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.

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.

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 focuses on an exciting moment in the history of Anglo-German literary exchange in the Romantic period, the moment of George Gordon Byron's and Percy Bysshe Shelley's interrelated encounters with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's seminal dramatic poem, Faust.

This book presents a unique sociological examination of British raciology, focusing on women's literary works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It uniquely offers a sociological perspective drawing from a range of academic disciplines, particularly literature, history and cultural studies. Wright traces the emergence of British modernity through the writings of a select group of women writers (including Jane Austen, Hannah More, Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Marla Edgeworth) of diverse political and philosophical affiliations, and fills a gap in scholarship on feminist accounts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women's writing.

The 1990s have witnessed a major reassessment of Blake initiated by a new and more rigorous comprehension of his modes of production, which in turn has led to re-evaluation of other literary and cultural contexts for his work. Blake in the Nineties grapples with the implications of the new bibliography for Blake studies, in its editorial, interpretative, and historical dimensions. As well as providing an international overview of recent Blake criticism, the collection contributes to current debates in a variety of disciplines dealing with the Romantic period, including art history, counter-Enlightenment-scholarship, theology and hermeneutic theory.

This book argues broadly that any historical narrative about republicanism needs to place Marlowe at the front of its genealogy, and that his interest in republican ideals is sustained from the beginning to the end of his meteoric career. More specifically, this study will nonetheless argue that it is difficult to discern a clear republican form of government in Marlowe's works. What we can discern is 'republican representation', the author's representational foregrounding of his own republican frame of art. This study is the first to situate the complex Marlowe corpus within the context of the advent of English Republicanism.

"Renaissance Earwitnesses" examines masculinity on the early modern stage through sensory culture. In his reading of plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Cary, and Jonson, Keith M. Botelho argues that earwitnessing, or judicious listening, is a vehicle early modern dramatists used to rethink constructions of male informational authority. Drawing on sound and gender studies and providing close analysis of the circulation of rumor both on and off the stage, Botelho reveals male anxieties to be self-generated, emerging not from female gossip, but from male rumormongering. By rethinking the gendered dimensions to the flow of information, Botelho makes an important contribution to early modern scholarship.

Emotive language is now best understood by combining the analytic techniques of classical rhetoric with current linguistic practices. With or without prompting, the "passions" of Renaissance culture can stir contrary feelings in today's readers, which are enlisted to validate a range of theorized responses. This book will use the "New Rhetoric" to open fresh perspectives on writers as diverse as Christopher Marlowe, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish.

Two and a half centuries after his birth, Blake's influence on later generations of writers and artists is more important than ever, extending into film, psychology, children's literature, and graphic novels as well as poetry, painting, and fiction. "Blake, Modernity, and Popular Culture" explores the ways in which Blake reacted to the subcultures of his day, as well as how he has inspired popular, modernist and postmodernist figures until the present day.

Taking a wide-ranging intertextual approach, Richard Hillman produces fresh readings of some familiar Early Modern English plays by setting them against political and cultural discourses concerning France, as the latter informed contemporary English consciousness. The English works explored go beyond those directly representing French affairs, on the premise that dramatic treatments of English historical topics, notably by Shakespeare and Marlowe, were inflected by events across the Channel.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, captivity emerged as a persistent metaphor as well as a material reality. The exercise of power on both an institutional and a personal level created conditions in which those least empowered, particularly women, perceived themselves to be captive subjects. This "domestic captivity" was inextricably connected to England's systematic enslavement of kidnapped Africans and the wealth accumulation realized from those actions, even as early fictional narratives suppressed or ignored the experience of the enslaved. Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660-1750 explores how captivity informed identity, actions, and human relationships for white British subjects as represented in fictional texts by British authors from the period.This work complicates interpretations of canonical authors such as Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood and asserts the importance of authors such as Penelope Aubin and Edward Kimber. Drawing on the popular press, unpublished personal correspondence, and archival documents, Catherine Ingrassia provides a rich cultural description that situates literary texts from a range of genres within the material world of captivity. Ultimately, the book calls for a reevaluation of how literary texts that code a heretofore undiscussed connection to the slave trade or other types of captivity are understood.

Collection of the best scholarly essays from the 2020 Southeastern Renaissance Conference plus essays submitted directly to the journal. Topics run from the epic to influence studies to the perennial problem of love and beyond. Renaissance Papers 2020 features essays from the conference held virtually at Mercer University, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with an essay that discusses the "ultimate story," the epic, and argues, pointing to the Henriad and The Faerie Queen, that some of the most ambitious remain unfinished; an essay on "just war" and Henry V follows, suggesting why such epic inconclusion may not be such a bad thing. A trio of influence studies investigate post-Marian virginity, Miltonic environmentalism, and cross-dressing knights. Three essays then interrogate the perennial problem of love: in popular ballads, in Hero and Leander, and in The Rape of Lucrece. An essay argues counterintuitively for Amelia Lanyer and Margaret Cavendish as exemplars of the Cavalier Ideal of the Bonum Vitae; it is followed by an equally provocative reconsideration of the role of Claudio D'Arezzo's rhetorical works for Sicilian national identity. The last essay analyzes the formal signatures of three sixteenth-century queens and how they sought to represent themselves on the public stage.

Turning Turk looks at contact between the English and other cultures inthe early modern Mediterranean, and analyzes the representation of thatexperience on the London stage. Vitkus's book demonstrates that theEnglish encounter with exotic alterity, and the theatrical representationsinspired by that encounter, helped to form the emergent identity of an English nation that was eagerly fantasizing about having an empire but was still in the preliminary phase of its colonizing drive. Vitkus' research shows how plays about the multi-cultural Mediterranean participated in this process of identity formation, and how anxieties about religious conversion, foreign trade and miscegenation were crucial factors in the formation of that identity.

On the basis of a close reading of Milton's major published political prose works from 1644 through to the Restoration, William Walker presents the anti-formalist, unrevolutionary, illiberal Milton. Walker shows that Milton placed his faith not so much in particular forms of government as in statesmen he deemed to be virtuous. He reveals Milton's profound aversion to socio-political revolution and his deep commitments to what he took to be orthodox religion. He emphasises that Milton consistently presents himself as a champion not of heterodox religion, but of 'reformation'. He observes how Milton's belief that all men are not equal grounds his support for regimes that had little popular support and that did not provide the same civil liberties to all. And he observes how Milton's powerful commitment to a single religion explains his endorsement of various English regimes that persecuted on grounds of religion. This reading of Milton's political prose thus challenges the current consensus that Milton is an early modern exponent of republicanism, revolution, radicalism, and liberalism. It also provides a fresh account of how the great poet and prose polemicist is related to modern republics that think they have separated church and state.

In this revisionist approach to book history and Marian studies Valerie Schutte argues that manuscript and printed book dedications reveal contemporary perceptions of statecraft, religion, and gender. She offers the first comprehensive catalogue of all book and manuscript dedications to Mary and all books known to have been in Mary's possession.

Discussing authors as diverse in time and type as Sir Fulke Greville, Christopher Hill, Charles Lamb, Edmund Waller, and Thomas Warton the elder, Richard Hillyer analyzes Sir Philip Sidney's reputation from his own day to the present. More important than how Sidney's works have fared over many centuries' worth of critical fashion, Hillyer argues, is how Sidney's versatility as a "Renaissance man" has elicited varying degrees of wonder, incomprehension, and skepticism. Even when least appreciated as an author, he has remained a cultural icon, a prominent figure on the landscapes of English culture and literature, and an influence that later authors and commentators have continued to address.

This work takes a new approach to the evolution of the modern English lyric, emphasizing the way in which several generations of poets, reacting to post-Reformation readers' dislike for invented poetic narratives, competed for the right to commemorate important public occasions and slowly expanded the range of acceptable occasions. The book demonstrates that many fundamental features of a typical modern lyric actually evolved as responses to the limitations of occasional poetry.

There was no single 'Elizabethan stage'. Early modern actors exploited various opportunities for patronage and profit between the 1570s and 1642, whether touring, or performing at inns, in country houses, in purpose-built theatres, at court, at the universities or at the inns of court. This authoritative and comprehensive collection of new essays explores the social, political, and economic pressures under which the playing companies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries operated. It shows how they evolved over time to meet new challenges such as the opposition of City of London authorities, the possibility of permanent location in London, the re-emergence of boy companies c. 1600, and the great increase in court performance which began under James I. Essays also explore the practical everyday business of playing: acquiring scripts and playhouses, dramatic authorship, the contribution of financiers and entrepreneurs, rehearsing, lighting, music, props, styles of acting, boy actors, and the role of women in an 'all-male' world. A number of contributors address the methodologies of theatre history itself, questioning its philosophical premises and evaluating the nature of the evidence we have, such as that from stage directions in play-books or from the visual records. The collection as a whole offers a challenging account of the world of the players in Tudor-Stuart England, revising old assumptions and so inviting us to explore anew the plays which were written for them and which are their greatest living legacy.

Howard demonstrates that Machiavellian discourse had a profound impact on early modern Spanish prose treatises. Arguing against historians of Spanish political thought that have neglected recent developments in our understanding of Machiavelli's contribution to the European tradition, the thesis of this book is that Machiavellian discoursehad a profound impact on Spanish prose treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After reviewing in chapter 1 Machiavelli's ideological restructuring of the language of European political thought, in chapter 2 Dr. Howard shows how, before his works were prohibited in Spain in 1583, Spaniards such as Fadrique Furio Ceriol and Balthazar Ayala used Machiavelli's new vocabulary and theoretical framework to develop an imperial discourse that would be compatible with a militant understanding of Catholic Christianity. In chapters 3, 4 and 5 he demonstrates in detail how Giovanni Botero, Pedro de Ribadeneyra, and their imitators in the anti-Machiavellian reason-of-state tradition in Spain, attack a straw figure of Machiavelli that they have invented for their own rhetorical and ideological purposes, while they simultaneously incorporate key Machiavellian concepts into their own advice. Keith David Howard is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Florida State University.

"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 Exiles in a Global City, Clare Carroll explores Irish migrants' experiences in early modern Rome (1609-1783) and interprets representations of their cultural identities in relation to their interaction with world-wide Spanish and Roman institutions. This study focuses on some sources in Roman archives not previously considered by Irish historians. The book examines a wide array of cultural productions-O Cianain's account of O'Neill's progress from Ireland to Rome, Luke Wadding's history of the Franciscan order, the portraits at S. Isidoro, the first printed Irish grammar, the letters of Oliver Plunkett, the records of a hospice for converts, Charles Wogan's memoir, and reports on the national college-for how they transformed emerging senses of an Irish nation.

New essays offering fresh glimpses of Romanticism as interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic, illuminating the discursive features and the pan-European nature of the movement. Romanticism bubbled up as lava from such historical eruptions as the Napoleonic Wars. The power of its flow across disciplines and linguistic borders reminds us that the use of the term in a context limited to one linguistic, national, or political tradition, or to one discipline or area of human development, shows an essential ignorance of the ideational configurations elaborated and lived out by the movement. Among its consistent norms are the notion ofreality as a transcendent self-unfolding Geist, everything existing in a dialectical relationship with all else; the position that art reveals mythic understructures of reality; and that all kinds of kinship are more normalthan isolation. This book brings together essays that highlight the inclusivity of Romanticism. A team of eleven scholars offers fresh glimpses of Romanticism as it manifests itself in a number of disciplines, including most prominently literature, but also music, painting, and the sciences. In so doing, the contributors treat Romanticism as interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic, providing data and interpretive viewpoints that illuminate the discursive features and the pan-European nature of the movement. Contributors: Lloyd Davies, Ellis Dye, Stacey Hahn, Hollie Markland Harder, Jennifer Law-Sullivan, Sarah Lippert, Marjean D. Purinton, Ashley Shams, Kaitlin Gowan Southerly. Larry H. Peer is Professor of Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University. Christopher R. Clason is Professor of German at Oakland University.

This volume charts the most significant changes for a literary history of women in a period that saw the beginnings of a discourse of 'enlightened feminism'. It reveals that women engaged in forms old and new, seeking to shape and transform the culture of letters rather than simply reflect or respond to the work of their male contemporaries.

The emblem was big business in early-modern Europe, used extensively not only in printed books and broadsheets, but also to decorate pottery, metalware, furniture, glass and windows and numerous other domestic, devotional and political objects. At its most basic level simply a combination of symbolic visual image and texts, an emblem is a hybrid composed of words and picture. However, as this book demonstrates, understanding the precise and often multiple meaning, intention and message emblems conveyed can prove a remarkably slippery process. In this book, Peter Daly draws upon many years' research to reflect upon the recent upsurge in scholarly interest in, and rediscovery of, emblems following years of relative neglect. Beginning by considering some of the seldom asked, but important, questions that the study of emblems raises, including the importance of the emblem, the truth value of emblems, and the transmission of knowledge through emblems, the book then moves on to investigate more closely-focussed aspects such as the role of mnemonics, mottoes and visual rhetoric. The volume concludes with a review of some perhaps inadequately considered issues such as the role of Jesuits (who had a role in the publication of about a quarter of all known emblem books), and questions such as how these hybrid constructs were actually read and interpreted. Drawing upon a database containing records of 6,514 books of emblems and imprese, this study suggests new ways for scholars to approach important questions that have not yet been satisfactorily broached in the standard works on emblems.