In the late Renaissance and Early Modern period, man's relationship to nature changed dramatically. An important part of this change occurred in the way that beauty was perceived in the natural world and in the particular features which became privileged objects of aesthetic gratification. This study explores the shift in aesthetic attitude towards the mountain that took place between 1450 and 1750. Over the course of these 300 years the mountain transformed from a fearful and ugly place to one of beauty and splendor. Accepted scholarly opinion claims that this change took place in the vernacular literature of the early and mid-18th century. Based on previously unknown and unstudied material, this volume now contends that it took place earlier in the Latin literature of the late Renaissance and Early Modern period. The aesthetic attitude shift towards the mountain had its catalysts in two broad spheres: the development of an idea of 'landscape' in the geographical and artistic traditions of the 16th century on the one hand, and the increasing amount of scientific and theological investigation dedicated to the mountain on the other, reaching a pinnacle in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The new Latin evidence for the change in aesthetic attitude towards the mountain unearthed in the course of this study brings material to light which is relevant for the current philosophical debate in environmental aesthetics. The book's concluding chapter shows how understanding the processes that produced the late Renaissance and Early Modern shift in aesthetic attitude towards the mountain can reveal important information about the modern aesthetic appreciation of nature. Alongside a standard bibliography of primary literature, this volume also offers an extended annotated bibliography of further Latin texts on the mountains from the Renaissance and Early Modern period. This critical bibliography is the first of its kind and constitutes an essential tool for further study in the field.

"Shakespearean Neuroplay" provides a methodology for applying cognitive science to the study of drama and performance. With Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" as a test subject and the cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual blending as a tool, Cook unravels the “mirror held up to nature” at the center of Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet’s mirror becomes a conceptual structure that invisibly scaffolds our understanding of the play. A lucid explanation of both contemporary science and "Hamlet," "Shakespearean Neuroplay" unveils Shakespeare’s textual theatrics and sheds light on blind spots in theatre and performance theory.

Sterne's work has been received, translated and imitated in most European countries with great success. Interest in his life and work grew into a literary cult at an early stage and led to the vogue of sentimentalism: Sterne became a legendary English writer, second only to Shakespeare. Among the topics discussed in this volume are: questions arising from the serial nature of much of Sterne's writings; the various ways in which translators all across Europe coped with the specific problems which the witty and ingenious Sternean text poses; the extent to which especially "A sentimental Journey" was regarded as a provocative political text and was therefore used as a weapon in nationalist movements; how "Tristram Shandy" became a test case for theories of humour and sentiment; how Sterne's texts and the "Letters" were used as didactic tools; how the history of the reception of Sterne mirrors the continental shift from a French cultural paradigm to a German and English one; and how the cult of Maria materialized in prints, paintings and ceramics. Trans-national patterns are emphasized, as are the impact of Sterne on European sentimentalism and modernist narrative theory.

This is a highly original study, which offers an innovative new approach towards the study of early modern drama. This book examines the work of the Elizabethan playwright, Robert Greene, arguing that his plays are innovative in their use of spectacle. This study's most striking feature is the use of the one-to-one analogies between Greene's drama and modern cinema, in order to explore the plays' stage effects. While recent Shakespearean criticism interprets his drama through the lens of performance, criticism of non-Shakespearean drama continues to disconnect the plays from even the scarce performances of them today. This book aims to bring the study of performance into the realm of non-Shakespearean drama so that the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries might not descend further into obscurity. This innovative study advocates the rejection of a purely text-based interpretation of drama and emphasizes the powerful visual dimension of the early modern stage.

This book situates John Clare's long, prolific but often badly neglected literary life within the wider cultural histories of the Regency and earlier Victorian periods. The first half considers the construction of the Regency peasant-poet and how Clare performed this role on stages such as the London Magazine. It also looks at the way in which it went out of fashion as Regency mentalities were replaced by early Victorian ones. The second half recreates asylum culture and places Clare's performances as Regency boxers and Lord Byron within this bleak new world.

This interdisciplinary collection explores the divergence or convergence of freedom and terror in a range of Byron's works. Challenging the binary opposition of historicism and critical theory, it combines topical debates in a manner that is sensitive both to the circumstances of their emergence and to their relevance for the twenty-first century.

Dublin-born Thomas Southerne has long been admired by scholars as one of the most important dramatists of the Restoration, but the lack of a modern edition has prevented his plays from taking their deserved place alongside those of Congreve, Wycherly, and Etherege. This two-volume collection--based on an exhaustive study of the earliest editions--brings together his ten plays and the small surviving body of non-dramatic writing. Volume Two features two of Southerne's best known tragedies, The Fatal Marriage and Oroonoko, based on stories by Aphra Behn, and the variants between the censored and uncensored texts of his political tragedy The Spartan Dame. In addition, the introduction contains the first biography of Southerne based on a comprehensive study of the surviving documentary records, and the editors have incorporated generous notes to clarify the many contemporary allusions and to relate Southerne's work to its sources and models.

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.

This book studies the uses of orality in Italian society, across all classes, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, with an emphasis on the interrelationships between oral communication and the written word. The Introduction provides an overview of the topic as a whole and links the chapters together. Part 1 concerns public life in the states of northern, central, and southern Italy. The chapters examine a range of performances that used the spoken word or song: concerted shouts that expressed the feelings of the lower classes and were then recorded in writing; the proclamation of state policy by town criers; songs that gave news of executions; the exercise of power relations in society as recorded in trial records; and diplomatic orations and interactions. Part 2 centres on private entertainments. It considers the practices of the performance of poetry sung in social gatherings and on stage with and without improvisation; the extent to which lyric poets anticipated the singing of their verse and collaborated with composers; performances of comedies given as dinner entertainments for the governing body of republican Florence; and a reading of a prose work in a house in Venice, subsequently made famous through a printed account. Part 3 concerns collective religious practices. Its chapters study sermons in their own right and in relation to written texts, the battle to control spaces for public performance by civic and religious authorities, and singing texts in sacred spaces.

Instead of asserting any alleged rivalry between Marlowe and Shakespeare, Sawyer examines the literary reception of the two when the writers are placed in tandem during critical discourse or artistic production. Focusing on specific examples from the last 400 years, the study begins with Robert Greene's comments in 1592 and ends with the post-9/11 and 7/7 era. The study not only looks at literary critics and their assessments, but also at playwrights such as Aphra Behn, novelists such as Anthony Burgess, and late twentieth-century movie and theatre directors. The work concludes by showing how the most recent outbreak of Marlowe as Shakespeare's ghostwriter accelerates due to a climate of conspiracy, including "belief echoes," which presently permeate our cultural and critical discourse.

Destabilizing Milton challenges the widely accepted view of Milton as a poet of absolute, unquestioning certainty. In Paradise Lost , Milton confronts the failure of the Revolution by creating a poem that refuses to grant the reader any interpretive stability or certainty. Doubts can no longer be contained and concepts once marked by a 'fundamental immobility' now seem unstable at best. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes equally reflect Milton's deep ambivalences after the collapse of the Republic. Far from confirming his earlier ideals, in his later poetry, Milton subjects his culture's most cherished beliefs, such as the goodness of God, to withering scrutiny, while refusing the comfort of orthodox answers.

Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism is the first book-length study of Jonson's literary criticism, and examines the ways that criticism defines his unprecedented role as a professional author. Each chapter explores a different facet: 'The Lone Wolf' looks at Jonson's role in creating a critical discourse to respond to a new literary market-place; 'Poet and Critic' explores the relationship between his 'creative' and 'critical' writing; 'Poet and State' traces his accommodations as an author with censorship and other forms of authority; 'The Laws of Poetry' relates his appeals to classical precedent to his insecurity in a world where literary conditions were very different from those of ancient Greece and Rome; 'Jonson and Shakespeare' examines the old supposed rivalry as evidence of competing definitions of authorship. Throughout Richard Dutton suggests how Jonson's criticism set the terms for the profession of letters in England for more than a century. Finally an appendix provides a representative selection of Jonson's critical work.

This edition of Swift's classic novel presents the 1965 Herbert Davis Edition (based on the Faulkner Edition of 1735) along with five critical essays -- newly commissioned or revised for a student audience.

What is the Gothic? Few literary genres have attracted so much praise and critical disdain simultaneously. This Guide returns to the Gothic novel's first wave of popularity, between 1764 and 1820, to explore and analyse the full range of contradictory responses that the Gothic evoked. Angela Wright appraises the key criticism surrounding the Gothic fiction of this period, from eighteenth-century accounts to present-day commentaries. Adopting an easy-to-follow thematic approach, the Guide examines: - contemporary criticism of the Gothic - the aesthetics of terror and horror - the influence of the French Revolution - religion, nationalism and the Gothic - the relationship between psychoanalysis and the Gothic - the relationship between gender and the Gothic. Concise and authoritative, this indispensable Guide provides an overview of Gothic criticism and covers the work of a variety of well-known Gothic writers, such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and many others.

This is the first book-length study of early modern English approaches to Medea, the classical witch and infanticide who exercised a powerful sway over literary and cultural imagination in the period 1558-1688. It encompasses poetry, prose and drama, and translation, tragedy, comedy and political writing.

"The Gothic and the Rule of Law" is the first full-length theoretical and historical study of the relation between early Gothic fiction and an emerging modern rule of law. The work identifies not only a political and cultural, but also an ontological relation between what critics have conceptualized as 'Gothic' and the nature and function of modern juridical power. It represents a highly significant contribution to Gothic criticism and to law and literature scholarship.

This book argues that Romantic-era writers used the figure of the minstrel to imagine authorship as a social, responsive enterprise unlike the solitary process portrayed by Romantic myths of the lone genius. Simpson highlights the centrality of the minstrel to many important literary developments from the Romantic era through to the 1840s.

Shakespeare has been misread for centuries as having modern ideas about sex and gender. This book shows how in the Restoration and Eighteenth century, Shakespeare's plays and other Renaissance texts were adapted to make them conform to these modern ideas. Through readings of Shakespearean texts, including "King Lear," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Othello," and other Renaissance drama, the book reveals a sexual world before heterosexuality. "Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Before Heterosexuality" shows how revisions and criticism of Renaissance drama contributed to the emergence of heterosexuality. It also shows how changing ideas about status, adultery, friendship, and race were factors in that emergence.

Sir Walter Ralegh created a powerful public identity by means of the prose texts he wrote from prison. This new study not only offers a much-needed analysis of these neglected political writings, but also demonstrates the ways in which his readers modified Ralegh's public identity in a series of fascinating posthumous reinterpretations. By focusing on both Ralegh and his interpreters, this book contributes to the growing body of work on the politics and practice of writing and reading in early-modern England.

Overturning the common characterization of seventeenth-century English prose romance as an exhausted, imitative genre with little bearing on the evolution of the novel, this book argues for the centrality of seventeenth-century romance in key political and moral philosophical debates of its time. Concentrating especially on the intersection between romance and the late humanist problem of self-interest, the book discerns the deeply moral philosophical aspect of prose romances from Sidney's "Arcadia," through Wroth's "Urania" and Barclay's "Argenis," to the dozen or so now little-known Royalist romances from the mid-seventeenth century. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of the history of prose fiction and the novel, early modern women's writing, and those concerned with the political valences of genre and the intersections between literature and moral philosophy.

This title concerns itself with dress in the novels of Samuel Richardson, and how attire confirms, contributes to, or challenges the characters' fashioning of self, and the self as others (characters or readers) perceive it.

This book brings to the foreground the largely forgotten "Fancy" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and follows its traces as they extend into the nineteenth and twentieth. Trivialized for its flightiness and femininity, Fancy nonetheless provided seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers such as Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Anna Barbauld a mode of vision that could detect flaws in the Enlightenment's patriarchal systems and glimpse new, female-authored worlds and genres. In carving out unreal, fanciful spaces within the larger frame of patriarchal culture, these women writers planted Fancy-and, with it, female authorial invention-at the cornerstone of Enlightenment empirical endeavor. By finally taking Fancy seriously, this book offers an alternate genealogy of female authorship and a new framework for understanding modernity's triumph.

Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture explores the new interpretive possibilities offered by using data visualization in eighteenth-century studies. Such visualizations include tabulations, charts, k-means clustering, topic modeling, network graphs, data mapping, and/or other illustrations of patterns of social or intellectual exchange. The contributions to this collection present groundbreaking research of texts and/or cultural trends emerging from data mined from existing databases and other aggregates of sources. Describing both small and large digital projects by scholars in visual arts, history, musicology, and literary studies, this collection addresses the benefits and challenges of employing digital tools, as well as their potential use in the classroom. Chapters 1, 3, 8 and 10 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

First published in 1990. The book surveys of the development of German theatre from a market sideshow into an important element of cultural life and political expression. It examines Schiller as 'theatre poet' at Mannheim, Goethe's work as director of the court theatre at Weimar, and then traces the rapid commercial decline that made it difficult for Kleist and impossible for Buchner to see their plays staged in their own lifetime. Four representative texts are analysed: Schiller's The Robbers, Goethe's Iphigenia on Tauris, Kleist's The Prince of Homburg, and Buchner's Woyzeck. This title will be of interest to students of theatre and German literature.