This timely book challenges conventional critical wisdom about the work of Ben Jonson. Looking in particular at his Jacobean and Caroline plays, it explores his engagement with concepts of republicanism. Julie Sanders investigates notions of community in Jonson's stage worlds - his 'theatrical republics' - and reveals a Jonson to contrast with the traditional image of the writer as conservative, absolutist, misogynist, and essentially 'anti-theatrical'. The Jonson presented here is a positive celebrant of the social and political possibilities of theatre.

Joel Chandler Harris was internationally famous in his own time and has a surprisingly broad scholarly and popular following in ours. His portraits of slaves and former slaves, particularly Uncle Remus and Free Joe, poor whites, and Brer Rabbit, the archetypal trickster hero, have influenced many other writers, including Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and a wide array of children's authors from Beatrix Potter to A. A. Milne. Harris also left a lasting mark on popular culture, most clearly manifested through Disney's ^ISong of the South^R and at Disney World attractions featuring versions of Harris's characters. He singlehandedly preserved and made internationally famous the Brer Rabbit folktales, the largest body of African American oral folklore that the world has ever known. Additionally, Harris was a major New South journalist who accelerated the process of reconciliation between North and South and promoted racial tolerance after the Civil War. This reference book is a complete bibliographic guide to the scholarly response to Harris during the last two decades. The introduction explores such issues as Harris's renderings of black dialect, Southern character, and folklore, and his influence on popular culture. The first part is a supplement to Bickley's earlier bibliography of Harris, which covered the period 1862-1976. The second part provides more than 300 entries for books, articles, and dissertations about Harris published after 1976. Entries are grouped in sections according to year of publication, and then alphabetically within each section. Each entry is fully annotated, and a detailed index concludes the volume.

"Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama" explores the fruitful and potentially unruly nature of metaphorical utterances in Shakespearean drama, with analyses of "Othello," "Titus Andronicus," "King Henry IV Part 1," "Macbeth," "Hamlet," and "The Tempest."

This book examines the revival of antique philosophy in the Renaissance as a literary preoccupation informed by wit. Humanists were more inspired by the fictionalized characters of certain wise fools, including Diogenes the Cynic, Socrates, Aesop, Democritus, and Heraclitus, than by codified systems of thought. Rich in detail, this study offers a systematic treatment of wide-ranging Renaissance imagery and metaphors and presents a detailed iconography of certain classical philosophers. Ultimately, the problems of Renaissance humanism are revealed to reflect the concerns of humanists in the twenty-first century.

"The categories of authenticity and sincerity have been treated with scepticism since at least the early twentieth century, but they remain indispensable for the study of Romantic literature and culture. This book, focusing on authors including Byron, Coleridge and Austen, aims to relocate the terms within the context of current critical debates"--

Geo-spatial identity and early Modern European drama come together in this study of how cultural or political attachments are actively mediated through space. Matei-Chesnoiu traces the modulated representations of rivers, seas, mountains, and islands in sixteenth-century plays by Shakespeare, Jasper Fisher, Thomas May, and others.

Spectral Shakespeares is an illuminating exploration of recent, experimental adaptations of Shakespeare on film, TV, and the web. Drawing on adaptation studies and media theory as well as Jacques Derrida's work, this book argues that these adaptations foreground a cluster of self-reflexive "themes" - from incorporation to reiteration, from migration to addiction, from silence to survival - that contribute to the redefinition of adaptation, and Shakespearean adaptation in particular, as an unfinished and interminable process. The "Shakespeare" that emerges from these adaptations is a fragmentary, mediatized, and heterogeneous presence, a spectral Shakespeare that leaves a mark on our contemporary mediascape.

Quantifiable citizenship in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was neither a word for "population" in the sense of numbers of people, nor agreement that monarchs should count their subjects. Much of the work of naturalizing the view that people can be represented as populations took place far outside government institutions and philosophical treatises. It occurred instead in the work of colonial writers who found in the act of counting the "vast numbers" of Indians who held her captive a way to imagine fixed boundaries between intermingling groups. Counting Bodies explores the imaginative, personal, and narrative writings that performed the cultural work of normalizing the enumeration of bodies. By repositioning and unearthing a literary pre-history of population science, the book shows that representing individuals as numbers was a central element of colonial projects. Early colonial writings that describe routine and even intimate interactions offer a window into the way people wove the quantifiable forms of subjectivity made available by population counts into everyday life. Whether trying to make sense of plantation slavery, frontier warfare, rapid migration, or global commerce, writers framed questions about human relationships across different cultures and generations in terms of population.

Why were so many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals passionate about the Italian Renaissance? This book answers that question by showing how the Victorian coupling of criminality with self-fashioning under the sign of the Renaissance provided queer intellectuals with an enduring model of ruthlessly permissive individualism.

This is the first study to consider the relationship between private confessional rituals and memory across a range of early modern writers, including Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Robert Southwell.

This volume examines the image-based methods of interpretation that pictorial and literary landscapists employed between 1500 and 1700. The seventeen essays ask how landscape, construed as the description of place in image and/or text, more than merely inviting close viewing, was often seen to call for interpretation or, better, for the application of a method or principle of interpretation. Contributors: Boudewijn Bakker, William M. Barton, Stijn Bussels, Reindert Falkenburg, Margaret Goehring, Andrew Hui, Sarah McPhee, Luke Morgan, Shelley Perlove, Kathleen P. Long, Lukas Reddemann, Denis Ribouillault, Paul J. Smith, Troy Tower, and Michel Weemans.

"Gambling permeated the daily lives of eighteenth-century Britons of all classes. This book explicates the relationship between the rampant gambling in eighteenth-century England, the new forms of gambling-inspired capitalism that transformed British society, and novels that interrogate the new socio-economy of long odds and lucky breaks"--

In this groundbreaking study, Christopher Warren argues that early modern literary genres were deeply tied to debates about global legal order and that todayas international law owes many of its most basic suppositions to early modern literary culture. Literature and the Law of Nations shows how the separation of scholarship on law from scholarship on literature has limited the understanding of international law on both sides. Warren suggests that both literary and legal scholars have tacitly accepted tendentious but politically consequential assumptions about whether international law is areala law. Literature and the Law of Nations recognizes the specific nature of early modern international law by showing how major writers of the English Renaissance-including Shakespeare, Milton, and Hobbes-deployed genres like epic, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, and history to shore up the canonical subjects and objects of modern international law. Warren demonstrates how Renaissance literary genres informed modern categories like public international law, private international law, international legal personality, and human rights. Students and scholars of Renaissance literature, intellectual history, the history of international law, and the history of political thought will find in Literature and the Law of Nations a rich interdisciplinary argument that challenges the usual accounts by charting a new literary history of international law.

The boundaries separating Literary Studies from other kinds of humanistic inquiry are more permeable now than at any moment since the Enlightenment, when disciplinary categories began to acquire their modern definition. "The Forms of Renaissance Thought" celebrates scholarship at a number of these frontiers. The contributors address works of the European Renaissance as they relate both to the textured world of their origins and to a modern scholarly culture that turns to the early moderns for methodological provocation and renewal. In this way, the volume charts the most important developments in the field since the turn towards cultural and ideological features of the Renaissance imagination.

From Milton and Donne to Anne Locke and Aemilia Lanyer, this guide to Renaissance poetry and prose explores key texts, contexts and connections and contains essential information on historical and cultural contexts and relevant literary criticism.

From Milton and Donne to Anne Locke and Aemilia Lanyer, this guide to Renaissance poetry and prose explores key texts, contexts and connections and contains essential information on historical and cultural contexts and relevant literary criticism.

• This book contains a wealth of essential information to create a complete guide to the period and is part of the first series to offer a comprehensive and accessible overview to the period
• June Waudby is extremely well known in the field, and has over ten years of teaching experience
• The book contains features to improve the reader's understanding, including annotated timelines, bibliographies, and further reading

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

Sixteenth century Elizabethan treatises on rhetoric in the vernacular are relatively rare. Guillaume Coatalen offers annotated editions of Richard Reynolds's The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), which has not been edited since the 1945 facsimile edition, and of William Medley's unknown Brief Discourse on Rhetoricke which survives in a single manuscript dated 1575. While Reynolds's work is an English adaptation of Aphthonius's Progymnasmata and a preparation for Thomas Wilson's influential Arte of Rhetoricke (1560), Medley's is broader in scope and contains the only full treatment of periodic prose in English in the period. Both works are essential to understand how Elizabethan rhetoric in the vernacular evolved, in particular in aristocratic circles, and its links with Continental developments, notably German.

Christopher Marlowe's drama, The Jew of Malta, has become an increasingly popular source for scholarly scrutiny, staged productions, and, most recently, a filmed version. The play follows the sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, often outrageous fortunes of its villainous protagonist, the Jew Barabas. In recent years the play has provoked as much interpretive controversy as any work in the Marlowe canon. This unique volume is therefore especially timely, providing fresh, varied approaches to the many enigmatic elements of the play.

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.

Environmentalists today debate whether ecological harmony means we must manage the natural world or appreciate its incomprehensible complexity. This argument has a long history, beginning with Francis Bacon's claim that through science, humanity could make Nature bend to its will. This timely book unearths the challenge voiced by John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and the Earl of Rochester to Bacon's endeavor to make Nature subservient.

Chris Stamatakis reappraises Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1504-1542) as a poetic innovator from the literary avant-garde of early Tudor England. He discusses Wyatt's reflections on the writing process, and his awareness of how words can be turned in new directions - that is, rewritten, amended, transformed, manipulated, even performed - over the course of a text's production, transmission, and reception. Where previous studies have read Wyatt's poetry from a largely biographical standpoint, this book examines the reading practices of his Tudor audiences and editors, and it considers the different types of textuality shown by the manuscript collections that contain his verse. By setting Wyatt's writings in the context of sixteenth-century theories of language and literary practice, and by drawing on early Tudor educational, rhetorical, and courtierly handbooks, Stamatakis examines the rhetoric of rewriting that colours Wyatt's texts. Repeatedly, his writings invite readers to 'turn' or perform the word-to draw out something that lies inert within it. These habits of rewriting and verbal performance often serve to sustain an intimate dialogue between writers and readers in this literary culture. The book pays particular attention to the fascinating materiality of Wyatt's texts: the margins around, and the interlinear spaces within, his poems are regularly filled with new text-handwritten scrawls that are supplied by Wyatt himself or by his copyists, editors and readers. Chapters are devoted to the types of rewriting found in each of Wyatt's main genres: Plutarchian essays; forensic apologias; psalm paraphrases; letters and verse epistles, and lyrics or 'balets'. Two appendices offer further detail about patterns of manuscript transmission and the copying of Wyatt's poems. Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting argues that reading often shaded into writing (and rewriting) in the early sixteenth century, and it shows how acts of apparent copying often transformed texts inventively and imaginatively.

Explores dramatic, narrative and polemical versions of the 'taming of the shrew' story, from the Middle Ages to the Restoration, in light of recent historical work on the position of early modern women in society. Its essays address shrew narratives as an extended cultural dialogue debating issues of gender and sexual politics.

Of all the new developments in literary theory, feminism has proved to be the most widely influential, leading to an expansion of the traditional English canon in all periods of study. This book aims to make the work of Renaissance women writers in English better known to general and academic readers so as to strengthen the case for their future inclusion in the Renaissance literary canon.
This lively book surveys women writers in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries. Its selection is vast, historically representative, and original, taking examples from twenty different, relatively unknown authors in all genres of writing, including poetry, fiction, religious works, letters and journals, translation, and books on childcare. It establishes new contexts for the debate about women as writers within the period and suggests potential intertextual connections with works by well-known male authors of the same time.
Individual authors and works are given concise introductions, with both modern and historical critical analysis, setting them in a theoretical and historicised context. All texts are made readily accessible through modern spelling and punctuation, on-the-page annotation and headnotes. The substantial, up-to-date bibliography provides a source for further study and research.

"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"--

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.