"This ground-breaking collection of essays presents a new bookish literary history, which situates questions about books at the intersection of a range of debates about the role of authors and readers, the organization of knowledge, the vogue for collecting, and the impact of overlapping technologies of writing and shifting generic boundaries"--Provided by publisher.

German women writers of the 18th and 19th centuries have been the subject of feminist, literary, critical and historical studies for around 30 years. This volume takes stock of what feminist literary criticism has achieved in that time and reflects on future trends in the field.

"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 Shakespeare Handbook" is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare and early modern literature.

A comprehensive interpretation of one of Great Britain's most wide-ranging and prolific authors, this book examines Daniel Defoe's capacity to perceive fundamental historical change and long-term social process in light of his observations on liberty, property, trade, warfare, religion, and manners. It establishes Defoe as the crucial figure between the age of John Locke and the age of Smith and Hume in the evolution of eighteenth-century theories about commerce and conquest, religious toleration, and civil society.

This innovative and ground-breaking study explores the complex relationship between linguistic theory and literature during the Romantic period. Several topics in eighteenth-century linguistics are discussed, and the philological interests of figures such as William Godwin, Leigh Hunt, Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas De Quincey are considered. However, it is William Hazlitt's writings about natural language and linguistic theory that provide the central focus, and several crucial issues are considered. In particular, Hazlitt's ambivalent response to the philosophical grammar movement and to the linguistic theorising of John Horne Tooke is revealed in its true complexity, while his views concerning the 'familiar style' are provocatively reinterpreted in the context of the grammar textbook and belletristic rhetoric traditions. In addition, it is shown that Hazlitt's literary criticism was profoundly influenced by his understanding of linguistic theory, an aspect of his work that has been largely ignored in the past.

What happened to the medieval romance genre during and after the Protestant Reformation in England? Who read these works; who printed them; and what did they mean to the varied audiences encountering them? Through a cross-temporal study using book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, this book argues that the medieval romances printed across the early modern period provided a flexible space for post-Reformation readers to negotiate their relationships with the recent 'medieval' past, a past that was becoming, for some, increasingly distanced from the present. In exploring the complex entanglements of time and technology that accrue on the pages of the post-Reformation romance book, Difficult Pasts offers an interdisciplinary framework for better understanding the role of physical books and imaginative forms in grappling with a 'difficult' past. -- .

This book revises assumptions about satire as a public, masculine discourse derived from classical precedents, in order to develop theoretical and critical paradigms that accommodate women, popular culture, and postmodern theories of language as a potentially aggressive, injurious act. Although Habermas places satirists like Swift and Pope in the public sphere, this book investigates their participation in clandestine strategies of attack in a world understood to be harboring dangerous secrets. Authors of anonymous pamphlets as well as major figures including Behn, Dryden, Manley, Swift, and Pope, share at times what Swift called the writer's "life by stealth."

This volume contains five articles by prominent scholars of French literature and political philosophy that examine the relation between Montaigne's Essays, one of the classic works of the French philosophical and literary traditions, and the writings attributed by Montaigne to his friend, the French "humanist" Etienne de La Boetie. Three contributors to the volume suggest that Montaigne was the real author of the revolutionary tract On Voluntary Servitude, along with the other works he attributed to La Boetie. Two contributors describe the remarkable mathematical and/or mythological patterns found in both the Essays and the works ascribed to La Boetie. Several essays articulate the revolutionary political teaching found in the Essays as well as On Voluntary Servitude, challenging the conventional view of Montaigne as a political conservative. And all the contributors challenge the received view that he was an "artless" or "nonchalant" writer. The volume also includes new translations of both On Voluntary Servitude and the "29 Sonnets of Etienne de La Boetie" that Montaigne included in all editions of the Essays except the final one. An important work for students and scholars of political philosophy, Renaissance history, and French and comparative literature.

Cervantes' "Don Quixote" is the most widely read masterpiece in world literature, as appealing to readers today as four hundred years ago. In "Fighting Windmills" Manuel Duran and Fay R. Rogg offer a beautifully written excursion into Cervantes' great novel and trace its impact on writers and thinkers across centuries and continents.
How did Cervantes write such a rich tale? Duran and Rogg explore the details of Cervantes' life, the techniques with which he constructed the novel, and the central themes of the adventures of Don Quixote and his earthy squire Sancho Panza. The authors then provide an insightful, panoramic view of Cervantes' powerful influence on generations of writers as diverse as Descartes, Voltaire, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Twain, and Borges.

"This collection asks pressing questions about how and why we study performances of Renaissance drama, challenging prevailing views and suggesting new methodologies for the field. How does an emphasis on Shakespeare limit us? What can we learn from non-traditional theatre? Why should we rethink the value of studying what happens onstage?"--

Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay is the first extensive literary history of the eighteenth-century British periodical essay, and the first to examine the critical reception and canonizing of the genre in a transatlantic context. Drawing on a wide range of early Modern and Enlightenment essays, character writings and critical reviews, it argues that authors on both sides of the Atlantic came to regard the periodical essay as a literary means of transmitting moral-civic wisdom to posterity. As it traces the developments and changes in the genre across the century, this study devotes special attention to important but lesser-read mid-century London serials like the" World" and "Connoisseur," the "Edinburgh Mirror" and "Lounger," and Washington Irving's "Salmagundi." By recovering the conception of literary citizenship that grounds these serials' claims to the notice of posterity, "Urban Enlightenment" gives new insights into the historical character of the Enlightenment literary public sphere.

First published in English in 1965, this book discusses the roots and development of the dumb show as a device in Elizabethan drama. The work provides not only a useful manual for those who wish to check the occurrence of dumb shows and the uses to which they are put; it also makes a real contribution to a better understanding of the progress of Elizabethan drama, and sheds new light on some of the lesser known plays of the period.

Daniel Defoe was one of the most important and best-known writers of the eighteenth century but there is a feeling among scholars that the Defoe 'canon' is a remarkably strange and not very satisfactory construction. Between 1790, when the first bibliography of Defoe appeared, and 1971, when J.R. Moore published the second edition of his Checklist, the canon had swollen from just over a hundred items to 570. A large proportion of these attributions had been made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the basis of features of style, 'favourite phrases' and resemblance to Defoe's known views. This book is a list of all the items in Moore's Checklist (the current authority on the Defoe canon) that at present the authors consider questionable with in each case a note as to who was the first attributer, a brief synopsis and an explanation of the reasons for doubting the ascription.

'This is an important and illuminating collection, however, which could only have been assembled by a formidably learned scholar.' - N. Fruman, Choice From Coleridge's vast writings this book assembles excerpts from Coleridge's inquiries into the workings of consciousness and the soul; man's evolution and divergence from animals; the varieties of human weakness and evil and the creation of culture and belief join to suggest an underlying coherence in Coleridge's interdisciplinary thought. The editor has arranged material from an assortment of public and private writings, and has provided linking commentary to the texts and notes. This volume follows John Morrow's volume, the first in the series, On Politics and Society (1990).

"British Women Writers and the French Revolution" provides an overview of a wide range of British women's writings on the French Revolution, from writers sympathetic to the Revolution like Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, and Charlotte Smith, to anti-revolutionary writers like Hannah More and Jane West. Based on new research in French and British archives and libraries, the book uncovers little-known writings by British women, and argues that these writers developed a distinct antinationalism, in some cases even a feminist cosmopolitanism, in their responses to the European revolutionary crisis.

In Defiance of Time explores the emergence of antiquarianism in early modern England, from its first flourishing in the mid-Tudor period through to its seventeenth-century heyday. A vibrant antiquarian culture emerged, which reached beyond scholarly and historical circles, and had a profound influence on the literature and thought of the period. Examining the influences on that development of that culture, this book argues that the origins of English antiquarianism need to be found in the methods and practices of continental (and especially Italian) humanism. It shows that, like the humanists, the early antiquaries had the essentially imaginative aim of resurrecting and recomposing the past and past societies 'in defiance of time'. The antiquaries conceived of themselves and their activities as bridging the gap between past and present, affording 'olden time' presence in this way so that it might speak to and inform present circumstances. At the heart of this book is the argument that the antiquarian project depended on the antiquaries' capacity to restore-in their imagination at least-the fragments of the past, to imagine those remnants of history 'which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time' made whole once again. In Defiance of Time traces these arguments through a range of authors and material, both printed and in manuscript. Chapters advance original readings of important authors such as Leland, Stow, Spenser, Camden, Drayton, and Selden, as well as shedding light on institutions such as the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries and reviewing the wide range of activities, interests, and concerns that came under the antiquarian purview. Antiquarianism is thereby shown to be integral to early modern literary and intellectual culture.

This edition of "Eastward Ho!" is the most authoritative and reliable to date. It has a text more accurate than any other and an extensive introduction that examines the relationship between the three authors and the problem of their collaboration. R. W. Van Fossen takes a fresh look at the question of the printing of the first quarto, provides a full stage history, and, most important, presents a critical interpretation of the play that takes account of its historical, social and theatrical context.

This book examines fictional representations of India in novels, plays and poetry produced between the years 1772 to 1823 as historical source material. It uses literary texts as case studies to investigate how Britons residing both in the metropole and in India justified, confronted and imagined the colonial encounter during this period.

"Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture" examines an important moment in the long history of the medical use and abuse of the human body. In early modern Protestant England, the fragmented corpse was processed, circulated, and ingested as a valuable drug in a medical economy underpinned by a brutal judicial system. In a meticulous engagement with an extensive range of medical, religious, and literary texts, Louise Noble shows how early modern writers became obsessed with medicinal cannibalism and its uncanny link to the contested Eucharist sacrament. In the process, Noble points out startling continuities between early modern and contemporary medical consumptions of the body.

This study explores how poets who espoused republican political ideals sought to embody and advance those principles in their verse. By examining a range of canonical and non-canonical authors-including Blake, Shelley, Cooper, Linton, Landor, Meredith, Thomson and Swinburne, Kuduk Weiner connects the formal strategies of republican poems to the political theory and expressive cultures of republican radicalism. Her new study traces a strain of powerful, complex political poetry that casts new light on the political and literary history of nineteenth-century England.

'Sold, a legal prostitute' when married off at the age of fifteen, Charlotte Smith left her wastrel husband to support herself and their children as a poet and novelist who would have a lasting influence on William Wordsworth and Jane Austen. Combative and witty she became a radical, controversial and very popular author: at a time when the French Revolution was raising high hopes of Reform, she argued for change in England too. Loraine Fletcher's vivid scholarly biography is as readable for the newcomer to the 1790s as for the specialist, tracing the embattled life in the wonderfully self-dramatising fiction.

Despite the explosion of scholarship on Shakespeare in popular culture, too little attention has been paid to the Renaissance itself as an imagined historical period. "The English Renaissance in Popular Culture" considers popular culture's confrontations with the history, thought, and major figures of the English Renaissance. Analyzing "period films," appropriations, television productions, popular literature, pastimes such as Ren Faires, and even punk music, its contributors explore the rich ways in which popular culture seeks to engage the Renaissance. Ultimately, this important collection asks how such popular engagements impact the teaching and the cultural importance of English Renaissance literature and history.

This book is a study of As You Like It , which shows how the play represents issues of interest to literate playgoers of its time, as well as speculatively to Shakespeare himself.

This introductory guide to one of Marlowe's most widely-studied plays offers a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key performances and productions, a survey of screen adaptations, and a wide sampling of critical opinion and further reading.

John Lyly was undisputed master of the private theatre stage in the 1570s and 1580s. Lyly's "Endymion" (1588) represents his famous Euphuistic style at its best and also gives us vintage Lyly as courtier and dramatist. In this love comedy, Lyly retells an ancient legend of the prolonged sleep of the man with whom the moon (Cynthia) fell in love. The fable is piquantly relevant to Queen Elizabeth and her exasperated if adoring courtiers. This edition makes a new and compelling argument for the relevance of "Endymion" to the threat of the Spanish Armada invasion of 1588 and to the role of the Earl of Oxford in England's politics of that troubled decade. Full commentary is provided on every aspect of the play, including its philosophical allegory about the relation of the moon to mortal life on earth.