This work offers a timely alternative to theater criticism's neglect of the intensely spatial character of theatrical performance by showing that early modern audiences were highly aware of the spatial aspects of the stage. Jacobean dramatists used stage space to explore the spatial transformations of early modern society--social mobility, wandering populations, rural enclosure, sea travel, localized empirical thought.

Macpherson's Ossian caused a sensation on its first appearance in the early 1760s. Contrary to the impression often conveyed in literary histories, enthusiasm for the Ossianic poetry cannot be dismissed as a short-lived fad, for its appeal lasted a century or more, both in Britain and Continental Europe. There is hardly a major Romantic poet on whom it failed to make a significant impact. And as may be seen from the contributions to this volume, its influence was ubiquitous, from Poland to Portugal, from Paris to Prague. The essays brought together here consider the reception of Ossian in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, as well as in a wide range of European countries. In some the focus is on an individual writer (for instance, Goethe, Schiller, Chateaubriand), in others there is a broader sweep and a survey of reception in a national literary culture is offered (for instance, Hungary, Russia, Sweden). One of the two essays on Ossian in Italy at last gives Macpherson's influential epigone, John Smith, his due. Consideration is also given to Ossian's significance for the rise of historicism, and to nonliterary forms of reception in music and art.

This book studies the cheap printed literature which was read in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland and the cultures of its audience. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to a little-known topic, pursuing comparisons with other regions such as Brittany and Scotland. By addressing questions such as language shift and the unique social configuration of Ireland in this period, it adds a new dimension to the growing body of studies of popular culture in Europe.

Contextualizing Michelangelo's poetry and spirituality within the framework of the religious Zeitgeist of his era, this study investigates his poetic production to shed new light on the artist's religious beliefs and unique language of art. Author Ambra Moroncini looks first and foremost at Michelangelo the poet and proposes a thought-provoking reading of Michelangelo's most controversial artistic production between 1536 and c.1550: The Last Judgment, his devotional drawings made for Vittoria Colonna, and his last frescoes for the Pauline Chapel. Using theological and literary analyses which draw upon reformist and Protestant scriptural writings, as well as on Michelangelo's own rime spirituali and Vittoria Colonna's spiritual lyrics, Moroncini proposes a compelling argument for the impact that the Reformation had on one of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance. It brings to light how, in the second quarter of the sixteenth century in Italy, Michelangelo's poetry and aesthetic conception were strongly inspired by the revived theologia crucis of evangelical spirituality, rather than by the theologia gloriae of Catholic teaching.

The first full length study of women's utopian spatial imagination in the seventeenth and eigtheenth centuries, this book explores the sophisticated correlation between identity and social space. The investigation is mainly driven by conceptual questions and thus seeks to link theoretical debates about space, gender and utopianism to historiographic debates about the (gendered) social production of space. As Pohl's primary aim is to demonstrate how women writers explore the complex (gender) politics of space, specific attention is given to spaces that feature widely in contemporary utopian imagination: Arcadia, the palace, the convent, the harem and the country house. The early modern writers Lady Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish seek to recreate Paradise in their versions of Eden and Jerusalem; the one yearns for Arcadia, the other for Solomon's Temple. Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell redefine the convent as an emancipatory space, dismissing its symbolic meaning as a confining and surveilled architecture. The utopia of the country house in the work of Delarivier Manley, Sarah Scott and Mary Hamilton will reveal how women writers resignify the traditional metonym of the country estate. The study will finish with an investigation of Oriental tales and travel writing by Ellis Cornelia Knight, Lady Mary Montagu, Elizabeth Craven and Lady Hester Stanhope who unveil the seraglio as a location for a Western, specifically masculine discourse on Orientalism, despotism and female sexuality and offers their own utopian judgment.

"This collection looks at the growing rapprochement between contemporary theory and early modern English literary-cultural studies. With sections on posthumanism and cognitive science, political theology, and rematerialism and performance, the essays incorporate recent theoretical inquiries into new readings of early modern texts"--

This book presents a theoretical and historicized reading of the production of the 'autonomous' subject in Milton's prose and in Paradise Lost. It rejects the current orthodoxy that liberal humanism is just a form of domination, and reads Milton's texts as revolutionary. Although Milton participates in the formation of discourses of sexuality, labour and the nature of reason which come to be normative, neither Milton's texts nor modernity more generally can be understood without also accepting the dynamism inherent in the belief in individual freedom.

Reissuing 15 works originally published between 1934 and 1991, this diverse set offers an outstanding collection of scholarship devoted to Renaissance Drama. Routledge Library Editions: Renaissance Drama provides an extensive study of performance history and criticism of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, as well as volumes dedicated to the playwrights Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. These volumes present together a lively picture of the development of British theatre and will be of interest to students of literature, drama and performance.

The last twenty years have witnessed the rediscovery of a large number of women writers of the early modern period. This process of recovery has had a major impact on early modern studies for, by beginning to restore women to the history of the period, it provides new insight into the formative years of the modern era. This collection amply demonstrates the diversity as well as the literary and historical significance of early women's writing. It brings together studies by an impressive range of critics, including Elaine Hobby, Catherine Gallagher, Jane Spencer and Laura Brown, and examines the major works of five of the most important women writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn and Anne Finch. The range of authors it covers, and the challenging critical work it presents, make Early Women Writers: 1600-1720 essential reading for students of feminist theory, Women's Studies and Cultural Studies, as well as for all those interested in the history and literature of the early modern 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. -- .

Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau. -- .

British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, and the Gothic Novel, 1764-1824 considers three interlocking developments of this period: the emergence of the Gothic novel at a time when national upheavals required the construction of a new nationalist identity, the Gothic novel's redefinition of heroes and heroism in that nationalist debate, and changes within class and gender as well as audience and author relations. The scope of this study extends beyond the confines of the novel proper to include chapbooks and illustrated reactions.

Alongside Spenser, Sidney and the early Donne, Shakespeare is the major poet of the 16th century, largely because of the status of his remarkable sequence of sonnets. Professor Cousins' new book is the first comprehensive study of the Sonnets and narrative poems for over a decade. He focuses in particular on their exploration of self-knowledge, sexuality, and death, as well as on their ambiguous figuring of gender. Throughout he provides a comparative context, looking at the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries. The relation between Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse and his plays is also explored.

This anthology of 18th-century English poetry is extensively annotated for a new generation of readers. It combines the scope of a period anthology with the detailed annotations of an authoritative single-author edition. Selected poets include John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope and William Cowper. The guiding principle of the annotation is one of thoroughness: the editors concentrate on works where the meanings have changed, on primary allusions and on relevant details of social and political history.

The Oxford Handbook of John Donne presents scholars with the history of Donne studies and provides tools to orient scholarship in this field in the twenty-first century and beyond. Though profoundly historical in its orientation, the Handbook is not a summary of existing knowledge but a resource that reveals patterns of literary and historical attention and the new directions that these patterns enable or obstruct.
Part I -- Research resources in Donne Studies and why they they matter -- emphasizes the heuristic and practical orientation of the Handbook, examining prevailing assumptions and reviewing the specialized scholarly tools available. This section provides a brief evaluation and description of the scholarly strengths, shortcomings, and significance of each resource, focusing on a balanced evaluation of the opportunities and the hazards each offers.
Part II -- Donne's genres -- begins with an introduction that explores the significance and differentiation of the numerous genres in which Donne wrote, including discussion of the problems posed by his overlapping and bending of genres. Essays trace the conventions and histories of the genres concered and study the ways in which Donne's works confirm how and why his "fresh invention" illustrates his responses to the literary and non-literary contexts of their composition.
Part III -- Biographical and historical contexts -- creates perspective on what is known about Donne's life; shows how his life and writings epitomized and affected important controversial issues of his day; and brings to bear on Donne studies some of the most stimulating and creative ideas developed in recent decades by historians of early modern England.
Part IV -- Problems of literary interpretation that have been traditionally and generally important in Donne Studies -- introduces students and researchers to major critical debates affecting the reception of Donne from the 17th through to the 21st centuries.

This is a comprehensive introduction to "The Duchess of Malfi" that introduces its critical and performance history, the current critical landscape and new directions in research. John Webster's classic revenge tragedy "The Duchess of Malfi" was first performed in 1614 and published in 1623. This guide offers students and scholars an introduction to its critical and performance history, including recent versions on stage and screen. It includes a keynote chapter outlining major areas of current research on the play and four new critical essays presenting new critical positions on the text include gender and political perspectives on the idea of secrecy in the play and debates surrounding Webster's religio-political allegiances. Finally, a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further individual research. "Continuum Renaissance Drama" offers practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performative contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Each guide introduces the text's critical and performance history but also provides students with an invaluable insight into the landscape of current scholarly research through a keynote essay on the state of the art and newly commissioned essays of fresh research from different critical perspectives.

This book reads Milton's "Paradise Lost" as a poem that seeks to educate its readers by narrating the education of its main characters. Many of Milton's characters enter the action in late adolescence, newly independent and eager to test themselves, to discover who they are and their place in the world. The poem charts their progress into moral adulthood. Taking as its premise that attention to the moral development of the poem's main characters will open the poem to most undergraduate readers, this book explores both the pedagogical activity within "Paradise Lost" and the pedagogical activity that the poem encourages.

This work offers a peer reviewed account of Defoe's birth and upbringing from 1644 and how he kept the first 36 years of his life a secret and discusses the effects of a vastly different life on all critical understandings of his writing. It is fundamental to any study of Daniel Defoe.

AMIDST THE OTHER religious, political, and technological changes in seventeenth-century England, the ready availability of printed books was the most significant sign of the disappearance of old ways of thinking. The ability to read granted new independence as the interactions between reader, text, and author moved from the public forums of church and court to the privacy and solitude of the home.

Privacy and Print proposes that the emergence of the concept of privacy as a personal right, as the very core of individuality, is connected in a complex fashion with the history of reading. Cecile M. Jagodzinski attempts to recover the experience of readers past by examining representations of reading and readers (especially women) in five genres of seventeenth-century literature: devotional books, conversion narratives, personal letters, drama, and the novel. The discussion ranges from the published letters of Charles I and John Donne to Aphra Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister and Margaret Cavendish's literary activities. The author examines how the resulting shifts in religious and literary practices due to the printed book influenced the development of the literary canon. She also addresses women's ambiguous roles in print culture, trying to pinpoint how privacy became gendered in the early modern period.

Debates about privacy and individualism still rage in today's computerized society. Jagodzinski's important and well-written book speaks to these present-day concerns and offers a historical example of the effect of new technologies on popular culture.

Narrative moves. Stories migrate from one culture to another, over vast distances sometimes, but their path is often difficult to trace and obscured by time. Fabulous Orients looks at the traffic of narrative between Orient and Occident in the eighteenth century, and challenges the assumption that has dominated since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) that such traffic is always one-way. Eighteenth-century readers in the West came to draw their mental maps of oriental territories and distinctions between them from their experience of reading tales "from" the Orient.
In this proto-colonial period the English encounter with the East was largely mediated through the consumption of material goods such as silks, indigo, muslin, spices, or jewels, imported from the East, together with the more "moral" traffic of narratives about the East, both imaginary and ethnographic. Through analyses of fictional representations (including travelers' accounts, letter narratives such as Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, and popular sequences of tales such as the Arabian Nights Entertainments) of four oriental territories (Persia, Turkey, China and India), Ros Ballaster demonstrates the ways in which the East came to be understood as a source of story, a territory of fable and narrative.
Fabulous Orients is structured according to territory rather than genre. Each section opens by re-narrating an oriental story in which a feminine character serves to "figure" western desire for the territory she represents: the courtesan queen of the Ottoman seraglio Roxolana; the riddling Chinese princess Turandocte; and the illusory sati of India, Canzade. The book goes on to explore the range offabulous writings relating to each territory in order to illustrate how certain narrative tropes can come to dominate its representation: the conflict between the male look and female speech staged in the seraglio in the case of Turkey and Persia, the inauthenticity and/or dullness associated with China and its products such as porcelain, and the illusory dreams that are woven in the space of India and associated with its textile industries.
This is the first book-length study of the oriental tale to appear for almost a century. Informed by recent historiographical and literary re-assessments of western constructions of the East, it develops an original argument about the use of narrative as a form of sympathetic and imaginative engagement with otherness, a disinvestment of the self rather than a confident expression of colonial or imperial ambition.

This collection brings together thirteen new essays that examine England's fascination with, and fantasies about, the Mediterranean in the early modern period. The essays in this volume employ the Mediterranean both as a physical and cultural space, and as an idea that challenges boundaries between the East and the West. It does so by emphasizing the Ottoman Mediterranean and by exploring a variety of literary and non-literary texts produced between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Afterword, written by an Ottomanist, engages in a dialogue with literary scholars and offers new pathways in the study of the Mediterranean, especially its eastern part.

Sensibility and Economics in the Novel argues that the sentimental novel, usually seen as a 'feminine' genre concentrating exclusively on emotional response, is in fact actively involved in contemporary economic and political debates. Spanning the period encompassing the rise, heyday and decline of sentimentalism, the book considers how the trajectory of the movement affected the sentimental novel's use of discourses of economics, sensibility and femininity, and assesses the impact of the pressures of the post-Revolutionary 1790s on these areas.

This book defines the previously unaddressed, early evolution of the American frontier hero in literature and popular culture. Denise MacNeil resituates the literary origins of this hero from the nineteenth century to the seventeenth century by tracing its roots to Mary Rowlandson's narration of her experiences as a prisoner. This study follows the subsequent evolution through works by Unca Eliza Winkfield, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and the film-maker John Ford and actor John Wayne. This book exposes complex gender and racial roots and clarifies a cultural stereotype that has become one of those most highly coded as white and masculine within American literature and culture.

What happened to the medieval romance genre during and after the Protestant Reformation in England? Who read these works; who printed them; and what did they mean to the varied audiences encountering them? Through a cross-temporal study using book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, this book argues that the medieval romances printed across the early modern period provided a flexible space for post-Reformation readers to negotiate their relationships with the recent 'medieval' past, a past that was becoming, for some, increasingly distanced from the present. In exploring the complex entanglements of time and technology that accrue on the pages of the post-Reformation romance book, Difficult Pasts offers an interdisciplinary framework for better understanding the role of physical books and imaginative forms in grappling with a 'difficult' past. -- .

'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.