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.

The early reception of Laurence Sterne in France was vocal and controversial, reflecting the literary and social upheaval of the period. This monograph is the first recent full-length study of the topic, and offers original readings of Sterne and his French interpreters, such as Voltaire, Diderot, Suard, and Julie de Lespinasse, placing them within the context of eighteenth-century French culture, its critical debates and Anglo-French literary relations. Drawing on contemporary reception theory, Lana Asfour analyzes the criticism, translations and imitations of "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey from 1760 to 1800", and stresses key moments at which both texts were read against the expectations of audiences familiar with comic, satiric, picaresque and sentimental traditions.She also explores the role of literary celebrity, theories of translation, and ideas of originality and imagination. Recent criticism has debated whether Sterne's work should be considered in relation to older, comic-satiric forms of writing or within the context of the genre of the novel. This study shows that such a divide was already present in early French responses and yet, in presenting their diversity and complexity, it suggests that the dichotomy is reductive, and that Sterne's reception history in France can contribute to modern readings of his work.

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.

The literary virgin is eighteenth-century England's most enduring and unlikely celebrity. Despite her ignominious association with Catholicism and her incorrigibility with respect to the methods of the new science, the virgin emerges, by the middle of the eighteenth century, as the triumphant heroine of sentimental fiction as well as a muse for both satire and pornography. This book explores how and why the virgin turns out to be such a highly contested character at the center of many enlightenment debates. By focusing on the figure and fate of the virgin, the book offers new arguments about the relationship of novelist epistemologies to other modes of knowing, about the significance of virginity to patriarchy, and about the feminization of the novel.

How did Renaissance literature affect readers' minds, bodies and souls? In what ways did the history of literary experience overlap with the history of humours and emotions? This book argues that a new aesthetic vocabulary based on the theory of the passions was formulated in the Renaissance to describe the affective power of literature.

Best known for his guide on writing and recognizing good prose, Style (1955), F.L. Lucas addresses four of the most popular 18th-century English poets and writers in this book: Samuel Johnson, Lord Chesterfield, James Boswell and Oliver Goldsmith. Knowledgeably, conversationally, and often amusing, he sketches the images of men who greatly influenced 18th century England and its literary landscape.

Hamlin's study provides the first full-scale account of the reception and literary appropriation of ancient scepticism in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (c. 1570-1630). Offering abundant archival evidence as well as fresh treatments of Florio's Montaigne and Bacon's career-long struggle with the challenges of epistemological doubt, Hamlin's book explores the deep connections between scepticism and tragedy in plays ranging from Doctor Faustus and Troilus and Cressida to The Tragedy of Mariam , The Duchess of Malfi , and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore .

On the morning of May 30, 1593, Christopher Marlowe met with three associates in the English intelligence network. Later that evening the Queen's coroner was summoned to their meeting place. A body lay on the floor. After an inquest, the dead man was taken to a nearby churchyard busy at the time receiving victims of the plague. According to the official report, England's foremost playwright was interred without fanfare or marker. Soon, plays attributed to William Shakespeare began to appear on the London stage, plays so undeniably similar to Marlowe's that noted scholars have since declared that Shakespeare wrote as if he had been Marlowe's apprentice.

"Marlowe's Ghost: The Blacklisting of the Man Who Was Shakespeare" explores the possibility that persecution of a writer who dared to question authority may have led to the greatest literary cover-up of all time.

Offering a fresh approach to the study of the figure of the diplomat in the early modern period, this collection of diverse readings of archival texts, objects and contexts contributes a new analysis of the spaces, activities and practices of the Renaissance embassy.

"Before the Empire of English" offers a broad re-examination of eighteenth-century British literary culture, centered around issues of language, nationalism, and provinciality. It revises our tendency to take for granted the metropolitan centrality of English-language writers of this period and shows, instead, how deeply these writers were conscious of the inherited marginality of their literary tradition in the European world of culture. The book focuses attention on crucial but largely overlooked aspects of eighteenth-century English literary culture: the progress of English topos since the death of Cowley and the cultural aspirations and anxieties it condenses; the concept of the republic of letters and its implications for issues of cultural centrality and provinciality; and the importance of cultural nationalist emphases in "Augustan" poetics in the context of these concerns about provinciality. The book examines imperial aspirations and imaginings in the English literary culture of the period, but it shows how such aspirations are responses to provincial anxieties more so than they are marks of imperial self-assurance. In doing so, the book offers a way of understanding the resonances between the cultural politics of the postcolonial world and those of the earlier history of the English tradition itself.

Gary Waller surveys Spenser's career in terms of the material conditions of its production - the often overlooked material factors of race, gender, class, agency - and the resonant 'places' which influenced his career - court, church, nation, colony. The book includes an original account of the gender politics of Spenser's work and his difficult position between Ireland and England, the 'homes' about which he held ambivalent feelings. Waller also discusses the 'place' the biographer occupies in writing a literary life.

This book provides provocative information on poetry written in response to the most revolutionary set of events seen in Britain since the 1640s: "Peterloo," a peaceful protest that became a massacre; "Cato Street," a government scripted rebellion; and the "Queen Caroline Controversy," when the estranged wife of George IV tried to claim her crown.

Before the 1969 Stonewall Riots ushered in the contemporary gay liberation movement, overt representations of same-sex desire in American literature and the arts were few and far between. Even in the 1970s, when gay and lesbian cultures began to register on our national consciousness, such work was still quite rare.

In the 1980s and 90s, however, all that changed. The Queer Renaissance puts a name to the unprecedented outpouring of creative work by openly lesbian and gay novelists, poets, and playwrights in the past two decades. This volume is one of the first to analyze critically this cultural awakening and is one of the only books to consider the work of gay male and lesbian writers together. Most importantly, The Queer Renaissance is the first book to consider how this wave of creative activity has worked in tandem with a flourishing of radical queer politics.

The Queer Renaissance explores the work of such important figures as Audre Lorde, Edmund White, Randall Kenan, Gloria Anzalda, Tony Kushner, and Sarah Schulman to question the dichotomy between art and activism. In addition, The Queer Renaissance interrogates the ways queer theory deploys, intersects with, and contests contemporary theoretical movements such as cultural studies, feminist theory, African American theory, and Chicano/a theory.

The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society.

Even in an age of emerging nationhood, English men and women still thought very much in terms of their parishes, towns, and counties. This book examines the vitality of early modern local consciousness and its deployment by writers to mediate the larger political, religious, and cultural changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Innovative and multidisciplinary, this collection of essays marks out the future of Atlantic Studies, making visible the emphases and purposes now emerging within this vital comparative field. The contributors model new ways to understand the unexpected roles that seduction stories and sentimental narratives played for readers struggling to negotiate previously unimagined differences between and among people, institutions, and ideas.

"The Feminization of Fame 1750-1830" addresses the literary, cultural and historical questions surrounding the reconceptualization of fame between 1750-1830. As the first sustained scholarly analysis of fame in this period, this interdisciplinary book examines genres from history writing to literature, public and private memoirs to political treatises in English and in French in order to explore 'The age of personality's' obsession with instantaneous publicity. In an age of expanding print culture, the classical notion of posthumous reward was becoming increasingly open to question, as the need 'to be brilliant', as Hazlitt put it, in the contemporary moment became all.

British salons, with guests such as Byron, Moore, Thackeray, and Baillie, were veritable hothouses of political and cultural agitation. In this comprehensive study of the British salon between the 1780s and the 1840s, Schmid traces the activities of three" salonnieres" Mary Berry, Lady Holland, and the Countess of Blessington. Mapping out the central place these circles held in London, this study explains to what extent they shaped intellectual debate and publishing ventures. Using a large number of sources - diaries, letters, silver-fork novels, satires, travel writing, Keepsakes, and imaginary conversations - the book establishes sociable networks of days gone by.

The Renaissance woman, whether privileged or of the artisan or the middle class, was trained in the expressive arts of needlework and painting, which were often given precedence over writing. "Pens and Needles" is the first book to examine all these forms as interrelated products of self-fashioning and communication.Because early modern people saw verbal and visual texts as closely related, Susan Frye discusses the connections between the many forms of women's textualities, including notes in samplers, alphabets both stitched and penned, initials, ciphers, and extensive texts like needlework pictures, self-portraits, poetry, and pamphlets, as well as commissioned artwork, architecture, and interior design. She examines works on paper and cloth by such famous figures as Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Bess of Hardwick, as well as the output of journeywomen needleworkers and miniaturists Levina Teerlinc and Esther Inglis, and their lesser-known sisters in the English colonies of the New World. Frye shows how traditional women's work was a way for women to communicate with one another and to shape their own identities within familial, intellectual, religious, and historical traditions. "Pens and Needles" offers insights into women's lives and into such literary texts as Shakespeare's "Othello" and "Cymbeline" and Mary Sidney Wroth's "Urania."

This innovative book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Shakespearean theatre, presented in a series of imaginative readings of plays from every period of the playwright's career, from Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew to King Lear and The Tempest , mapping a new approach to ideas of the theatre as an institution.

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1721) together defined a new way of writing fiction in the eighteenth century. Each was highly controversial in Defoe's time, and each has generated a very large amount of criticism since. This Guide examines the major trends and movements in critical interpretation of these two popular and widely-studied novels, from the earliest reception history to the present day. The thematic and chronological organization of material points out similarities and differences between the two books, and maps Defoe studies onto some of the obvious lines of development that criticism in general has taken over the last century in particular, including feminist, ideological and postcolonial perspectives. The volume also features a section on adaptations of the novels in film and other media.

An exploration of how Malory deals with the themes of love, marriage and adultery, revealing the socially conservative vantage of the gentry and nobility. Marriage in the Middle Ages encompassed two crucial but sometimes conflicting dimensions: a private companionate relationship, and a public social institution, the means whereby heirs were produced and land, wealth, power and political rule were transferred. This study examines the concept of marriage as seen in the Morte Darthur, moving beyond it to look at "adulterous" and other male/female relationships, and their impact on the world of the RoundTable in general. Key points addressed are the compromise achieved in the "Tale of Sir Gareth" between natural, youthful passion and the gentry's pragmatic view of marriage; the problems of King Arthur's marriage in light of bothpolitical need and the difficulty of the queen's infertility and adultery; and the repercussions of Lancelot's adultery in the tragedies of two marriageable daughters, Elaine of Astolat and Elaine of Corbin. Finally, the author reveals and considers in detail (focusing on dynastic dysfunction in three generations of Pendragon men: Uther, Arthur and Mordred) the myth of benevolent paternity by which men, whether born legitimate of bastard, were united through the Round Table. KAREN CHEREWATUK is Professor of English at St Olaf College, Minnesota.

Cultural Constructions of Madness in the Eighteenth Century deals with the (mis)representation of insanity through a substantial range of literary forms and figures from across the eighteenth century and beyond. Chapters cover the representation, distortion, sentimentalization and elevation of insanity, and such associated issues as gender, personal identity, and performance, in some of the best, as well as some of the least, known writers of the period. A selection of visual material, including works by Hogarth, Rowlandson, and Gillray, is also discussed. While primarily adopting a literary focus, the work is informed throughout by an alertness to significant issues of medical and psychiatric history.

This book redefines the plays and theatrical culture of the years 1625 to 1642 as something more than simply post-Shakespearean in character. Scholars reveal the drama's mixture of political engagement, urbane cosmopolitanism, and commercial ingenuity. They urge us to recalibrate our histories to account for the innovations of the Caroline period.

The stigmatisation of parody as "the worst enemy" of creativity has been pervasive in our literary culture. Although recent theoretical approaches have compelled critics to rethink many received notions regarding the significance of contemporary parodic activity, the perception remains that parody existed only on the disreputable margins of earlier literary cultures. This study places parody firmly (if paradoxically) where it belongs: at the centre of the literary-creative process in much of the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.