From his work editing "Wordsworth's Juvenile Poetry (1785-1790)," Duncan Wu came to understand that much of the content of the poet's later great work drew on early childhood experiences, particularly delayed mourning arising from his parents' deaths. This original study is the first fully to investigate the impact of this formative experience on Wordsworth's poetry and to integrate it into a critical account of how his art developed from 1787 to 1813. In doing so it seeks to explain the importance of Wordsworth's great epic, "The Recluse," to his work as a whole, and looks at how some of it got written and why it was left unfinished at his death.

The book includes 20 illustrations from original notebooks retained by the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, and, among its numerous discoveries, presents the first annotated reading text of The "White Doe of Rylstone" (1808) with its important 'Advertizement'. Written in an accessible manner, this revealing study will be of great interest to students and researchers of Wordsworth's poetry.

Time-Bound Words argues that changes in English society and the English language are woven together, often in surprising ways, and investigates this claim by following eleven words from Chaucer's time to Shakespeare's. Middle English words like corage, estat, thrift , and virtu come to serve the logic of new social discourses by 1611. Language from Chaucer, Wyclif, More, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson and others is examined both as current and emerging usage, and as verbal play that accomplishes cultural work.

British Discovery Literature and the Rise of Global Commerce examines how, between 1680 and 1800, British maritime travelers became both friends and foes of the commercial state. Examining voyage narratives by William Dampler, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Johnson, James Cook, and William Bligh, Neill demonstrates how the transformation of travelers from nomadic outlaws into civil subjects, and vice versa, takes place against the political-economic backdrop of commercial expansion.

Shakespeare lived his professional life amid the London streets and died a prominent figure in the town of Stratford. The language of his plays is shot through with the concerns of London "freemen" and their wives, the diverse commercial class that nevertheless excluded adult immigrants from country towns and northern Europe alike. This book combines London historiography, close reading, and recent theories of citizen subjectivity to demonstrate for the first time that Shakespeare's plays embody citizen and alien identities despite their aristocratic settings. The book points out where the city shadows the country scenes of the major comedies, shows how London's trades animate the "civil butchery" of the history plays, and explains why England's metropolis becomes the fractured Rome of tragedy.

A unique collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth-century and late enlightenment, the first to range widely over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration of the formal experiments, aesthetics, and politics of their work. Experiment with genre and form, the poetics of the body, the politics of gender, revolutionary critique, and patronage are themes of the collection.

Andrew Marvell (1621-78) is best known today as the author of a handful of exquisite lyrics and provocative political poems. In his own time, however, Marvell was famous for his brilliant prose interventions in the major issues of the Restoration, religious toleration, and what he called "arbitrary" as distinct from parliamentary government. This is the first modern edition of all Marvell's prose pamphlets, complete with introductions and annotation explaining the historical context. Four major scholars of the Restoration era have collaborated to produce this truly Anglo-American edition. From the Rehearsal Transpros'd, a serio-comic best-seller which appeared with tacit permission from Charles II himself, through the documentary Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, Marvell established himself not only as a model of liberal thought for the eighteenth century but also as an irresistible new voice in political polemic, wittier, more literary, and hence more readable than his contemporaries.

The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell is the most comprehensive and informative collection of essays ever assembled dealing with the life and writings of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell (1621-78). Like his friend and colleague John Milton, Marvell is now seen as a dominant figure in the literary landscape of the mid-seventeenth century, producing a stunning oeuvre of poetry and prose either side of the Restoration. In the 1640s and 1650s he was the author of hypercanonical lyrics like 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'The Garden' as well as three epoch-defining poems about Oliver Cromwell. After 1660 he virtually invented the verse genre of state satire as well as becoming the most influential prose satirist of the day-in the process forging a long-lived reputation as an incorruptible patriot. Although Marvell himself was an intensely private and self-contained character, whose literary, religious, and political commitments are notoriously difficult to discern, the interdisciplinary contributions by an array of experts in the fields of seventeenth-century literature, history, and politics gathered together in the Handbook constitute a decisive step forward in our understanding of him. They offer a fully-rounded account of his life and writings, individual readings of his key works, considerations of his relations with his major contemporaries, and surveys of his rich and varied afterlives. Informed by the wealth of editorial and biographical work on Marvell that has been produced in the last twenty years, the volume is both a conspectus of the state of the art in Marvell studies and the springboard for future research.

Reading the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj explores representations of animals during British rule in India--the tigers, elephants, boars, furs, and feathers that sometimes all but obscured the human beneath and behind them, and that were integral in the creation and maintenance of the hierarchies of colonialism.

This book explores the significance of the physicality of manuscripts and printed early modern texts. Focusing on the material aspects and social practices of texts as a new way of reading meaning, it reassesses the developing relationships between cultures of manuscript and print from the late sixteenth to early eighteenth century.

To explore literary silence is to explore the relationships between literary texts and the silence of the ineffable. It is to enquire what dynamics texts develop as they strive to 'say the unsayable', and it is to think literature as a silence that speaks itself. This study describes these literary and silent dynamics through readings of Pascal's Pensees, Rousseau's Reveries, and Beckett's trilogy Molloy, Malone meurt, and L'Innommable. It contributes to our understanding of three major writers and challenges our idea of what silence is. The subject of silence and of the ineffable has a long philosophical and critical tradition. A careful study of this tradition reveals the dominance of a limiting dualistic understanding of silence and its relationship to noise or language: silence becomes the negative other, the beyond, about which there remains nothing to say. The study of literary silence seeks rather to trace a language that becomes its own silence. It compromises the attempt to think a silence that moves within and through texts, that is inherent to the literary expression. Central to this theoretical endeavour are thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze, Gadamer, and Vattimo (among several others). The theoretical understanding of silence permits an effective methodology for reading literary silence. Notions of repetition, the aporia and the implosion, which are developed in reference to Kierkegaard and Bataille, describe textual strategies of literary silence and structure the readings. Finally, the reading of literary silence has its point of reference in writers like Mallarme, Blanchot, and Beckett. It is their texts that have taught us to become topological readers, to move in and out of texts' movements; they have shown us how the literary expression is irreducible to linear, meaning oriented language. As readers of such texts we have been prepared to read the dynamics of the unsayable, and finally to start discerning the silences of the literary.

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.

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.

This volume explores the differences that separate man from other forms of life. Building on the increased attention paid in recent criticism to both plant and animal life in the Renaissance, as well as the instability of categories such as 'human' and 'animal, ' the essays in this engaging collection argue for recognition of the persistently indistinct nature of humans, who cannot be finally divided ontologically or epistemologically from other forms of matter

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.

The debate over extending full civil rights to British and Irish Catholics not only preoccupied British politics but also informed the romantic period's most prominent literary works. This book offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of Catholic Emancipation, one of the romantic period's most contentious issues.

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.

What is "Wordsworthian" Romanticism and how did it evolve? This book argues that only by reading Charlotte Smith's poetry in tandem with William Wordsworth's can this question be answered, demonstrating their mutual contribution to the creation of the "Wordsworthian," through literary analysis and historical contextualizing of their writings.

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.

Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation spans the boundaries between literary studies and history. It looks at the impact of tyrannical government on the work of poets, playwrights, and prose writers of the early English Renaissance. It shows the profound effects that political oppression had on the literary production of the years from 1528 to 1547, and how English writers in turn strove to mitigate, redirect, and finally resist that oppression. The result was the destruction of a number of forms that had dominated the literary production of late-medieval England, but also the creation of new forms that were to dominate the writing of the following centuries. Paradoxically, the tyranny of Henry VIII gave birth to many modes of writing now seen to be characteristic of the English literary Renaissance.

The English courtly masque was a lavish multi-dimensional entertainment which flourished during the reigns of the first two Stuarts. It involves some of the greatest artists of early 17th-century England. Although it has received considerable attenton from literary scholars, this is the first study of its music. By combining documentary, textual, and musical evidence, Peter Walls builds up a picture of the form and function of music in the masque, from the ascension of James I until the beginning of the civil war.

Designed to complement DeMaria's textbook British Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology, this critical reader contains seventeen essays by sixteen contemporary literary critics and covers the full range of works printed in the anthology. All the essays were first published within the last ten years, and they represent current thinking about the literature in this chronological span. The Reader will help students and teachers of the period find new approaches to central canonical works, but it also provides introductions to several of the less well known writers included in DeMaria's anthology. Most of the essays in the reader articulate readings of important individual works while situating those works in historical contexts that provide background for understanding other writings of the period. Many of the essays also relate the contexts under study to larger historical or cultural movements. For example, David Norbrook's essay provides a historically - based reading of Milton's Areopagitica while making a contribution to the history of censorship and the evolution of the public sphere in England. Similarly, Catherine Gallagher's essay on Aphra Behn's Oroonoko explains how blackness of the novella's main character functions in literary terms while providing background. Other essays throw light on such topics as the history of readers and authors; social definitions of sexuality; religious thought; nationhood; and the relations between public politics and the private, gendered self. The critics selected for the reader are all currently very active, and many are young scholars whose work has begun to appear in only the last five or ten years: Sharon Achinstein, Helen Deutsch, George Haggerty, Adam Potkay, Carol Barash, D. N. DeLuna, and Frans De Bruyn join more senior established scholars such as Ruth Perry, Terry Castle, David Perkins, Howard Weinbrot, Claude Rawson, and Thomas Greene.

Mademoiselle de Montpensier: Writings, Chateaux, and Female Self-Construction in Early Modern France examines questions of self-construction in the works of Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orleans, Duchesse de Montpensier (1627-1693), the wealthiest unmarried woman in Europe at the time, a pro-women advocate, author of memoirs, letters and novels, and the commissioner of four chateaux and other buildings throughout France, including Saint-Fargeau, Champigny-sur-Veude, Eu, and Choisy-le-roi. An NEH-funded project, this study explores the interplay between writing and the symbolic import of chateaux to examine Montpensier's strategies to establish herself as a woman with autonomy and power in early modern France.

Reads the imagined history of the long term relationship between pagan and Christian through quasi-factual fifteenth-century Middle English writings, from Lydgate's Troy Book to the hagiographies of Bokenham, Barclay and Capgrave and Mandeville's Travels. SHORTLISTED for the 2020 Katharine Briggs Award. Late medieval English culture was fascinated by the figure of the pagan, the ancestor whose religious difference must be negotiated, and by the pagan's idol, an animate artefact. In romances, histories and hagiographies medieval Christians told the story of the pagans, focussing on the absence or presence of pagan material culture in the medieval world to ask whether the pagan era had completely ended or whether it might persist into the Christian present. This book reads the imagined history of the long term relationship between pagan and Christian through quasi-factual fifteenth-century Middle English writings. John Lydgate's Troy Book describes the foundation of a Troy that is at once London's ancestor and a vision for its future; he, John Capgrave and Reginald Pecock consider how pagans were able to build idols that attracted spirits to inhabit them. The hagiographies of Osbern Bokenham, Alexander Barclay, Capgrave and Lydgate describe the confrontation of saint and idol, and the saint's appropriation for Christians of the city the pagans built. Traces of the pagan appeared in the medieval present: Capgrave, Lydgateand John Metham contemplated both extant and lost artefacts; Lollards and orthodox writers disputed whether Christian devotional practice had pagan aspects; and Mandeville's Travels sympathetically imagined how pagans mightexplain themselves. Dr SARAH SALIH is Senior Lecturer in Medieval English, King's College London.

Of all the poets Francis Meres names in his famous Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), just two rate a mention as being both 'our best for tragedy' and 'the best poets for comedy': William Shakespeare and George Chapman. All Fools, written in 1599, is the only Elizabethan comedy based directly on the plays of Terence. By taking episodes and characters from two brilliant works, The Self-Tormenter and The Brothers, Chapman creates something that is distinctly Elizabethan while remaining faithful to the spirit of the great Roman master. In this edition, an extensive introduction and commentary show how Chapman combines the literary and theatrical traditions of ancient Rome with everyday life in his own time to fashion a sparkling and innovative comedy that will delight audiences today as much as it did those of 1599. -- .