The Critical Heritage series gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Critical Heritage series is available as a set of 67 volumes, as mini-sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) or as individual volumes.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

1 The "Critical Heritage" series gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The "Collected Critical Heritage" set is available as a set of 68 volumes, as mini-sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) or as individual volumes.

These volumes gather together a body of critical sources on the Jacobean dramatists. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects.

This series gathers together a body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The selected sources range from important essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation.

"Paradise Lost" is for many the greatest poem written in English. Composed late in the author's life, it deals with nothing less than the destiny of mankind.
This essential introductory guide:
- leads the reader into the epic poem through detailed analysis of key extracts, exploring Milton's original thought and style
- provides useful sections on 'Methods of Analysis' and 'Further Work' to aid independent study
- offers valuable information on Milton's life, times and literary legacy
- examines the development of critical opinion and discusses some recent critical views of the poem.
"John Milton: Paradise Lost" is ideal for anyone who is studying this complex and beautiful work for the first time. It will enable you to approach your own critical analysis of the poem with confidence.

Perception and analogy explores ways of seeing scientifically in the eighteenth century. The book examines how sensory experience is conceptualised during the period, drawing novel connections between treatments of perception as an embodied phenomenon and the creative methods employed by natural philosophers. Covering a wealth of literary, theological, and pedagogical texts that engage with astronomy, optics, ophthalmology, and the body, it argues for the significance of analogies for conceptualising and explaining new scientific ideas. As well as identifying their use in religious and topographical poetry, the book addresses how analogies are visible in material culture through objects such as orreries, camera obscuras, and aeolian harps. It makes the vital claim that scientific concepts become intertwined with Christian discourse through reinterpretations of origins and signs, the scope of the created universe, and the limits of embodied knowledge. -- .

Containing an urgently needed archival database of historical evidence, this volume includes both a consolidated presentation of the documentary records of black people in Tudor and Stuart England, and an interpretive narrative that confirms and significantly extends the insights of current theoretical excursus on race in early modern England. Here for the first time Imtiaz Habib collects the scattered references to black people-whether from Africa, India or America-in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and arranges them into a systematic, chronological descriptive index. He offers an extended historical and theoretical interpretation of the records in six chapters, which serve as an introductory guide to the index even as they articulate a specific argument about the meaning of the records. Both the archival information and interpretive scholarship provide a strong framework from which future historical debates on race in early modern England can proceed.

This book makes connections between selfhood, reading practice and moral judgment which propose fresh insights into Austen's narrative style and offer new ways of reading her work. It grounds her writing in the Enlightenment philosophy of selfhood, exploring how Austen takes five major components of selfhood theory-memory, imagination, probability, sympathy and reflection-and investigates their relation to self-formation and moral judgement. At the same time, Austen's narrative style breaks new ground in the representation of consciousness and engages directly with contemporary concerns about reading practice. Drawing analogies between reading text and reading character, the book argues that Austen's rendering of reading and rereading as both reflective and constitutive acts demonstrates their capacity to enable self-recognition and self-formation. It shows how Austen raises questions about the potential for different readings and, in so doing, challenges her readers to reflect on and reread their own interactions with her texts.

Ties in with #metoo movement so has very broad potential appeal Blends contemporary examples with Shakespearean texts so will appeal to students Written in a very accessible style so appropriate for courses Focuses on three of Shakespeare's most commonly studied texts so will slot easily into courses

This major work brings together, for the first time in a single volume, all the recognized sources of Marlowe's dramatic work. Many of the forty-two texts presented here are of outstanding interest in their own right. Together they illuminate the cultural milieu which fostered Marlowe's talent, and deepen our appreciation of his dramatic methods.
* Each of the texts is accessibly presented for the modern reader and is fully annotated.
* Works in Latin or foreign vernaculars are translated, many for the first time, and modern spelling and punctuation are used throughout.
* The sources for each play are examined individually and are thoroughly edited.
Few libraries provide the range of sources contained in this one volume. The editors include texts of works such as the English Faust-Book from which Marlowe borrowed heavily, and provide substantial extracts from other books with which he was no doubt familiar.
This book is an invaluable resource for all those interested in Marlowe and the development of Elizabethan theatre.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203379837

In a bold and brilliantly persuasive series of moves, Lorna Hutson draws upon new historicist and feminist theories to examine closely Renaissance literature and the cultural impact of the humanist project.
The Usurer's Daughter:
* provides startling new readings of Shakespeare
* takes an entirely new approach to classical scholarship
* focuses attention on the central importance of the history of the representation of women
* illuminates how social relations between men were textualised during the early modern period.


eBook available with sample pages: 0203215605

In this engaging and accessible guidebook, Stephen Guy-Bray uses queer theory to argue that in many of Shakespeare's works representation itself becomes queer. Shakespeare often uses representation, not just as a lens through which to tell a story, but as a textual tool in itself. Shakespeare and Queer Representation includes a thorough introduction that discusses how we can define queer representation, with each chapter developing these theories to examine works that span the entire career of Shakespeare, including his sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, King John, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. The book highlights the extent to which Shakespeare's works can be seen to anticipate, and even to extend, many of the insights of the latest developments in queer theory. This thought-provoking and evocative book is an essential guide for students studying Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, gender studies, and queer literary theory.

eBook available with sample pages: PB:0415077788

The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope has remained the standard edition for more than a generation. Offering the complete poems this work is the single most authoritative collection available. Set in a descriptive background of eighteenth-century life, the poetry is placed in its historical context, providing th reader not only with the masterpieces of one of England's most famous poets but also with an insight into eighteenth-century life. An exhaustive index allows easy access to the individual poems and people and places of the period, making this an essential source for anyone studying eighteenth-century literature or eighteenth-century studies.

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the most successful dramatists of the Restoration theatre and a popular poet. This is the second volume in a set of seven which comprises a complete edition of all her works.

During his lifetime, Benjamin Constant was known as a political theorist, a courageous defender of liberal causes and a notable historian of the religious experience of mankind. Through his journals, autobiographical works and correspondence--documents mostly unknown by his contemporaries--subsequent generations have discoverd in Constant a fascinating and highly complex personality. In recent decades, a number of private archives have become accessible to scholars for the first time, and this has brought to light important documents by and about Constant.
Drawing on these sources, many unpublished, Dennis Wood offers a fresh assessment of the writer and the man. He closely relates the development of Constant's political thought and passionate interest in the history of religion to his work as a novelist and self-analyst. "Benjamin Constant" draws together the considerable findings of modern scholarship, presenting a lively and sympathetic portrait of the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy' (Sir Isaiah Berlin).

To 'rematerialize' in the sense of Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage is not to recover a lost material infrastructure, as Marx spoke of, nor is it to restore to some material existence its priority over the imaginary. Indeed, this collection of work by some of the most highly-regarded critics in Shakespeare studies does not offer a single theoretical stance on any of the various forms of critical materialism (Marxism, cultural materialism, new historicism, transversal poetics, gender studies, or performance criticism), but rather demonstrates that the materiality of Shakespeare is multidimensional and consists of the imagination, the intended, and the desired. Nothing returns in this rematerialization, unless it is a return in the sense of the repressed, which, when it comes back, comes back as something else. An all-star line-up of contributors includes Kate McLuskie, Terence Hawkes, Catherine Belsey and Doug Bruster.

When it was first published, "Radical Tragedy" was hailed as a groundbreaking reassessment of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. An engaged reading of the past with compelling contemporary significance, "Radical Tragedy" remains a landmark study of Renaissance drama and a classic of cultural materialist criticism. The corrected and reissued third edition of this critically acclaimed work includes a candid new Preface by the author and features a Foreword by Terry Eagleton.

An examination of sixteenth-century quest narratives, focussing on their conscious use of a medieval tradition to hold a mirror up to contemporary culture. Offers the first full study of the allegorical knightly quest tradition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Richly satisfying, as impressive in the detail of its scholarship as in the elegance of its critical formulations. It seamlessly moves between different literary traditions and across conventional period boundaries. In Dr Nievergelt's treatment of this theme, the successive retellings of the tale of the knight's quest come to stand as an emblemof shifting values and norms, both religious and worldly; and of our repeated failures to realise those ideals. Dr Alex Davis, Department of English, University of St Andrews. The literary motif of the "allegorical knightly quest" appears repeatedly in the literature of the late medieval/early modern period, notably in Spenser, but has hitherto been little examined. Here, in his examination of a number of sixteenth-century English allegorical-chivalric quest narratives, focussing on Spenser's Faerie Queene but including important, lesser-known works such as Stephen Bateman's Travayled Pylgrime and William Goodyear's Voyage of the Wandering Knight,the author argues that the tradition begins with the French writer Guillaume de Deguileville. His seminal Pelerinage de la vie humaine was composed c.1331-1355; it was widely adapted, translated, rewritten and printed overthe next centuries. Dr Nievergelt goes on to demonstrate how this essentially "medieval" literary form could be adapted to articulate reflections on changing patterns of identity, society and religion during the early modern period; and how it becomes a vehicle of self-exploration and self-fashioning during a period of profound cultural crisis. Dr Marco Nievergelt is Lecturer (Maitre Assitant) and SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation) Research Fellow in the English Department at the Universite de Lausanne

Robert Burns's songs were, in their author's eyes, the crown to his achievement as a poet. After years of study and investigation, many hours spent listening to old airs, as he recalled the living, daily song-life of the people of Scotland, and through the creation of some of the finest lyric poetry of the British Isles, Burns's success is beyond doubt. Yet, until this volume, there has been no complete edition of his songs.
Donald Low, the leading expert on Burns's songs, brings together in chronological sequence, the words and tunes of all the known songs, providing a full critical introduction and detailed notes. An appendix by Peter Davidson discusses musical arrangements.
The book contains more than 300 songs and their music, from Burns's first known composition to the songs supplied for James Johnson's "Scots Musical Museum," and George Thompson's "Select Collection," to Burns's bawdy songs secretly published as "The Merry Muses of Caledonia,"
This comprehensive critical edition can only enhance Burns's reputation as a supreme lyric poet. It will be important reading for those interested in Robert Burns and his age, lovers of the traditional music of Scotland, and students of song, lyric, and early European Romanticism.

Favorite Sons explores Sir Philip Sidney's extraordinary poetic legacy, which is closely linked to the development of the early modern family in England, both by-products of new forms of affection and secrecy, both shaped equally by pride and projection. The reasons for such connections are writ small and large by the Sidney family of writers. If family history is driven by and experienced through the logic of culture, all families are poetic projects, too, as the work of Sidney, Robert Sidney, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Mary Wroth attests.

In this groundbreaking book one of the most original and compelling voices in contemporary Shakespeare criticism undertakes a detailed study of the ten extraordinary comedies Shakespeare wrote during his first decade as a dramatist: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night.
Through close readings of these plays Kiernan Ryan reveals Shakespeare's deepening disenchantment with his world and his dream of that world transfigured. Ryan engages with each comedy as a unique work of dramatic and poetic art, with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges, paying special attention to its language and form. As the haunting vision shared by the plays emerges from Ryan's acute analysis of each of them, the book transforms our understanding and appreciation of Shakespearean comedy.
Written in a lively, accessible style, Shakespeare's Comedies is essential reading not only for students and teachers, but also for anyone keen to consider these plays from a fresh perspective.

In this chronology Gordon Campbell brings his unique command of manuscripts associated with John Milton to the first synthesis of the Milton documents attempted in forty years. Many manuscripts that have been lost to view have been rediscovered, and some manuscripts that have never been seen by students of Milton are recorded here for the first time. These new discoveries, together with many unrecorded printed allusions that have never been integrated into biographical studies of Milton, make this chronology an essential research and reference tool that creates a new context for many of Milton's poems and prose writings.