Using both canonical and underappreciated texts, Alien Albion argues that early modern England was far less unified and xenophobic than literary critics have previously suggested. Juxtaposing literary texts from the period with legal, religious, and economic documents, Scott Oldenburg uncovers how immigrants to England forged ties with their English hosts and how those relationships were reflected in literature that imagined inclusive, multicultural communities.

Through discussions of civic pageantry, the plays of dramatists including William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Middleton, the poetry of Anne Dowriche, and the prose of Thomas Deloney, Alien Albion challenges assumptions about the origins of English national identity and the importance of religious, class, and local identities in the early modern era.

The interpretation of Paradise Lost has undergone remarkable changes in the last twenty years. This new collection of essays maps these changes, showing how they have been achieved by the combined discourses of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. The essays are by writers working at the forefront of current criticism, and not only provide an overview of contemporary readings of one of the seminal works of English literature, but also indicate the range and subtlety of the revolution in English studies that has taken place in the past two decades. Paradise Lost is revealed as a work of immediate and challenging relevance.

Examining how labouring-class poets constructed themselves and were constructed by critics as part of a canon, and how they situated their work in relation to contemporaries and poets from earlier periods, this book highlights the complexities of labouring-class poetic identities in the period from Burns to mid-late century Victorian dialect poets.

"The Art of Rhetoric" is the earliest systematic work of rhetoric and literary criticism in the English. This work, which brought into English the procedures of Ciceronian rhetoric-invention, disposition, style, memory, and delivery-the core of the academic curriculum in Renaissance England, went through eight editions between 1553 and 1585. At the time, its appeal was both practical and academic. Today it gives a unique insight into the formal training of such authors as Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Milton.

A study and edition of one of the most ignored works of early Spanish literature because of its strong sexual content, this work examines the social ideology that conditioned the reactions of people to the events it describes as well as Fernando de Rojas's masterpiece, Celestina. Since Carajicomedia was published in 1519, it has been largely ignored by critics because of its strong sexual content. The author of Carajicomedia: Parody and Satire in Early Modern Spain believes that it is a sophisticated and complex composition that provides as good a vantage point from which to examine the ideology of the period as does La Celestina. In their poems, the writers of Carajicomedia inadvertently reveal thedeep worries of the knights and nobles who opposed the regencies of Ferdinand the Catholic and Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros pending the arrival of Charles V. Carajicomedia is therefore a harbinger of the War of the Comuneros, the great popular revolt that convulsed Spain in 1520. In this book's chapters, the author examines the parodic relationship between the text of Juan de Mena's El Laberinto de Fortuna, the glosses of Hernan Nunez's Las Trezientas, and Carajicomedia. He then turns to its actual writers and their settings, and shows how their satirical attitudes towards males, females, and conversos reveals the failure of the societal mechanisms in place to control desire and miscegenation. Carajicomedia: Parody and Satire in Early Modern Spain concludes with a paleographic edition of the text and appendices that contain a modern Spanish version and its Englishtranslation, as well as examine Carajicomedia's language. Frank A. Dominguez is a professor of medieval Spanish literature and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Through an exploration of key women writers of the early modern period, Marion Wynne-Davies demonstrates the ways in which female authors were both enabled and constrained by the writing traditions and influences within their families. The engagement with and participation in the construction of individual familial discourses is explained via an analysis of six Renaissance families: the Mores, Lumleys, Sidneys/Herberts, Carys and Cavendishes. While the book addresses the writings of male authors from these family groups, such as Sir Thomas More, John Donne, Philip Sidney, Lucius Cary and William Cavendish, its primary focus is on Margaret More/Roper, Gertrude More, Jane Lumley, Mary Wroth, Elizabeth Cary and Jane, Elizabeth and Margaret Cavendish.

Drawing upon archival material as well as the drama, popular verse and pamphlets, this book reads representations of masters and servants in relation to key Renaissance preoccupations. Apprentices, journeymen, male domestic servants, maidservants and stewards, Burnett argues, were deployed in literary texts to address questions about the exercise of power, social change and the threat of economic upheaval. In this way, writers were instrumental in creating servant 'cultures', and spaces within which forms of political resistance could be realized.

The bicentenary of the foundation of the Edinburgh Review has provided the foremost scholars in the field with the opportunity to re-examine the pervasive significance of the most important literary review of the Romantic period. These essays assess the controversial role played by the Edinburgh Review in the development of Romantic literature and explore its sense of "Scottishness" in the context of early 19th century British culture.

This original and scholarly work uses three detailed case studies of plays - Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," "King Lear" and "Cymbeline "- to cast light on the ways in which early modern writers used metaphor to explore how identities emerge from the interaction of competing regional and spiritual topographies.

The Earth's land and its inhabitants are in jeopardy. Ecosystems are threatened in every corner of the world. Neocolonial forces define human relations increasingly in fundamentalist terms. Land settlement patterns formulated during the colonial era have left more and more people on today's planet without property, without the resources needed to sustain a livable existence, and with only a combative understanding of identity. This book argues that humanity's relationship to the land has undergone a fundamental change, and reveals how the historical phenomenon known as the "enclosure movement" has come to have a profound effect on how we relate to the earth, and on how we conceive of ourselves as human beings. Analyzing narratives by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Salman Rushdie, and others, Marzec reveals the extent to which the legacy of enclosures continues to dictate the geopolitical reality of the present.

Here are dozens of surprising aspects of the life and writings of C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and Dante. (George MacDonald loved the writings of Dante, and C. S. Lewis loved the writings of both Dante and MacDonald.) Contents range from the quick, surprising fun of "Who Is This Man?" to the practical, down-to-earth instruction of "C. S. Lewis's Free Advice to Hopeful Writers" and the adventurous scholarship of "Spring in Purgatory" and "Mining Dante".

"The Real History of Tom Jones" revivifies historical materials from which Henry Fielding constructed the greatest comic novel of the eighteenth century. This study recovers and explores the contexts necessary to understand Fielding's subtle art, such as the bloody conflict for the throne between Stuarts and Hanoverians, a contradictory class system, game laws that both protected and flouted individual property rights, and a justice system that proclaimed hanging for many crimes but let most criminals go. Drawing on evidence such as the peculiar appearance of eighteenth-century money, the fraudulent autobiography of a gypsy king, and a magical prayer book illustration, the book offers new readings of both "Tom Jones" and the political and legal landscape of Georgian England.

This book maps the field of seventeenth-century women's writing in Spanish, English, and French and situates the work of Sor Juana more clearly within that field. It holds up the multi-layered, proto-feminist writings of Sor Juana as a meaningful lens through which to focus the literary production of her female contemporaries. Merrim's book advances the integration of Hispanic women authors and women's issues into the panorama of early modern women's writing and opens up unexplored commonalities between Sor Juana and her sister writers.

Early modern women writers whose works are explored include Marie de Gournay, Margaret Fell Fox, Catalina de Erauso, Maria de Zayas, Ana Caro, Mme de Lafayette, Anne Bradstreet, St. Teresa, and Margaret Lucas Cavendish.

Merrim's study provides a full-bodied picture of the resources that the cultural and historical climates of the seventeenth century placed at the disposal of women writers, the manners in which women writers instrumentalized them, the building blocks and concerns of early modern women's writing, and the continuities between early modern and modern women's writing.

Written in an engaging, clear manner, this innovative study will be of interest not only to Hispanists but also to scholars in early modern studies, women's studies, history, and comparative literature.

Against the backdrop of Britain’s underground 18th and early-19th century homosexual culture, mob persecutions, and executions of homosexuals, Hobson shows how Blake's hatred of sexual and religious hypocrisy and state repression, and his revolutionary social vision, led him gradually to accept homosexuality as an integral part of human sexuality. In the process, Blake rejected the antihomosexual bias of British radical tradition, revised his idealization of aggressive male heterosexuality and his male-centered view of gender, and refined his conception of the cooperative commonwealth.

Focusing on how citizens of early modern England tried to locate themselves and their nation through geography and travel writing, Monica Matei-Chesnoiu explores theatrical representations of Western European space and ethnography. Geographic discourses share many features with drama in that they appeal to the readers' and audience's curiosity and imagination. Playwrights use information derived from geography treatises as vehicles to allegorize contemporary English issues in a dialogical mode. While geography and travel texts provide an objective synthesis in describing Western European nations, dramatic interaction destabilizes any preconceived notions and submits contrastive views on imagined global European communities. This book explores representations of France, Spain, Germany, the Low Countries, and Denmark in a wide range of geography texts and offers fresh readings of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, Dekker, Massinger, Marston, and others.

The Parish Church was the primary site of religious practice throughout the early modern period. This was particularly so for the silent majority of the English population, who conformed outwardly to the successive religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What such public conformity might have meant has attracted less attention - and, ironically, is sometimes less well documented - than the non-conformity or semi-conformity of recusants, church-papists, Puritan conventiclers or separatists. In this volume, ten leading scholars of early modern religion explore the experience of parish worship in England during the Reformation and the century that followed it. As the contributors argue, parish worship in this period was of critical theological, cultural and even political importance. The volume's key themes are the interlocking importance of liturgy, music, the sermon and the parishioners' own bodies; the ways in which religious change was received, initiated, negotiated, embraced or subverted in local contexts; and the dialectic between practice and belief which helped to make both so contentious. The contributors - historians, historical theologians and literary scholars - through their commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, provide fruitful and revealing insights into this intersection of private and public worship. This collection is a sister volume to Martin and Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Together these two volumes focus and drive forward scholarship on the lived experience of early modern religion, as it was practised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Rethinking the history of women's writing and literary history itself, this new volume examines the diversity of early women's writing (from verse and songs to household records and recipes), offering a new paradigm for understanding women's shaping roles in the literary, religious, and political movements of the sixteenth century.

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF LITERARY TRANSLATION IN ENGLISH
General Editors: Peter France and Stuart Gillespie
This groundbreaking five-volume history runs from the Middle Ages to the year 2000. It is a critical history, treating translations wherever appropriate as literary works in their own right, and reveals the vital part played by translators and translation in shaping the literary culture of the English-speaking world, both for writers and readers. It thus offers new and often challenging perspectives on the history of literature in English. As well as examining the translations and their wider impact, it explores the processes by which they came into being and were disseminated, and provides extensive bibliographical and biographical reference material.
In the period covered by Volume 2 comes a drive, unprecedented in its energy and scope, to bring foreign writing of all kinds into English. The humanist scholar depicted in Antonello's St Jerome, the jacket illustration, is one of the figures at work, and one of the most self-conscious and prolonged encounters that took place was with the Bible, a uniquely fraught and intimidating original. But early modern English translation often finds its setting within far busier scenes of worldly life - on the London stage, as a bid for patronage, for purposes polemical, political, hortatory, instructional, and as a way of making a living in the expanding book trade.
Translation became, as never before, a part of the English writer's career, and sometimes a whole career in itself. Translation was also fundamental in the evolution of the still unfixed English language and its still unfixed literary styles. Some translations of this period have themselves become landmarks in English literature and have exercised a profound and enduring influence on perceptions of their originals in the anglophone world; others less well-known are treated more comprehensively here than in any previous history. The entire phenomenon is documented in an extensive bibliography of literary translations of the period, the most comprehensive ever compiled. The work of our early modern translators, with all its energy, is not always scholarly or even always convincing. But after this era is over English translation never again feels quite so urgent or contentious.

Taking into consideration the political and literary issues hanging upon the circulation of Machiavelli's works in England, this volume highlights how topics and ideas stemming from Machiavelli's books - including but not limited to the Prince - strongly influenced the contemporary political debate. The first section discusses early reactions to Machiavelli's works, focusing on authors such as Reginald Pole and William Thomas, depicting their complex interaction with Machiavelli. In section two, different features of Machiavelli's reading in Tudor literary and political culture are discussed, moving well beyond the traditional image of the tyrant or of the evil Machiavel. Machiavelli's historiography and republicanism and their influences on Tudor culture are discussed with reference to topical authors such as Walter Raleigh, Alberico Gentili, Philip Sidney; his role in contemporary dramatic writing, especially as concerns Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, is taken into consideration. The last section explores Machiavelli's influence on English political culture in the seventeenth century, focusing on reason of state and political prudence, and discussing writers such as Henry Parker, Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Thomas Hobbes and Anthony Ascham. Overall, contributors put Machiavelli's image in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England into perspective, analyzing his role within courtly and prudential politics, and the importance of his ideological proposal in the tradition of republicanism and parliamentarianism.

This book argues that the term 'Romanticism' should be more culturally-inclusive, recognizing the importance of scientific and medical ideas that helped shape some of the key concepts of the period, such as natural rights, the creative imagination and the sublime. The book discusses a range of authors including Joanna Baillie, Edmund Burke, Erasmus Darwin, William Godwin, Joseph Priestly, Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft. Chapters look at these figures from a new perspective, using their journal articles, diaries, manuscript notebooks and poetry, as well as unpublished letters. Humphry Davy is given particular attention and his poetry and chemistry are explored as central to Romantic efforts in both poetry and science.

The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622 studies the conception of Persia in the literary, political and pedagogic writings of Renaissance England and Britain. It argues that writers of all kinds debated the means and merits of English empire through their intellectual engagement with the ancient Persian empire. It studies the reception of Xenophon's Cyropaedia and the Histories of Herodotus, the bedrock of English conceptions of Persia and the Persian empire, in plays, poetry and political thought. Covering the period from the beginnings of Anglo-Persian relations under the auspices of the Muscovy Company in the 1560s and 1570s to the first Anglo-Persian military alliance in 1622, it traces the changing conception and uses of Persia - both Islamic and ancient - in the English literary and political imaginary, and demonstrates the contemporary uses of an idealized image of Persia rooted in the classical legacy.

Eighteenth-century drama is often dismissed as homogenous, aesthetically uninteresting, or politically complacent. This book reveals the incredibly intriguing and intricate nature of the periods history plays and their often messy dramatisaton of the complexities of patriotic rhetoric and national identification.