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.

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.

Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque is the first work to link the study of metatheater with the concepts of baroque and neobaroque. Arguing that the onset of European modernity in the early seventeenth century and both the modernist and the postmodernist periods of the twentieth century witnessed a flourishing of the phenomenon of theater that reflects on itself as theater, the author reexamines the concepts of metatheater, baroque, and neobaroque through a pairing and close analysis of seventeenth and twentieth century plays. The comparisons include Jean Rotrou's The True Saint Genesius with Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean and Jean Genet's The Blacks; Pierre Corneille's L'Illusion comique with Tony Kushner's The Illusion; Gian Lorenzo Bernini's The Impresario with Luigi Pirandello's theater-in-theater trilogy; Shakespeare's Hamlet with Pirandello's Henry IV and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Moliere's Impromptu de Versailles with "impromptus" by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, and Eugene Ionesco. Metatheater and Modernity also examines the role of technology in the creating and breaking of illusions in both centuries. In contrast to previous work on metatheater, it emphasizes the metatheatrical role of comedy. Metatheater, the author concludes, is both performance and performative: it accomplishes a perceptual transformation in its audience both by defending theater and exposing the illusory quality of the world outside.

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.

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.

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke and sister to Sir Philip Sidney, is the most important woman writer of the Elizabethan era outside the royal family. 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.

Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell offers fresh perspectives from leading and emerging scholars on seventeenth-century British literature, with a focus on the surprising ways that texts interacted with writers and readers at specific cultural moments. With an eye to the elusive and complicated Andrew Marvell as tutelary figure of the age, the contributors have provided nuanced and sophisticated readings of a range of seventeenth-century authors, often foregrounding the uncertainties and complexities with which these writers were faced as the remarkable events of these years moved swiftly around them. The essays make important contributions, both methodological and critical, to the field of early modern studies and include examinations of prominent seventeenth-century figures such as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden and Edmund Waller. -- .

Many plays of Shakespeare's time were, like modern movie and television scripts, products of collaboration between two or more writers. This book shows that in the first of his Late Romances, Pericles, Shakespeare collaborated with the minor playwright George Wilkins. It explores a wide range of new techniques for identifying the co-authors in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Romance was the preeminent narrative form through which medieval Christendom imagined its encounter with the world. But in the early modern period, religious war and commercial and colonial expansion radically changed the terms of that encounter. This book traces the process through which Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others adapted, revised, or resisted romance, mapping a world of increasingly uncertain allegiances and affiliations. Early modern romance re-imagined the world, and in the process decisively rearticulated the relations between "Christendom," "Islam," and "Europe." By attending to genre, Robinson explores both the conflicts that formed early modern identities and the power of literary form to shape the world defined by those conflicts - a power with effects that reach to our present moment.

From 1880 to 1956, when John Osborne transformed the British theater world with Look Back in Anger, British playwrights made numerous lasting contributions and provided a foundation for the innovations of dramatists during the latter half of the 20th century. This reference profiles the life and work of some 40 British playwrights active during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of whom are also known for their work as novelists and poets. Included are figures such as W. H. Auden, Max Beerbohm, Noel Coward, T. S. Eliot, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, D. H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. Each entry provides a biographical overview; a list of major plays and summaries of their critical reception; a list of minor plays, adaptations, and productions; an assessment of the playwright's career; and archival and bibliographical information. Included in this reference book are alphabetically arranged entries for some 40 British playwrights active from 1880 through 1956. Entries are written by expert contributors, with each entry providing a biographical overview; a list of major plays, premieres, and significant revivals, along with a summary of the critical reception of these works; a listing of additional plays, adaptations, and productions; an assessment of the playwright's career and contributions, with reference to published evaluations in magazines, journals, dissertations, and books; a listing of locations housing unpublished archival material, if available; a selected bibliography of the dramatist's published plays and of essays and articles by the playwright on aspects of the theater; a selected bibliography of secondary sources; and, when available, a listing of previously published bibliographies on the playwright.

Recently voted the best literary work of all time, Cervantes' Don Quixote is widely read by students and has had enormous influence on popular culture. Written by a leading Cervantes scholar yet accessible to students and general readers, this book conveniently introduces Cervantes' masterpiece. Included along with a detailed plot summary are chapters on the novel's background, themes, style, and reception. The volume closes with an extensive bibliographical essay and a selected, general bibliography. In 2002, the Norwegian Book Club, affiliated with the Nobel Prize organization, polled 100 writers from around the world, asking each to name the 10 best works of imaginative literature of all time. Cervantes' Don Quixote, though first published in 1605, was the overwhelming winner. Don Quixote is a favorite among students and general readers alike. It has been translated into more languages than any book other than the bible; adapted to the stage more than any other non-dramatic text; illustrated more than any other novel; and inspired more films than any other literary work. Written by a leading scholar yet accessible to high school students, this guide is an indispensable introduction to the world's most important novel. An introductory chapter overviews Cervantes' life and career and discusses the background of his novel. The book then provides a detailed plot summary of Don Quixote and considers the merits of different editions. It then looks at the cultural and historical contexts surrounding the novel and gives extensive attention to the work's themes, style, and reception. A bibliographical essay and selected, general bibliography of major studies conclude the volume.

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 is the first edition since its original publication of Daniel Heinsius' Latin tragedy Auriacus, sive Libertas saucia (Orange, or Liberty Wounded, 1602), with an introduction, a parallel English translation, and a commentary. Centering on the assassination of William of Orange, one of the leaders of the Dutch Revolt against King Philip II of Spain, Auriacus was Heinsius' history drama, with which he aimed to raise Dutch drama to the level of classical drama. Highly influential, the tragedy contributed to the construction of a national identity in the Low Countries and launched Heinsius' long career as an internationally celebrated poet and professor at Leiden University.

Romanticism is taught at universities across the globe and is considered integral to the study of British and European literature. This book, written by leading academics, presents innovative, practical approaches to teaching traditional and newer aspects of the curriculum and is essential to anyone teaching Romanticism at university level.

This book is a historical and theoretical study of some of John Donne's less frequently discussed poetry and prose; it interrogates various trends that have dominated Donne criticism, such as the widely divergent views about his attitudes towards women, the focus on the Songs and Sonets to the exclusion of his other works, and the tendency to separate discussions of his poetry and prose. On a broader scale, it joins a small but growing number of feminist re-readings of Donne's works. Using the cultural criticism of French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, Meakin explores works throughout Donne's career, from his earliest verse letters to sermons preached while Divinity Reader at Lincoln's Inn and Dean of St. Paul's in London. Donne's articulations of four feminine figures in particular are examined: the Muse, Sappho, Eve as `the mother of mankind', and a young girl who lived and died in Donne's own time, Elizabeth Drury. Meakin's reading of Donne's self-described `masculine perswasive force' asserting itself upon the `incomprehensibleness' of the feminine suggests that the Donne canon needs to be reassessed as even richer and more complex than previously asserted, and that his reputation as a supreme Renaissance poet - revived at the beginning of this century - needs to be carried into the next.

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.

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.

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.

This study of the long and varied afterlife of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, primarily in the overlapping arenas of children's and popular culture, offers new insights into not only the continued popularity and relevance of Crusoe's story, but into how modern conceptions of childhood have been shaped by nostalgia and by ideas of 'the popular.' Because it enjoyed such tremendous success as a pedagogical work for children and as a source for children's and popular entertainments, Robinson Crusoe provides a unique case study in the development of our ideas of childhood and the points of intersection between children's and popular cultures. Drawing on a wide range of adaptations and remediations, including children's abridgements, print 'robinsonades, ' chapbooks, popular songs, pantomimes, toys, games, and various consumer items, this book offers a fresh consideration of the place Crusoe has occupied in our culture for almost three centuries.

Coriolanus is the last and most intriguing of Shakespeare's Roman tragedies. Critics, directors and actors have long been bewitched by this gripping character study of a warrior that Rome can neither tolerate nor do without. Caius Martius Coriolanus is a terrifying war machine in battle, a devoted son to a wise and ambitious mother at home, and an inflammatory scorner of the rights and rites of the common people. This Critical Reader opens up the extraordinary range of interpretation the play has elicited over the centuries and offers exciting new directions for scholarship. The volume commences with a Timeline of key events relating to Coriolanus in print and performance and an Introduction by the volume editor. Chapters survey the scholarly reaction to the play over four centuries, the history of Coriolanus on stage and the current research and thinking about the play. The second half of the volume comprises four 'New Directions' essays exploring: the rhetoric and performance of the self, the play's relevance to our contemporary world, an Hegelian approach to the tragedy, and the insights of computer-assisted stylometry. A final chapter critically surveys resources for teaching the play.

Famously, Blake believed that "without contraries" there could be no "progression." Conflict was integral to his artistic vision, and his style, but it had more to do with critical engagement than any urge to victory. The essays in this volume look at conflict as it marked Blake's thinking on politics, religion and the visual arts.

On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his History of England, 'English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government'. It's certainly true that the system of prior restraint enshrined in this Restoration measure was now at an end, at least for print. Yet the same cannot be said of government control, which came to operate instead by means of post-publication retribution, not pre-publication licensing, notably for the common-law offence of seditious libel. For many of the authors affected, from Defoe to Cobbett, this new regime was a greater constraint on expression than the old, not least for its alarming unpredictability, and for the spectacular punishment-the pillory-that was sometimes entailed. Yet we may also see the constraint as an energizing force. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period, writers developed and refined ingenious techniques for communicating dissident or otherwise contentious meanings while rendering the meanings deniable. As a work of both history and criticism, this book traces the rise and fall of seditious libel prosecution, and with it the theatre of the pillory, while arguing that the period's characteristic forms of literary complexity-ambiguity, ellipsis, indirection, irony-may be traced to the persistence of censorship in the post-licensing world. The argument proceeds through case studies of major poets and prose writers including Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, and Southey, and also calls attention to numerous little-known satires and libels across the extended period.

At the end of the Eighteenth century, British writers began to celebrate work in a strangely indirect way. Instead of describing diligence as an attribute of character, poets and novelists increasingly identified work with impersonal 'energies' akin to natural force. Chemists traced mental and muscular work back to its source in sunlight, giving rise to the claim (beloved by Nineteenth-century journalists) that 'all the labour done under the sun is really done by it'. The Work of The Sun traces the emergence of this model of work, exploring its sources in middle-class consciousness and its implications for British literature and science.

Who really wrote the Shakespeare plays? This important literary and cultural controversy is livelier and more widely discussed than ever before. Here, nine leading experts offer their version of who wrote the plays. Why does this issue matter? Because a full understanding of the author can make a huge difference to our wider appreciation of the life and times, the literature, and the culture of the period. William Shakespeare is universally regarded as the greatest writer who ever lived. Every year sees vast amounts of critical, philosophical and contextual interpretations of his works. There is endless biographical analyses of his life in relation to this work. And yet, despite this vast output, Shakespeare remains an enigmatic figure. He remains a man who seems to have understood humanity so well but whose life as a writer is absent in records of the time. This truth has led to many questions about the real author behind the title-pages, the real nature of Shakespeare the man, and how this nature relates to Shakespeare the writer. In new essays especially written for this book nine leading 'Shakespearean' authors present their version of the man. Ros Barber, Barry Clarke, John Casson with William Rubinstein & David Ewald, William Leahy, Alan H. Nelson, Diana Price, Alexander Waugh and Robin Williams each offer their ideas. Each essay is founded in scholarly research and provides a positive case for why the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy needs to be taken seriously. These versions of Shakespeare are realistic and compelling. Each in its turn will provoke the reader to see various aspects of Shakespeare in a different light. And they will help us understand the enigmatic fascination that Shakespeare (and the authorship question) continues to generate.

A pioneering scholarly collection of essays outlining Jonathan Swift's reception and influence in Europe Jonathan Swift has had a profound impact on almost all the national literatures of continental Europe. The celebrated author of acknowledged masterpieces like A Tale of a Tub (1704), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729), the Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin, was courted by innumerable translators, adaptors, and retellers, admired and challenged by shoals of critics, and creatively imitated by both novelists and playwrights, not only in central Europe (Germany and Switzerland) but also in its northern (Denmark and Sweden) and southern (Italy, Spain, and Portugal) outposts, as well as its eastern (Poland and Russia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) and western parts - from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the present day.