By examining these competing depictions of combat that coexist in sixteenth-century texts ranging from Arthurian romance to early modern medical texts, this study reveals both the importance of combat in understanding the humanist subject and the contours of the previously neglected pre-modern subject.

Explores the process involved in reading William Blake's poems. The poems include on the same pages, verbal and visual texts that often seem to be at odds with one another or even, at times, to be entirely unrelated. Because reading verbal and visual texts involves different asthetic assumptions and operations, Blake's texts make different demands on their readers which further complicates the reading activity. The author attempts to outline some of the ways in which the intellectual and imaginative transaction proceeds between author and reader via the medium of the illuminated text as a physical artifact.

The essays in this book analyze a range of genres and considers geographical areas beyond the Ottoman Empire to deepen our post-Saidian understanding of the complexity of real and imagined "traffic" between England and the "Islamic worlds" it encountered and constructed.

Did the Stuart queens create their own courts, and can these courts shed new light on women's poetry, drama and performance? This book investigates the literature, theater, patronage and commissioning of the courts of Anna of Denmark (1603-19) and Henrietta Maria (1625-42). Unearthing the neglected history of the Stuart queens, these essays look afresh at the early modern European female elite to create a new picture of femininity for students and scholars of early modern culture.

Stephen Greenblatt argued in these celebrated essays that the art of the Renaissance could only be understood in the context of the society from which it sprang. His approach - 'New Historicism' - drew from history, anthropology, Marxist theory, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis and in the process, blew apart the academic boundaries insulating literature from the world around it. Learning to Curse charts the evolution of that approach and provides a vivid and compelling exploration of a complex and contradictory epoch.

Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens was a cosmopolitan Dutch physician and Latin poet of the eighteenth century. A Catholic, he was in many ways an outsider on his own turf, the peat country of Protestant Groningen, and looked to Voltaire's Paris, as much as Ovid, in exile, had looked to Rome. An indefatigable traveller and networker, Heerkens mixed freely with philosophers, physicians, churchmen, and antiquarians. This book reconstructs his Latin works and networks, and reveals in the process a virtually unexplored corner of eighteenth-century culture, the 'Latin Enlightenment'.

This volume argues for the enduring and pervasive significance of war in the formation of British Enlightenment and Romantic culture. Showing how war throws into question conventional disciplinary parameters and periodization, essays in the collection consider how war shapes culture through its multiple, divergent, and productive traces.

The funeral elegy is in some ways the quintessential English Renaissance genre. This book demonstrates how the hospitality of elegy to different styles, genres and modes, alongside the primary formal obligation to fit the poem decorously to the subject, gave a special value to ingenuity. The elegist, like the sonneteer, had to prove (or at least protest) that the ingenuity was grounded in the subject and not merely indulged in as a species of self-advertisement or display. By the time Milton came to write "Lycidas", the vernacular funeral elegy had developed into a form - or rather a variety of possible forms - in which any educated person could perform. For younger poets the elegy eventually constituted a kind of laboratory in which they could put into notice what they had learned about composition. It also became, during the period covered in this study, a means of learning about decorum, of investigating, exploring, analyzing, representing, anatomizing social (and political) relationships on the occasion of the subject's death. "Melodious Tears" charts the history of the elegy from the time in the mid-16th century when it was exclusively the province of professional writers, the

After theory and the new historicism, what might a self-conscious turn to formal analysis in Renaissance literary studies look like today? The essays address this question from a variety of critical perspectives, embodying a renewed engagement with questions of form.

This book brings together key, incisive writings (published and unpublished) of the late Andre Gunder Frank on world development and world history in a singular volume. The selections provide the reader with a historical tracing of Gunder Frank's conceptual thinking on development from the national liberation struggles of the 1950s -1960s through to his views on world history, world development and globalization in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The latter period witnessed his rethinking of world development and the rejection of theoretical positions he had taken in the 1960s and 1970s. Pertinent writings during the last phase of his intellectual career addressing the impact of Eurocentrism on the understanding of world development and world history, the mythology of European exceptionalism, and the rise of Asia are included.

This biography emphasises the extraordinary versatility and resourcefulness of a lifetime spent serving the public interest with the pen. At the same time, it shows Swift's distinctive love of writing for personal entertainment and diversion, with little or no interest in publication. While remaining a fiercely committed writer, he always tried to preserve, especially in his poetry and letters, a literature dedicated to friendship. Swift's literary career comprises much more than the well-known satires.

This title offers a comprehensive critical analysis of the most important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors and directors. This volume focuses on Shakespeare's reception by figures in Victorian theatre. "Great Shakespeareans" offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of William Charles Macready, Edwin Booth, Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.

This bold and wide-ranging study takes a fresh look at a controversial question: what do the acts and shows of grief performed in early modern drama tell us about the religious culture of the world in which they were historically staged? Many rites of mourning shown in the theatre held Catholic resonances, but how did such memories of traditional worship work in post-Reformation England? Drawing on performance studies, this book provides detailed readings of major playtexts, Shakespearean and others, to explore the politics, pathologies, physiologies and parodies of mourning.

This series reprints classic works illustrating the cultural and intellectual life of Scotland during one of its most creative and dynamic periods: the second half of the eighteenth century. It was the age of the mature Scottish Enlightenment, when Scotland, to the surprise of most Europeans, became one of the leading cultural and intellectual centres of the western world. Although the writings of some eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, are widely available, many others are scarce. This series will regularly publish groups of thematically connected titles, most of which have not been reprinted for a century or more, many with specially commissioned new introductions.

Many readers today associate the early modern history play with Shakespeare. While not wishing to ignore the influence of Shakespeare, this collection of essays explores other historical drama between 1500 and 1660, covering a wide range of different formats outside the canon of 1590s history cycles. An introduction provides a survey of current criticism, including both early modern and contemporary definitions of the 'history play'. Individual essays in chronological order explore genres that perform 'history' in different ways, such as shows, moralities or closet drama. In this way this collection establishes alternative paradigms of early modern historical drama.

This book is an analysis of the sonnet in the English Renaissance. It especially traces the relations between Shakespeare's sonnets and the ways in which other writers use the form. It looks at how the poetry fits into the historical situation at the time, with regard to images of the family and of women. Its explorationi of these issues is informed by much recent work in critical theory, which it tries to make as accessible as possible.

This book addresses the function of the classical world in the cultural imaginations of the second generation of romantic writers: Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the rest of their diverse circle. The younger romantics inherited impressions of the ancient world colored by the previous century, in which classical studies experienced a resurgence, the emerging field of comparative mythography investigated the relationship between Christianity and its predecessors, and scientific and archaeological discoveries began to shed unprecedented light on the ancient world. The Shelley circle embraced a specifically pagan ancient world of excess, joy, and ecstatic experiences that test the boundaries between self and other. Though dubbed the "Satanic School" by Robert Southey, this circle instead thought of itself as "Athenian" and frequently employed mythology and imagery from the classical world that was characterized not by philosophy and reason but by wildness, excess, and ecstatic experiences.

Robinson Crusoe explores Defoe's story, the legend it captured, the universal desire which underlies the myth and a range of modern re-writings which reveal a continued fascination with the problematic character of this narrative. Whether envisaged as an heroic rejection of the old world order, a piece of pre-colonialist propaganda or a tale raising archetypal problems of 'otherness' and 'inequality', the mythic value of Crusoe has become a pretext over many centuries for an examination of some of the fundamental problems of existence. This collection of essays examines, from a wide range of critical and philosophical perspectives, the cultural manifestations of Robinson Crusoe in different centuries, in different media, in different genres.

Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England is a groundbreaking collection of essays that draws together leading and emerging scholars to investigate performances of transgression on the early modern English stage. Building on recent scholarship in studies of performance, politics, gender, sex, and race, this collection seeks to assess, respond to, and look beyond the last concentrated critical discussion of transgression in the 1980s. This collection explores areas of study that have been previously neglected in scholarly discussion and seeks to challenge critical orthodoxies and assumptions about the power and effect of onstage performances of illicit, deviant and disorderly behaviour. Contributors examine a wide range of onstage activities - from drunkenness and spitting to murder and rebellion - and offer fresh insights into the cultural work of theatre in Shakespeare's England.

The comic grotesque is a powerful element in a great deal of Elizabethan literature, but one which has attracted scant critical attention. In this study, first published in 1980, Neil Rhodes examines the nature of the grotesque in late sixteenth-century culture, and shows the part it played in the development of new styles of comic prose and drama in Elizabethan England. In defining 'grotesque', the author considers the stylistic techniques of Rabelais and Aretino, as well as the graphic arts. He discusses the use of the grotesque in Elizabethan pamphlet literature and the early satirical journalists such as Nashe, and argues that their work in turn stimulated the growth of satirical drama at the end of the century. The second part of the book explains the importance of Nashe's achievement for Shakespeare and Jonson, concluding that the linguistic resources of English Renaissance comedy are peculiarly - and perhaps uniquely - physical.

Dominic Rainsford examines ways in which literary texts may seem to comment on their authors' ethical status. Its argument develops through readings of Blake, Dickens, and Joyce, three authors who find especially vivid ways of casting doubt on their own moral authority, at the same time as they expose wider social ills. The book combines its interest in ethics with post-structuralist scepticism, and thus develops a type of radical humanism with applications far beyond the three authors immediately discussed.

Eighteenth-century philosophy owes much to the early novel. Using the figure of the romance reader this book tells a new story of eighteenth-century reading. The impressionable mind and mutable identity of the romance reader haunt eighteenth-century definitions of the self, and the seductions of fiction insist on making an appearance in philosophy.

First published in 1985, The Subject of Tragedy takes the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the starting point for an analysis of the differential identities of man and woman. Catherine Belsey charts, in a range of fictional and non-fictional texts, the production in the Renaissance of a meaning for subjectivity that is identifiably modern. The subject of liberal humanism - self-determining, free origin of language, choice and action - is highlighted as the product of a specific period in which man was the subject to which woman was related.

One view of the author in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain held that poetic genius could reside in the lady or gentleman of fashion. Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century examines this cultural trope of genius-as-fashionista by applying an innovative mix of approaches-book history, Enlightenment and twentieth-century philosophy, visual studies, and material analyses of fashions in books and in dress-to specific editions of Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson and Lord Byron. In its material analyses of these books, Fashioning Authorship looks closely at bindings, letterforms, engravings, newspaper advertisements, correspondence, and other ephemera. In its theoretical approaches, it takes up the interventions of Locke and Kant in connection with the visual theories of Richardson, Hogarth, and Reynolds. These investigations point ultimately to a profound connection between Enlightenment formulations of subjectivity, genius, and fashion, a link that is relevant to the construction of celebrity in our own cultural moment.

In his plays, Shakespeare produced a new and unprecedented way of thinking about life, death, power, and their affects. "Philosophical Readings of Shakespeare" offers close readings of "King Lear," "Hamlet," "Macbeth," and "Timon of Athens" to provide insight into the ontological discourse of poverty and money. Following Marxian thought, Margherita Pascucci shows how Shakespeare was the first to depict money as a conceptual persona. Ultimately, the book's analysis of the themes of creation, subjectivity, and value opens new reflections on central questions of our time.