The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After offers a series of sophisticated and powerful readings of tragicomedy from Shakespeare's late plays to the drama of the Interregnum. Rejecting both the customary chronological span bounded by the years 1603-42 (which presumes dramatic activity stopped with the closing of the theatres) and the negative critical attitudes that have dogged the study of tragicomedy, the essays in this collection examine a series of issues central to the possibility of a politics for the genre. Individual essays offer important contributions to continuing debates over the role of the drama in the years preceding the Civil War, the colonial contexts of The Tempest, the political character of Jonson's late plays, and the agency of women as public and theatre actors. The introduction presents a strong challenge to previous definitions of tragicomedy in the English context, and the collection as a whole is characterized by its rejection of absolutist strategies for reading tragicomedy. This collection will prove essential reading for all with an interest in the politics of Renaissance drama; for specialists in the work of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson; for those interested in genre and dramatic forms; and for historians of early Stuart England.

Smallpox was a much feared disease until modern times, responsible for many deaths worldwide and reaching epidemic proportions amongst the British population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is the first substantial critical study of the literary representation of the disease and its victims between the Restoration and the development of inoculation against smallpox around 1800. David Shuttleton draws upon a wide range of canonical texts including works by Dryden, Johnson, Steele, Goldsmith and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the latter having experimented with vaccination against smallpox. He reads these texts alongside medical treatises and the rare, but moving writings of smallpox survivors, showing how medical and imaginative writers developed a shared tradition of figurative tropes, myths and metaphors. This fascinating study uncovers the cultural impact of smallpox, and the different ways writers found to come to terms with the terror of disease and death.

The typographic imaginary is an aesthetic linking authors from William Caxton to Alexander Pope, this study centrally contends. Early modern English literature engages imaginatively with printing and this book both characterizes that engagement and proposes the typographic imaginary as a framework for its analysis. Certain texts, Rachel Stenner states, describe the people, places, concerns, and processes of printing in ways that, over time, generate their own figurative authority. The typographic imaginary is posited as a literary phenomenon shared by different writers, a wider cultural understanding of printing, and a critical concept for unpicking the particular imaginative otherness that printing introduced to literature. Authors use the typographic imaginary to interrogate their place in an evolving media environment, to assess the value of the printed text, and to analyse the roles of other text-producing agents. This book treats a broad array of authors and forms: printers' manuals; William Caxton's paratexts; the pamphlet dialogues of Robert Copland and Ned Ward; poetic miscellanies; the prose fictions of William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, and Thomas Nashe; the poetry and prose of Edmund Spenser; writings by John Taylor and Alexander Pope. At its broadest, this study contributes to an understanding of how technology changes cultures. Located at the crossroads between literary, material, and book historical research, the particular intervention that this work makes is threefold. In describing the typographic imaginary, it proposes a new framework for analysis of print culture. It aims to focus critical engagement on symbolic representations of material forms. Finally, it describes a lineage of late medieval and early modern authors, stretching from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, that are linked by their engagement of a particular aesthetic.

The political and religious upheavals of the seventeenth century caused an unprecedented number of people to emigrate, voluntarily or not, from England. Among these exiles were some of the most important authors in the Anglo-American canon. In this 2007 book, Christopher D'Addario explores how early modern authors thought and wrote about the experience of exile in relation both to their lost homeland and to the new communities they created for themselves abroad. He analyses the writings of first-generation New England Puritans, the Royalists in France during the English Civil War, and the 'interior exiles' of John Milton and John Dryden. D'Addario explores the nature of artistic creation from the religious and political margins of early modern England, and in doing so, provides detailed insight into the psychological and material pressures of displacement and a much overdue study of the importance of exile to the development of early modern literature.

Frances Burney (1752-1840) was the most successful female novelist of the eighteenth century. Her first novel Evelina was a publishing sensation; her follow-up novels Cecilia and Camilla were regarded as among the best fiction of the time and were much admired by Jane Austen. Burney's life was equally remarkable: a protegee of Samuel Johnson, lady-in-waiting at the court of George III, later wife of an emigre aristocrat and stranded in France during the Napoleonic Wars, she lived on into the reign of Queen Victoria. Her journals and letters are now widely read as a rich source of information about the Court, social conditions and cultural changes over her long lifetime. This Companion is the first volume to cover all her works, including her novels, plays, journals and letters, in a comprehensive and accessible way. It also includes discussion of her critical reputation, and a guide to further reading.

Richard Polwhele was a writer of rare energies. Today known only for The Unsex'd Females and its attack on radical women writers, Polwhele was a historian, translator, memoirist, and poet. As an indigent Cornish gentleman clergyman and JP, his extensive written output encompassed sermons, open letters, and even headstone verse. This book recovers the lost Polwhele, locating him within an archipelagic understanding of the vitality and complexity inherent in the loyalist tradition with British Romantic culture via a range of previously unexamined texts and manuscript sources. Torn between a desire for sociability and an appetite (and capacity) for a good argument, Polwhele's outspoken contributions across a range of disciplines testify to the variety and dynamism of what has previously been considered provincial and reactionary. This book locates Polwhele's work within key preoccupations of the age: the social, economic, and political valences of literary sociability in the age of print; the meaning of loyalism in an age of revolution; the meaning of place and belonging; enthusiasm, religious or otherwise; and the self-fashioning of the provincial man of letters. In doing so it argues for a broader definition of Romanticism than the one that has typed Polwhele as an unpalatable embarrassment and the anachronistic voice of provincial High Tory reaction. This volume will be of interest to those working in the field of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British Literature, with a particular focus on politics and on the nature of literary production and identity across the non-metropolitan areas of the British Isles.

Voltaire's historical works reflect his own changing roles and preoccupations from conteur to campaigner. His groundbreaking historical output of thirty-eight texts, composed throughout his long career as a writer, is now receiving renewed critical attention. In the first study to explore the whole range of Voltaire's writings in this domain, Siofra Pierse looks at the irreducible ambiguity of the term histoire, both factual truth and the way it is represented - 'history' and 'story'. She discusses how Voltaire's theories of history interact with other, more literary considerations, and analyses how a search for truth overlaps with a desire to create a compelling narrative that engages the reader in a deeper, collaborative, and polemical project. In Voltaire historiographer: narrative paradigms, Siofra Pierse brings to light how the philosophe exploits the potential of history not simply to record the past, but to influence the present and shape the future.

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Hristomir Stanev argues, ideas about the senses became part of a dramatic and literary tradition in England, concerned with the impact of metropolitan culture. Drawing upon an archive of early modern dramatic and prose writings, and on recent interdisciplinary studies of sensory perception, Stanev here investigates representations of the five senses in Jacobean plays in relationship to metropolitan environments. He traces the significance of under-examined concerns about urban life that emerge in micro-histories of performance and engage the (in)voluntary and sometimes pre-rational participation of the five senses. With a dominant focus on sensation, he argues further for drama's particular place in expanding the field of social perception around otherwise less tractable urban phenomena, such as suburban formation, environmental and noise pollution, epidemic disease, and the impact of built-in city space. The study focuses on ideas about the senses on stage but also, to the extent possible, explores surviving accounts of the sensory nature of playhouses. The chapters progress from the lower order of the senses (taste and smell) to the higher (hearing and vision) before considering the anomalous sense of touch in Platonic terms. The plays considered include five city comedies, a romance, and two historical tragedies; playwrights whose work is covered include Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster, Fletcher, Dekker, and Middleton. Ultimately, Stanev highlights the instrumental role of sensory flux and instability in recognizing the uneasy manner in which the London writers, and perhaps many of their contemporaries, approached the rapidly evolving metropolitan environment during the reign of King James I.

A common literary language linked royal absolutism to radical religion and republicanism in seventeenth-century England. Authors from both sides of the Civil Wars, including Milton, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and the Quakers, adapted the analogy between family and state to support radically different visions of political community. They used family metaphors to debate the limits of political authority, rethink gender roles, and imagine community in a period of social and political upheaval. While critical attention has focused on how the common analogy linking father and king, family and state, bolstered royal and paternal claims to authority and obedience, its meaning was in fact intensely contested. In this wide-ranging study, Su Fang Ng analyses the language and metaphors used to describe the relationship between politics and the family in both literary and political writings and offers a fresh perspective on how seventeenth-century literature reflected as well as influenced political thought.

During the eighteenth century there was a growing interest in recording, listing and documenting the world, whether for personal interest and private consumption, or general record and the greater good. Such documentation was done through both the written and printed word. Each genre had its own material conventions and spawned industries which supported these practices. This volume considers writing and printing in parallel: it highlights the intersections between the two methods of communication; discusses the medium and materiality of the message; considers how writing and printing were deployed in the construction of personal and cultural identities; and explores the different dimensions surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of private and public letters, words and texts during the eighteenth-century. In combination the chapters in this volume consider how the processes of both writing and printing contributed to the creation of cultural identity and taste, assisted in the spread of knowledge and furthered personal, political, economic, social and cultural change in Britain and the wider-world. This volume provides an original narrative on the nature of communication and brings a fresh perspective on printing history, print culture and the literate society of the Enlightenment.

Originally published in 1991. This book explicitly examines rhetoric as the art of persuasion in the practical world, and as in the expression of thinking in the language a speaker uses. It presents Leviathan in terms of the philosophical character of the work considered through Hobbes' use of language to express and organise his thought. Throughout, the nature of the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy is discussed and the problems of language in philosophical understanding. The book is concerned with Hobbes' political philosophy and his views on figurative language, interest in literary theory and particularly his allegory. A special feature is the chapter on engraved title pages in Leviathan and other texts of the era.

What role does food and cooking play in how people imagine themselves and their communities? In this book Wendy Wall argues that representations of housework in the early modern period helped to forge crucial conceptions of national identity. Rich with a detailed account of household practices in the period, Staging Domesticity reads plays on the London stage in the light of the first printed cookbooks in England. Working from original historical sources on wetnursing, laundering, sewing, medical care and butchery, Wall shows that domesticity was represented as deeply familiar but also enticingly alien. Wall analyses a wide range of the repertoire, including some now little-known plays, as well as key works in the period by Shakespeare and others. Wall concludes that, rather than dramatizations of only court-based and aristocratic domestic life, literature of the period drew on work from the more common household.

A collection of essays on Spanish poetry honouring a distinguished British Hispanist. Trevor J. Dadson is a British Hispanist of international distinction whose remarkable scholarly range has resulted in a published output that embraces cultural, literary and social history, textual editing, literacy, book ownership and literary criticism. The twelve essays of the present volume pay tribute to his distinctive interventions in the field of Spanish poetry (early modern and contemporary); collectively they recognize the catalytic role of Professor Dadson's original research while opening up to dialogues beyond it, aiming to inspire new conversations around the topics he has inspired generations of scholars to pursue. Represented in the volume are former doctoralstudents, former colleagues and international collaborators, all of whom are also distinguished authorities in their fields. Javier Letran is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the University of St Andrews. Isabel Torres is Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Queen's University Belfast.

When people speak about love and money, they usually are referring to a conflict: love distorted by the desire for money. Such statements imply that love has a distinct form before economics interferes, but this book aims to show that such a view simplifies what is going on, because people have always been deeply shaped by everything in the social order, including economics. So when people say that money is distorting love, what they are really saying is that the current relationship of love and economics is different from an earlier relationship. This book seeks then to demonstrate the intertwining of the discourses of love and money over a long history by focusing on moments when parallel conceptions appear in economic theories and love stories. The two discourses intersect because both seek to define qualities and behaviors of human beings which are most valuable and hence most desirable. Similar descriptions of valuable behaviors appear at roughly the same time in economic theories of how to acquire wealth and literary stories of how to find ideal lovers. By tracking mutual expressions of desire, value, and acquisition in economics and love stories, this book argues for the ubiquity of the intertwining of these discourses, while exploring shifts in conceptions of value. It focuses on four eras when economic and romantic conceptions of what is most desirable were actively changing in English discourses: the early modern 17th century, the Victorian 19th, the modernist 20th, and the postmodern present.

This book examines the writings of seven English women economists from the period 1735-1811. It reveals that contrary to what standard accounts of the history of economic thought suggest, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women intellectuals were undertaking incisive and gender-sensitive analyses of the economy. Women's Economic Thought in the Romantic Age argues that established notions of what constitutes economic enquiry, topics, and genres of writing have for centuries marginalised the perspectives and experiences of women and obscured the knowledge they recorded in novels, memoirs, or pamphlets. This has led to an underrepresentation of women in the canon of economic theory. Using insights from literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and feminist economics, the book develops a transdisciplinary methodology that redresses this imbalance and problematises the distinction between literary and economic texts. In its in-depth readings of selected writings by Sarah Chapone, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Priscilla Wakefield, Mary Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, this book uncovers the originality and topicality of their insights on the economics of marriage, women and paid work, and moral economics. Combining historical analysis with conceptual revision, Women's Economic Thought in the Romantic Age retrieves women's overlooked intellectual contributions and radically breaks down the barriers between literature and economics. It will be of interest to researchers and students from across the humanities and social sciences, in particular the history of economic thought, English literary and cultural studies, gender studies, economics, eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, social history, and the history of ideas.

"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."-Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination In Black and Blur-the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being-Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and Jose Esteban Munoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.

This collection explores the consequences of accentism-an under-researched issue that intersects with racism and classism-in the Shakespeare industry across languages and cultures, past and present. It adopts a transmedia and transhistorical approach to a subject that has been dominated by the study of "Original Pronunciation." Yet the OP project avoids linguistically "foreign" characters such as Othello because of the additional complications their "aberrant" speech poses to the reconstruction process. It also evades discussion of contemporary, global practices and, underpinning the enterprise, is the search for an aural "purity" that arguably never existed. By contrast, this collection attends to foreign speech patterns in both the early modern and post-modern periods, including Indian, East Asian, and South African, and explores how accents operate as "metasigns" reinforcing ethno-racial stereotypes and social hierarchies. It embraces new methodologies, which includes reorienting attention away from the visual and onto the aural dimensions of performance.

This volume re-examines traditional interpretations of the rise of modern aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain and Germany. It provides a new account that connects aesthetic experience with morality, science, and political society. In doing so, it challenges long-standing teleological narratives that emphasize disinterestedness and the separation of aesthetics from moral, cognitive, and political interests. The chapters are divided into three thematic parts. The chapters in Part I demonstrate the heteronomy of eighteenth-century British aesthetics. They chart the evolution of aesthetic concepts and discuss the ethical and political significance of the aesthetic theories of several key figures: namely, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Part II explores the ways in which eighteenth-century German, and German-oriented, thinkers examine aesthetic experience and moral concerns, and relate to the work of their British counterparts. The chapters here cover the work of Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Madame de Stael. Finally, Part III explores the interrelation of science, aesthetics, and a new model of society in the work of Goethe, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Friedrich Hoelderlin, and William Hazlitt, among others. This volume develops unique discussions of the rise of aesthetic autonomy in the eighteenth century. In bringing together well-known scholars working on British and German eighteenth-century aesthetics, philosophy, and literature, it will appeal to scholars and advanced students in a range of disciplines who are interested in this topic.

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) earned his place in literary history as a perceptive diarist from 1811 onwards. Drawing substantially on hitherto unpublished manuscript sources, this book discusses his formal and informal engagement with a wide variety of English and European literature prior to this point. Robinson emerges as a pioneering literary critic whose unique philosophical erudition underpinned his activity as a cross-cultural disseminator of literature during the early Romantic period. A Dissenter barred from the English universities, Robinson educated himself thoroughly during his teenage years and began to publish in radical journals. Godwin's philosophy subsequently inspired his first theory of literature. When in Germany from 1800 to 1805, he became the leading British scholar of Kant, whose philosophy informed his discussions of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and August Wilhelm Schlegel. After his return to London, Robinson aided Hazlitt's understanding of Kant and, thus, Hazlitt's early career as a writer. His distinctive comparative criticism further enabled him to draw compelling parallels between Wordsworth, Blake, and Herder, and to discern 'moral excellence' in Christian Leberecht Heyne's Amathonte. This also prompted Robinson's transmission of Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul in 1811, as well as a profound exchange of ideas with Coleridge. In this new study, Philipp Hunnekuhl finds that Robinson's ingenious adaptation of Kantian aesthetic autonomy into a revolutionary theory of literature's moral relevance anticipated the current 'ethical turn' in literary studies.

Originally published in 1988, The Protean Text looks at the shifting evolution of medieval texts and how changing social and aesthetic values were depicted in the literature of the period. The book examines how this was reflected in the reworking and rewriting of texts - a common practice in medieval literature - as various groups adapted existing legends to their own socio-aesthetic needs. Such textual fluidity often resulted in a proliferation of versions. This tendency to experience the text in protean terms is intrinsic to medieval literary expression. This book uses the legend of "Doon and Olive", to discuss the protean text, and uses the diverse series of extant versions available, to enhance our understanding of the possibilities of literary shift and modulation through this period.

Originally published in 1967, The Poetry of John Lydgate presents a broad discussion of John Lydgate's secular poetry. It reassesses much of the poetry through critical examination and suggests that Lydgate was not necessarily the master that the medieval ages proclaimed him to be, nor the plain poet that he is often seen as in modern analysis. Instead, the book suggest that he was a competent poetic craftsman that presents substantial literary form in his poetry. The analysis in the book looks at Lydgate as atypical of the Middle Ages, instead exhibiting traits currently linked to the Renaissance. The book provides a unique perspective on John Lydgate as a poet and will be of interest to medievalist and literary historians alike.

This selection of sixty-two poems written by various Jesuit poets offers a unique and illuminating look at neo-Latin poetry. Includes original text, translations, notes, and vocabulary.

Focusing on John Milton's Paradise Lost , this book investigates the metaphorical identification of nature with a court of law - an old and persistent trope, haunted by ancient aporias, at the intersection of jurisprudence, philosophy and literature. In an enormous variety of texts, from the Greek beginnings of Western literature onward, nature has been described as a courtroom in which an all- encompassing trial takes place and a universal verdict is executed. The first, introductory part of this study sketches an overview of the metaphor's development in European history, from antiquity to the seventeenth century. In its second, more extensive part, the book concentrates on Milton's epic Paradise Lost in which the problem of the natural law court finds one of its most fascinating and detailed articulations. Using conceptual tools provided by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Hans Blumenberg, Gilles Deleuze, William Empson and Alfred North Whitehead, the study demonstrates that the conflicts in Milton's epic revolve around the tension between a universal legal procedure inherent in nature and the positive legal decrees of the deity. The divine rule is found to consolidate itself by Nature's supplementary shadow government; their inconsistencies are not flaws, but rather fundamental rhetorical assets, supporting a law that is inherently "double- formed". In Milton's world, human beings are thus confronted with a twofold law that entraps them in its endlessly proliferating double binds, whether they obey or not. The analysis of this strange juridical structure can open up new perspectives on Milton's epic, as well as on the way legal discourse tends to entangle norms with facts and thus to embed itself in human life. This original and intriguing book will appeal not only to those engaged in the study of Milton, but also to anyone interested in the relationship between law, history, literature and philosophy.

Bringing together scholars from literature and the history of ideas, Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture explores new ways of negotiating the boundaries between cognitive and bodily models of emotion, and between different versions of the will as active or passive. In the process, it juxtaposes the historical formation of such ideas with contemporary philosophical debates. It frames a dialogue between rhetoric and medicine, politics and religion, in order to examine the relationship between mind and body and between experience and the senses. Some chapters discuss literature, in studies of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton; other essays concentrate on philosophical arguments, both Aristotelian and Galenic models from antiquity, and new mechanistic formations in Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. A powerful sense of paradox emerges in treatments of the passions in the early modern period, also reflected in new literary and philosophical forms in which inwardness was displayed, analysed and studied-the autobiography, the essay, the soliloquy-genres which rewrite the formation of subjectivity. At the same time, the frame of reference moves outwards, from the world of interior states to encounter the passions on a public stage, thus reconnecting literary study with the history of political thought. In between the abstract theory of political ideas and the inward selves of literary history, lies a field of intersections waiting to be explored. The passions, like human nature itself, are infinitely variable, and provoke both literary experimentation and philosophical imagination. Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture thus makes new connections between embodiment, selfhood and the emotions in order to suggest both new models of the self and new models for interdisciplinary history.

Pornographic Sensibilities stages a conversation between two fields-Medieval/Early Modern Hispanic Studies and Porn Studies-that traditionally have had little to say to each other. The collection offers innovative new approaches to the study of gendered and sexualized bodies in medieval and early modern textual production, including literary and historical documents. The volume's embrace of the interpretative tools of Porn Studies also inscribes a critical provocation: in what ways can contemporary modes of reading the past serve to freshly illuminate not only the contours of that same past but also the very critical assumptions of the present upon which fields like medieval and early modern Hispanic Studies are built? In this way, Pornographic Sensibilities encourages at once both rigorous historicizations of pre- and early-modern culture, and playful engagement with "presentism," considered here as a critical tool to undress the hidden assumptions of both past and present. This move substantively challenges long-held critical orthodoxies among scholars of pre-Enlightenment periods, for whom the very category of "pornography" itself has often problematically been framed as an anachronism when applied to their work.