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.

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.

The essays in this volume offer fresh and innovative considerations both of how children interacted with the world of print, and of how childhood circulated in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century. They engage with not only the texts produced for the period's newly established children's book market, but also with the figure of the child as it was employed for a variety of purposes in literatures for adult readers. Embracing a wide range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives and considering a variety of contexts, these essays explore childhood as a trope that gained increasing cultural significance in the period, while also recognizing children as active agents in the worlds of familial and social interaction. Together, they demonstrate the varied experiences of the eighteenth-century child alongside the shifting, sometimes competing, meanings that attached themselves to childhood during a period in which it became the subject of intensified interest in literary culture.

Originally published between 1938 and 1996, the volumes in this set provide a survey of German poetry, prose and fiction from the Middle Ages to the late 20th Century. In many cases no prior knowledge of German is necessary, as translations into English are provided. Many of the books focus particularly on German writers and literature from an international perspective. The books: Analyse Naturalism, Impressionism, Neo-romanticism and Expressionism as well as dealing exhaustively with Surrealism, Magic Realism and Existentialism. Include discussion of post-war Anglo-American and French literature. Provide guidebooks through the masses of periodicals and allows the English side of the Anglo-German literary relationship to be explored in detail. Present a detailed analysis of the major literary movements in Austria and Germany from the end of the nineteenth century to the collapse of the Third Reich Examine two of the central themes of medieval German mythology, the Dietrich and Nibelung legends Survey the development of political writing in the former Federal Republic of Germany, Illustrating the connections between literature and politics Elucidate the concealed meanings in some of the more obscure writings of great authors such as Goethe Provides a full survey of the best and most significant work of German writers to the First World War.

This collection of essays explores the remarkable range and cultural significance of the engagement with 'infancy' during the Romantic period. Taking its point of departure in the commonplace claim that the Romantics invented childhood, the book traces that engagement across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Essays authored by scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds reveal how Romantic-period representations of and for children constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi associated with infancy. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential theoretical descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, the collection also seeks to rethink the idea of a clear-cut dichotomy between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of infancy.

This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. Cancer is perhaps the modern world's most feared disease. Yet, we know relatively little about this malady's history before the nineteenth century. This book provides the first in-depth examination of perceptions of cancerous disease in early modern England. Looking to drama, poetry and polemic as well as medical texts and personal accounts, it contends that early modern people possessed an understanding of cancer which remains recognizable to us today. Many of the ways in which medical practitioners and lay people imagined cancer - as a 'woman's disease' or a 'beast' inside the body - remain strikingly familiar, and they helped to make this disease a byword for treachery and cruelty in discussions of religion, culture and politics. Equally, cancer treatments were among the era's most radical medical and surgical procedures. From buttered frog ointments to agonizing and dangerous surgeries, they raised abiding questions about the nature of disease and the proper role of the medical practitioner.

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.

"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.

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."

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.

Although haiku is well known throughout the world, few outside Japan are familiar with its precursor, haikai (comic linked verse). Fewer still are aware of the role played by the Chinese Daoist classics in turning haikai into a respected literary art form. Basho and the Dao examines the haikai poets' adaptation of Daoist classics, particularly the Zhuangzi, in the seventeenth century and the eventual transformation of haikai from frivolous verse to high poetry. The author analyzes haikai's encounter with the Zhuangzi through its intertextual relations with the works of Basho and other major haikai poets, and also the nature and characteristics of haikai that sustained the Zhuangzi's relevance to haikai poetic construction. She demonstrates how the haikai poets' interest in this Daoist work was rooted in the intersection of deconstructing and reconstructing the classical Japanese poetic tradition. Well versed in both Chinese and Japanese scholarship, Qiu explores the significance of Daoist ideas in Basho's and others' conceptions of haikai. Her method involves an extensive hermeneutic reading of haikai texts, an in-depth analysis of the connection between Chinese and Japanese poetic terminology, and a comparison of Daoist traits in both traditions. The result is a penetrating study of key ideas that have been instrumental in defining and rediscovering the poetic essence of haikai verse. Basho and the Dao adds to an increasingly vibrant area of academic inquiry - the complex literary and cultural relations between Japan and China in the early modern era. Researchers and students of East Asian literature, philosophy, and cultural criticism will find this book a valuable contribution to cross-cultural literary studies and comparative aesthetics.

Was Shakespeare really the original genius he has appeared to be since the eighteenth century, a poet whose words came from nature itself? The contributors to this volume propose that Shakespeare was not the poet of nature, but rather that he is a genius of rewriting and re-creation, someone able to generate a new language and new ways of seeing the world by orchestrating existing social and literary vocabularies. Each chapter in the volume begins with a key word or phrase from Shakespeare and builds toward a broader consideration of the social, poetic, and theatrical dimensions of his language. The chapters capture well the richness of Shakespeare's world of words by including discussions of biblical language, Latinity, philosophy of language and subjectivity, languages of commerce, criminality, history, and education, the gestural vocabulary of performance, as well as accounts of verbal modality and Shakespeare's metrics. An Afterword outlines a number of other important languages in Shakespeare, including those of law, news, and natural philosophy.

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.

Histories of the Turks were a central means through which English authors engaged in intellectual and cultural terms with the Ottoman Empire, its advance into Europe following the capture of Constantinople (1454), and its continuing central European power up to the treaty of Karlowitz (1699). Writing the Ottomans examines historical writing on the Turks in England from 1480-1700. It explores the evolution of this discourse from its continental roots, and its development in response to moments of military crisis such as the Long War of 1593-1606 and the War of the Holy League 1683-1699, as well as Anglo-Ottoman trade and diplomacy throughout the seventeenth century. From the writing of central authors such as Richard Knolles and Paul Rycaut, to lesser known names, it reads English histories of the Turks in their intellectual, religious, political, economic and print contexts, and analyses their influence on English perceptions of the Ottoman world.

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.

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.

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.

This book uses the theme of "debatable lands," a term first applied to disputed parts of the Anglo-Scottish border, to explore aspects of writing in the Romantic period. Walter Scott brought it to a wider public, and the phrase came to be applied, by metaphorical extension, to debates which were not so much geographical but intellectual, political or artistic. These debates are pursued in a collection of essays grouped under the headings "Britain and Ireland" and Europe and Beyond."

Elizabeth I as Icon examines how the image and memory of the queen has been used and viewed in the 400 years since her death. Beginning with how Elizabeth created her iconic status during her reign, the book goes on to explore ways in which this image has evolved over the years. Walker shows that centuries of social, cultural and political agenda have been given public appeal by the use of the dead queen's image, and looks at her representation within children's literature, the suffragette movement, the two world wars, and within popular culture, including the Hollywood film Elizabeth.