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.

'Anthony Munday and civic culture' is a full-scale study of a fascinating but hitherto neglected author set in the context of the city where he was born, and where he lived and worked. A re-appraisal of Munday has long been overdue. He was a contemporary of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Dekker, amongst others; as a playwright, prose writer, translator, poet, pageant-maker and pamphleteer he was active in all the major literary genres of his day. This study of his diverse works throws fresh light on our understanding of this significant period, which thus far has largely been interpreted through canonical texts and authors. Recent early modern studies have been characterised by a return to history and an increasing interest in the material dimensions of culture. This book also builds in a timely fashion upon the on-going scholarly interest in London and its culture to put forward new ways of re-thinking existing debates, such as the relationship between the City of London, the court and the theatres. A wide range of Munday's texts are explored in depth, including plays, original prose works, translations, Lord Mayors' Shows, and his editions of John Stow's Survey of London. The book employs an interdisciplinary methodology drawing on history, biography, literary criticism and topography, offering a broad and contextualised account of this important writer in his various milieux. 'Anthony Munday and civic culture' explores historical sources as well as literary texts and will appeal to students and scholars of both early modern literature and history as well as to cultural geographers.

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.

Until recently it was widely believed that women in Renaissance and early modern England either did not write, or did not publish their work. It is now becoming clear that instead of using the emerging technology of print, many women writers circulated their works by hand. This study contributes to the discovery and re-evaluation of women writers by examining the writing and manuscript publication of key authors from 1550 to 1800, altering our understanding of the history of the book and early modern British literature.

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.

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.

Shifting our focus from author to publisher and from first performance to first edition, Zachary Lesser offers a new vantage point on the drama of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, and their contemporaries. Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication re-imagines the reception and meaning of plays by reading them through the eyes of their earliest publishers. Since success in the book trade required specialization, locating a play within its publisher's output allows us to see how the publisher read it and speculated that customers would read it. Their readings often differ radically from our own and so revise our views of the drama's engagement with early modern culture. By reading the 1633 Jew of Malta as a part of Nicholas Vavasour's Laudian specialty, for example, or the 1622 Othello in the context of Thomas Walkley's trade in parliamentary news, Lesser's groundbreaking study reveals the politics of these publications - for early modern readers and for us.

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.

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

This collection of essays reassesses the importance of verse as a medium in the long eighteenth century, and as an invitation for readers to explore many of the less familiar figures dealt with, alongside the received names of the standard criticism of the period.

James VI of Scotland and I of England participated in the burgeoning literary culture of the Renaissance, not only as a monarch and patron, but as an author in his own right, publishing extensively in a number of different genres over four decades. As the first monograph devoted to James as an author, this book offers a fresh perspective on his reigns in Scotland and England, and also on the inter-relationship of authorship and authority, literature and politics in the Renaissance. Beginning with the poetry he wrote in Scotland in the 1580s, it moves through a wide range of his writings in other genres, including scriptural exegeses, political, social and theological treatises and printed speeches, concluding with his manuscript poetry of the early 1620s. The book combines extensive primary research into the preparation, material form and circulation of these varied writings, with theoretically informed consideration of the relationship between authors, texts and readers. The discussion thus explores James's responses to, and interventions in, a range of literary, political and religious debates, and reveals the development of his aims and concerns as an author. Rickard argues that, despite the King's best efforts to the contrary, his writings expose the tensions and contradictions between authorship and authority. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of the reign of James VI and I, the literary and political cultures of late sixteenth-century Scotland and early seventeenth-century England, the development of notions of authorship and the relationship between literature and politics. -- .

"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"--

Reading Material in Early Modern England rediscovers the practices and representations of a wide range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English readers. Heidi Brayman Hackel argues for a history of reading centered on the traces left by merchants and maidens, gentlewomen and servants, adolescents and matrons - precisely those readers whose entry into the print marketplace provoked debate and changed the definition of literacy. By telling their stories and insisting upon their variety, Brayman Hackel displaces both the singular 'ideal' reader of literary theory and the elite male reader of literary history. This interdisciplinary study draws upon portraiture, prefaces, marginalia, commonplace books, inventories, diaries, letters, and literature (Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, Greene, Dekker, Lyly, Jonson, and others). A contribution to literary studies, the history of the book, cultural history, and feminist criticism, this accessible book will also appeal to readers interested in our continuing engagement with print and the evolution of reading material.

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.

Following his opposition to the establishment of a theatre in Geneva, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often considered an enemy of the stage. Yet he was fascinated by drama: he was a keen theatre-goer, his earliest writings were operas and comedies, his admiration for Italian lyric theatre ran through his career, he wrote one of the most successful operas of the day, Le Devin du village, and with his Pygmalion, he invented a new theatrical genre, the Scene lyrique ('melodrama'). Through multi-faceted analyses of Rousseau's theatrical and musical works, authors re-evaluate his practical and theoretical involvement with and influence on the dramatic arts, as well as his presence in modern theatre histories. New readings of the Lettre a d'Alembert highlight its political underpinnings, positioning it as an act of resistance to external bourgeois domination of Geneva's cultural sphere, and demonstrate the work's influence on theatrical reform after Rousseau's death. Fresh analyses of his theory of voice, developed in the Essai sur l'origine des langues, highlight the unique prestige of Italian opera for Rousseau. His ambition to rethink the nature and function of stage works, seen in Le Devin du village and then, more radically, in Pygmalion, give rise to several different discussions in the volume, as do his complex relations with Gluck. Together, contributors shed new light on the writer's relationship to the stage, and argue for a more nuanced approach to his theatrical and operatic works, theories and legacy.

Textual Intercourse proposes that the language and practice of writing plays in early modern England was inextricably linked to languages and practices of eroticism, sexuality and reproduction. Jeffrey Masten reads a range of early modern materials - burial records, contemporary biographical anecdotes and theatrical records, essays, conduct books and poems; the printed apparatus of published plays, and the plays themselves - to illustrate the ways in which writing for the theatre shifted from a model of homoerotic collaboration toward one of singular authorship on a patriarchal-absolutist model. Plays and collections of plays by Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Fletcher, Beaumont and Fletcher, Margaret Cavendish, and others, are considered. Textual Intercourse illustrate the ways in which methods attuned to sexuality and gender can illuminate more traditional questions of authorship, attribution, textual editing and intellectual property.

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.

In the decades leading up to England's first permanent American colony, the literature that emerged needed to establish certain realities against a background of skepticism, and it also had to find ways of theorizing the enterprise. The voyage narratives evolved almost from the outset as a genre concerned with recuperating failure--as noble, strategic, even as a form of success. Reception of these texts since the Victorian era has often accepted their claims of heroism and mastery; this study argues for a more complicated, less glorious history.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.