory, this book provides an entirely new perspective on the lives and writings of Charles and Mary Lamb. It argues that the Lambs's ideological inheritance as the children of servants, their work experience as clerk and needlewoman respectively, and the role that madness and matricide played in both their lives, resulted in writings which were at variance with the spirit of their age. In particular, the intensity of their sibling bond is seen, in Charles Lamb's case, as resulting in texts stylistically and thematically opposed to the masculinist stance currently considered characteristic of Romantic writers.

'Bluebeard', in which women are slaughtered and hidden in a horrible chamber by a monstrous husband, is hair-raising; yet its happy ending gives it a utopian force. Davies's book focuses on literature in German from the eighteenth century to the 1990s, and is the first full-length study of the history of Bluebeard published in any language.

As a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet, Judith Sargent Murray candidly and often humorously asserted her opinions about the social and political conditions of women in late eighteenth-century America. As a committed feminist, she urged American women to enter a "new era in female history", yet published her own writings under a man's name in the hopes of more widely disseminating her ideas. This volume includes selections from The Gleaner, her major work, and other publications.

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, is the most important Elizabethan woman writer and patron outside the royal family. By astute use of the genres permitted to women, she supported the Protestant cause, introduced continental literary genres, expanded opportunities for later women writers, and influenced seventeenth-century lyric and drama by such writers as John Donne, George Herbert, Mary Wroth, and William Shakespeare. This scholarly edition in two volumes is the first to include all her extant works: Volume I prints her three original poems, the disputed `Dolefull Lay of Clorinda', her translations from Petrarch, Mornay, and Garnier, and all her known letters. Volume II contains her metrical paraphrases of Psalms 44-150. The edition also provides a biographical introduction, discussion of her sources and methods of composition, textual annotation, and a detailed commentary.

Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine is a bold new investigation of Shakespeare's female characters using the late plays and the early adaptations written and staged during the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

The six great Romantic poets represented in this concise collection - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats - are those considered essential reading for anyone with an interest in the verse of the period.
An essential selection of poetry by the six great Romantic poets.
Ideal for general readers or for students taking short courses in Romanticism.
Includes the whole of Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience."
Gives readers a concise overview of Romantic poetry.

Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded pits the "coarse" rural masses against the "refined" urban population. In Volume One, al-Shirbini describes the three rural "types"-peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural dervish-offering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with digressions into love, food, and flatulence. Volume Two of Brains Confounded is followed by Risible Rhymes, a concise text that includes a comic disquisition on "rural" verse, mocking the pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside. Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems, which were another popular genre of the day, and presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbi. Together, Brains Confounded and Risible Rhymes offer intriguing insight into the intellectual concerns of Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics and shedding light on the literature of the era. An English-only edition.

No thanks to Walter Scott, Scotland has at last regained its parliament. If this statement sounds extreme, it echoes the tone that criticism of Scott and his culture has taken through the twentieth century. Scott is supposed to have provided stories of the past that allowed his country no future--that pushed it "out of history." Scotland has become a place so absorbed in nostalgia that it could not construct a politics for a changing world.
Possible Scotlands disagrees. It argues that the tales Scott told, however romanticized, also provided for a national future. They do not tell the story of a Scotland lost in time and lacking value. Instead they open up a narrative space where the nation is always imaginable. This book reads across Scott's complex characters and plots, his many personae, his interventions in his nation's nineteenth-century politics, to reveal the author as an energetic producer of literary and national culture working to prevent a simple or singular message. Indeed, Scott invites readers into his texts to develop multiple and forward-looking interpretations of a Scotland always in formation. Scott's texts and his nation are alive in their constant retelling. Scott was an author for Scotland's new times.

Lost Plays in Shakespeare's England examines assumptions about what a lost play is and how it can be talked about; how lost plays can be reconstructed, particularly when they use narratives already familiar to playgoers; and how lost plays can force us to reassess extant plays, particularly through ideas of repertory studies.

Caroline Drama takes as its focus the public theatre playwriting of Philip Massinger, John Ford, James Shirley and Richard Brome between 1625 and 1642. It brings into clear focus for those unfamiliar with these playwrights a neglected period of writing. Setting their plays within a social and political context, Julie Sanders reveals their concern with issues of community and hierarchy in the decades leading up to the English Civil Wars. By exploring a range of plays of each writer, she explores both their continuities and their differences, as well as examining their particular choices of subject matter, language, and theatrical strategy. The value of Caroline Drama as a whole becomes clear as a result of this study.