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.

El Caballero de Olmedo is a history play, a retelling of a folk talk, a celebrated piece of Golden Age drama, and also an intense mediation upon the power of desire, the deceits of eroticism and literary convention, the injustice of a world obsessed with appearance, and the tragic potential inherent in the courting of beautiful women. The introduction sets this play within the context of Baroque eroticism and sexual mores as well as dramatic practice. The text is presented with glosses to words unfamiliar to undergraduate students; the notes comprise summaries of acts and scenes from a dramatic point of view, and in-depth notes to problematic passages in the text, written with an undergraduate readership in mind. -- .

Was Elizabeth I worshipped by her subjects? Many twentieth-century scholars have suggested that the Virgin Queen was a cult-figure who replaced the Virgin Mary. But how could this be in a Protestant state officially opposed to idolatry? Helen Hackett examines these issues through readings of a wide variety of Elizabethan texts. She traces some of the cross-currents in Elizabethan culture, and considers both Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary in terms of the history of representations of gender, sexuality and power.

A regiment of women warriors strides across the battlefield of German culture - on the stage, in the opera house, on the page, and in paintings and prints. These warriors are re-imaginings by men of figures such as the Amazons, the Valkyries, and the biblical killer Judith. They are transgressive and therefore frightening figures who leave their proper female sphere and have to be made safe by being killed, deflowered, or both. This has produced some compelling works of Western culture - Cranach's and Klimt's paintings of Judith, Schiller's Joan of Arc, Hebbel's Judith, Wagner's Brunnhilde, Fritz Lang's Brunhild. Nowadays, representations of the woman warrior are used as a way of thinking about the woman terrorist. Women writers only engage with these imaginings at the end of the 19th century, but from the late 18th century on they begin to imagine fictional cross-dressers going to war in a realistic setting and thus think the unthinkable. What are the roots of these imaginings? And how are they related to Freud's ideas about women's sexuality?

Gradually receiving legal rights from the eighteenth century onwards, Jews in Germany and Austria adapted to their surrounding culture with success but also with increasing strain as antisemitism gathered pace. Ritchie Robertson offers a cogent examination of this dual process and investigates how its tensions were articulated in a range of literary works, by both Jews and Gentile authors, from the Enlightenment to the 1930s.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

Thomas Holcroft was a central figure of the 1790s, whose texts played an important role in the transition toward Romanticism. In this, the first essay collection devoted to his life and work, the contributors reassess Holcroft's contributions to a remarkable range of literary genres-drama, poetry, fiction, autobiography, political philosophy-and to the project of revolutionary reform in the late eighteenth century. The self-educated son of a cobbler, Holcroft transformed himself into a popular playwright, influential reformist novelist, and controversial political radical. But his work is not important merely because he himself was a remarkable character, but rather because he was a hinge figure between laboring Britons and the dissenting intelligentsia, between Enlightenment traditions and developing 'Romantic' concerns, and between the world of self-made hack writers and that of established critics. Enhanced by an updated and corrected chronology of Holcroft's life and work, key images, and a full bibliography of published scholarship, this volume makes way for more concerted and focused scholarship and teaching on Holcroft. Taken together, the essays in this collection situate Holcroft's self-fashioning as a member of London's literati, his central role among the London radical reformers and intelligentsia, and his theatrical innovations within ongoing explorations of the late eighteenth-century public sphere of letters and debate.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

"Literature and Culture Handbooks" are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills. Written in clear language by leading academics, they provide an indispensable introduction to key topics, including: - Introduction to authors, texts, historical and cultural contexts - Guides to key critics, concepts and topics - An overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research - Case studies in reading literary and critical texts - Annotated bibliography (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms. "The Eighteenth-Century Literature Handbook" is an invaluable introduction to literature and culture in the eighteenth century. >

Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617 is the first book to consider railing plays and pamphlets as participating in a coherent literary movement that dominated much of the English literary landscape during the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. Author Prendergast considers how these crisis-ridden texts on religious, gender, and aesthetic controversies were encouraged and supported by the emergence of the professional theater and print pamphlets. She argues that railing texts by Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson, Jane Anger and others became sites for articulating anxious emotions-including fears about the stability of England after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the increasing factional splits between Protestant groups. But, given that railings about religious and political matters often led to censorship or even death, most railing writers chose to circumvent such possible repercussions by railing against unconventional gender identity, perverse sexual proclivities, and controversial aesthetics. In the process, Prendergast argues, railers shaped an anti-aesthetics that was itself dependent on the very expressions of perverse gender and sexuality that they discursively condemned, an aesthetics that created a conceptual third space in which bitter enemies-male or female, conformist or nonconformist-could bond by engaging in collaborative experiments with dialogical invective. By considering a literary mode of articulation that vehemently counters dominant literary discourse, this book changes the way that we look at late Elizabethan and early Jacobean literature, as it associates works that have been studied in isolation from each other with a larger, coherent literary movement.