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'.

Shakespeare's plays are stuffed with letters - 111 appear on stage in all but five of his dramas. But for modern actors, directors, and critics they are frequently an awkward embarrassment. Alan Stewart shows how and why Shakespeare put letters on stage in virtually all of his plays. By reconstructing the very different uses to which letters were put in Shakespeare's time, and recapturing what it meant to write, send, receive, read, and archive a letter, it throws new light on some of his most familiar dramas. Early modern letters were not private missives sent through an anonymous postal system, but a vital - sometimes the only - means of maintaining contact and sending news between distant locations. Penning a letter was a serious business in a period when writers made their own pen and ink; letter-writing protocols were strict; letters were dispatched by personal messengers or carriers, often received and read in public - and Shakespeare exploited all these features to dramatic effect. Surveying the vast range of letters in Shakespeare's oeuvre, the book also features sustained new readings of Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV Part One.

John Dryden was England's most outstanding and controversial writer for the last four decades of the seventeenth century. He dominated the literary world as a satirist, a skilled and versatile dramatist, a pioneer of literary criticism, a writer of religious poetry, and an eloquent translator from the great classical poets. The present book discusses Dryden's career both chronologically and thematically, taking issue with his enemies' denigration of his integrity, and revealing him as a subtle, passionate and sceptical writer.

The book considers the London theatrical culture which took shape in the 1570s and came to an end in 1642.
Places emphasis on those plays that are readily available in modern editions and can sometimes to be seen in modern productions, including Shakespeare.
Provides students with the historical, literary and theatrical contexts they need to make sense of Renaissance drama.
Includes a series of short biographies of playwrights during this period.
Features close analyses of more than 20 plays, each of which draws attention to what makes a particular play interesting and identifies relevant critical questions.
Examines early modern drama in terms of its characteristic actions, such as cuckolding, flattering, swaggering, going mad, and rising from the dead.

This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of "victim feminism," the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies--Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster’s Duchess and White Devil, among others--are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.

Ann Kelly’s provocative book breaks the mold of Swift studies. 20th-century scholars have tended to assess Jonathan Swift as a pillar of the 18th-century “republic of letters," a conservative, even reactionary voice upholding classical values against the welling tide of popularization in literature. Kelly’s Swift is instead a practical exponent of the popular and impresario of the literary image. She argues that Swift turned his back on the elite to write for a popular audience, and that he annexed scandals to his fictionalized print alter ego, creating a continual demand for works by or about this self-mythologized figure. A fascinating look at popular print media, the commodification of the author, culture formation, and modern myth making, this book opens new ground in our understanding of one of the greatest English writers.

This collection of essays illustrates various pressures and concerns-both practical and theoretical-related to the study of print culture. Procedural difficulties range from doubts about the reliability of digitized resources to concerns with the limiting parameters of 'national' book history.

"A friend in history", Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "looks like some premature soul". And in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crain sees the soul of the nation's literature.

In a sensitive analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain describes the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing -- the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. He traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature -- a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout this engaging book, Crain demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.

Probably the most famous of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne worked with and influenced many of the leading poets of the age. This excellent introduction to his life and works sets his writing firmly in the context of his times.

The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature is a major new reference work that provides the best single-volume source of original scholarship on early American literature. Comprised of twenty-seven chapters written by experts in their fields, this work presents an authoritative, in-depth, and up-to-date assessment of a crucial area within literary studies.
Organized primarily in terms of genre, the chapters include original research on key concepts, as well as analysis of interesting texts from throughout colonial America. Separate chapters are devoted to literary genres of great importance at the time of their composition that have been neglected in recent decades, such as histories, promotion literature, and scientific writing. New interpretations are offered on the works of Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Alexander Hamilton while lesser known figures are also brought to light. Newly vital areas like print culture and natural history are given full treatment. As with other Oxford Handbooks, the contributors cover the field in a comprehensive yet accessible way that is suitable for those wishing to gain a good working knowledge of an area of study and where it's headed.

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.

Early modern playgoers were avid consumers of voyage drama. When they entered the playhouse they engaged with the players in a collaborative form of 'mind-travelling, ' and the result was an experience of stage-travel that was predicated on pleasure. This book investigates the pleasures of vicarious travel in early modern England, treating playgoing as part of a playing system, wherein imaginative work is distributed across the various participants: playwright, player, the physical environment, technologies of the stage, and emphatically in this study, the playgoer. Drawing on a wide range of drama from across the entire seventeenth century, including works by Marlowe, Heywood, Jonson, Brome, Davenant, Dryden and Behn, it situates voyage drama in its historical and intellectual context between the individual act of reading in early modern England and the communal act of modern sightseeing

Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire provides a painstaking study of the Founding Father's stances on government, imperialism, and fiscal policy, ultimately emphasizing how his opinions on these matters evolved over the course of his lifetime. Carla Mulford uses Franklin's prodigious literary output-which includes letters, pamphlets, newspaper articles, journal entries, and drafted speeches-to demonstrate how his views shifted, with special attention to the role played by Great Britain in his decision-making process before, during, and after the Revolution. The book begins with Franklin's progressive early writings on mercantilism, freedom of conscience, and freedom of the press, considering how they were shaped by his English-born parents and their decision to leave their tumultuous homeland in the seventeenth century. Franklin's young adult and middle years, when he became heavily involved with Pennsylvania politics, see a sharply conservative shift in his attitudes toward empire and monetary policy. Mulford draws on letters and issues of Poor Richard's Almanack from these years to reveal the beginnings of a conservative turn in his thought, highlighting his surprising support for the politics of imperialism. Franklin's mature years as the colonies' chief representative and cultural ambassador in Britain and Europe form the content of the next two chapters, which elucidate Franklin's disenchantment with the British colonial administrations overseeing the Thirteen Colonies. Mining Franklin's autobiography, the book's last chapters cover Franklin's ultimate rejection of Great Britain and his condemnation of imperialism, especially with regard to Ireland and India. Overall, Mulford's monograph offers fresh, nuanced interpretations of the central issues that preoccupied Franklin throughout his life.

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.

Edgeworth is regarded as a pioneer in the development of the regional novel and the use of vernacular language. This study investigates her attitudes towards language and regionalism. It shows, by a detailed discussion of her major Irish texts - Castle Rackrent , Essay on Irish Bulls , Ennui , The Absentee and Ormond - how her intellectual 'Lunar' background, and her life in Ireland during the momentous years of the Union is reflected in the form and language of her writing.

In a fresh investigation of primary sources and original readings, Kitson traces the origins of contemporary ideas about race though a variety of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literary texts by Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, De Quincey, and other published and unpublished writings about travel and exploration and natural history.

"Lukas Erne's study of Kyd is remarkable: it engages straightforwardly with this immensely important playwright and presents a great deal that is substantially original and of real significance. Serious students of English Renaissance drama will certainly find this book indispensable, and as an added bonus, it is a pleasure to read. " Professor Brian Gibbons, General Editor of the New Mermaids Kyd is arguably Shakespeare's most important tragic predecessor. Brilliantly fusing the drama of the academic and popular traditions, Thomas Kyd's plays are of central importance for understanding how the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries came about. Called 'an extraordinary dramatic ...genius' by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Kyd invented the revenge tragedy genre that culminated in Shakespeare's Hamlet some twelve years later. In this study, The Spanish Tragedy - the most popular of all plays on the English Renaissance stage - receives the extensive scholarly and critical treatment it deserves, including a full reception and modern stage history. Yet as Erne shows, Thomas Kyd is much more than the author of a single masterpiece. Don Horatio (partly extant in The First Part of Hieronimo), the lost early Hamlet, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia all belong to what emerges in this work as a coherent dramatic oeuvre. This groundbreaking study is now in paperback. Contents: Introduction 1. Don Horatio and The First Part of Hieronimo 2. The Spanish Tragedy: an introduction 3. The Spanish Tragedy: origins 4. The Spanish Tragedy: framing revenge 5. The Spanish Tragedy: additions, adaptations, modern stage history 6. Hamlet 7. Soliman and Perseda: an introduction 8. Soliman and Perseda: the play and its making 9. Cornelia 10. Other works and apocrypha Appendix: Kyd's patron Select Bibliography Index Lukas Erne is Professor of English in the Departement d'Anglais, Universite de Geneve.

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.

"The Adventures of Telemachus" is the first critical edition of Tobias Smollett's 1776 translation of Bishop Fenelon's 1699 "mirror for princes," written especially for Duc de Burgogne, heir presumptive to Louis XIV.

Both in its original French and its many translations, "The Adventures of Telemachus" was one of the most popular and revered works of the eighteenth century. There were more than ten English prose and poetry versions, including this masterful prose translation by Smollett. Known for his novels "Roderick Random" and "The Expedition of Humphry Clinker," Smollett was also a gifted translator. "The Adventures of Telemachus" was his final translation and is one of the finest versions of the work. Long a disputed title in the Smollett canon, it is fully restored to his credit by Leslie A. Chilton.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans invented 'Indians' and populated the world with them. The global history of the term 'Indian' remains largely unwritten and this volume, taking its cue from Shakespeare, asks us to consider the proximities and distances between various early modern discourses of the Indian. Through new analysis of English travel writing, medical treatises, literature, and drama, contributors seek not just to recover unexpected counter-histories but to put pressure on the ways in which we understand race, foreign bodies, and identity in a globalizing age that has still not shed deeply ingrained imperialist habits of marking difference.

Taking as a starting point the parallel occurrence of Cook's Pacific voyages, the development of natural history, scenic tourism in Britain, and romantic travel in Europe, this book argues that the effect of these practices was the production of nature as an abstract space and that the genre of travel writing had a central role in reproducing it.

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.

India was the object of intense sympathetic concern during the Romantic period. But what was the true nature of imaginative engagement with British India? This study explores how a range of authors, from Edmund Burke and Sir William Jones to Robert Southey and Thomas Moore, sought to come to terms with India's strangeness and distance from Britain.

Buildings tell stories. Castles, country homes, churches, and monasteries are "documents" of the people who built them, owned them, lived and died in them, inherited and saved or destroyed them, and recorded their histories. "Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England" examines the relationship between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural and literary works. By becoming more sensitive to the narrative functions of architecture, Anne M. Myers argues, we begin to understand how a range of writers viewed and made use of the material built environment that surrounded the production of early modern texts in England.

Scholars have long found themselves in the position of excusing or explaining England's failure to achieve the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance in the visual arts. Myers proposes that architecture inspired an unusual amount of historiographic and literary production, including poetry, drama, architectural treatises, and diaries. Works by William Camden, Henry Wotton, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Anne Clifford, and John Evelyn, when considered as a group, are texts that overturn the engrained critical notion that a Protestant fear of idolatry sentenced the visual arts and architecture in England to a state of suspicion and neglect.

This book examines how the concept of the poet as a male professional emerged during the Restoration and 18th century. Analyzing works by writers from Rochester to Johnson, Linda Zionkowski argues that the opportunities for publication created by the growth of a commercial market in texts profoundly challenged aristocratic conceptions of authorship and altered the status of professional poets on the hierarchies of class and gender. The book proposes that during this period, discourse about the poet’s social role both revealed and produced a crucial shift in configurations of masculinity: the belief that commodifying their mental labor undermined writers’ cultural authority gave way to a celebration of the market’s function as the proving ground for both literary merit and bourgeois manhood.