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.

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.
Volume 1 of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English originates with what medievalists have long known, that virtually everything written in the Middle Ages in English can be regarded, one way or another, as a translation, and that medieval understandings of what constitutes literature were significantly more generous than many modern ones. It uses modern as well as medieval understandings of translation to inform its discussions (the two understandings have a great deal in common), and it aims to situate medieval translation in English as fully as possible in its various cultural contexts: this includes, in particular, the complicated inter-relations of translation throughout the period into Latin, and (for the Middle English period) of translation in French. Since it also understands the Middle Ages of its title as including the first half of the sixteenth century, it studies what has survived of nearly athousand years of translation activity in England.

A sensitive investigation into how French writers, including Descartes and Racine, treated a central preoccupation in early modern writings. Idolatry was one of the dominant and most contentious themes of early modern religious polemics. This book argues that many of the best-known literary and philosophical works of the French seventeenth century were deeply engaged and concerned with the theme. In a series of case studies and close readings, it shows that authors used the logic of idolatry to interrogate the fractured and fragile relationship between the divine and the human, with particular attention to the increasingly fraught question of the legitimacy of human agency. Reading d'Urfe, Descartes, La Fontaine, Sevigne, Moliere, and Racine through the lens of idolatry reveals heretofore hidden aspects of their work, all while demonstrating the link between the emergent autonomy of literature and philosophy and the confessional conflicts that dominated the period. In so doing, Professor McClure illustrates how religion can become a source of interpretive complexity, and how this dynamism can and should be taken into account in early modern French studies and beyond.

How do we perceive evil? How do we represent evil? In Transgression and the Aesthetics of Evil, Taran Kang examines the entanglements of aesthetics and morality. Investigating conceptions and images of evil, Kang identifies a fateful moment of transformation in the eighteenth century that continues to reverberate to the present day. Transgression, once allocated the central place in the constitution of evil, undergoes a startling revaluation in the Enlightenment and its aftermath, one that needs to be understood in relation to emergent ideas in the arts. Taran Kang engages with the writings of Edmund Burke, the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hannah Arendt, among others, as he questions recent calls to "de-aestheticize" evil and insists on a historically informed appreciation of evil's aesthetic dimensions. Chapters consider the figure of the "evil genius," the paradoxical appeal of the grotesque and the disgusting, and the moral status of spectators who behold scenes of suffering and acts of transgression. In grappling with these issues, Transgression and the Aesthetics of Evil questions the feasibility and desirability of insulating the moral from the aesthetic.

This book proposes the poetic link between Donne and Crashaw during the English Reformation. In the first half of this work, Donne's Songs and Sonets, Verse Letters, religious works and Anniversaries are discussed as they reflect increasingly covert reverence for a holy mother figure. In the second half, Crashaw's juvenile poems and epigrams, verse in honour of the Virgin and Child, and mature contemplative verse are seen to express mystical homage to Mary and growing admiration for feminine powers of faith.

An in-depth study of early modern women's modesty rhetoric from the English Reformation to the Restoration. This book provides new readings of modesty's gendered deployment in the works of Anne Askew, Katharine Parr, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet.

British Women's Life Writing, 1760-1840 brings together for the first time a wide range of print and manuscript sources to demonstrate women's innovative approach to self-representation. It examines canonical writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, amongst others.

"The Culture of the Gift in ""Eighteenth-Century England" analyzes the long overlooked role of gift exchange in literary texts and cultural documents and provides innovative readings of how gift transactions shaped the institutions and practices that gave this era its distinctive identity.

This, the first full analysis of Arbuthnot's Art of Political Lying (1712), argues that the work is a commentary on long-standing themes of debate in science, rhetoric and philosophy and should be seen as a seminal satire standing in opposition to the practice of Swift and Pope. Rather than simply condemning dishonesty, Arbuthnot raises serious questions about the elusive nature of truth in politics. The argument thus traverses literary analysis, intellectual history and philosophy. An original version of the Art of Political Lying , based on English and French editions is supplied in the appendix.

The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.

Aphra Behn, Susannah Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald were the only four women in England who enjoyed career-long success as comicplaywrights from 1670-1800. Their respective approaches to the body, contracts, nationalism, and divorce animate their comedies and provide comic comment on the marriage plot. By attending to the dialogue between humorous comic events and the more predictable comic endings of these plays, Anderson illuminates the philosophical, political, and legal arguments about women and marriage that fascinated both female playwrights and the theatergoing public.

Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660-1727 shows how early women novelists drew on debates about the self generated by the 'scientific' revolution to establish the novel as a genre and literary omniscience as a point of view. These writers such as Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Mary Davys used, tested, explored, accepted, and rejected ideas about the self in their works to represent the act of knowing and what it means to be a knowing self. Karen Bloom Gevirtz agues that as they did so, they developed structures for representing authoritative knowing that contributed to the development of the novel as a genre, and to literary omniscience as a point of view.

This Jacobean tragic-comedy by Philip Massinger explores the cultural conflict between Christian Europe and Muslim North Africa experienced when the two began to travel and trade in the early modern period. The play is peopled with merchants and pirates and the somewhat convoluted plot involves conversions between both faiths, disguise, kidnap and clandestine marriage.

The play is one of many of the period exploring the tantalizing and sometimes threatening "other" world of other religions and cultures and as such is studied alongside more familiar plays such as "Othello" and "The Merchant of Venice." Michael Neill explores the themes as well as the pure theatrical joy of this fast-paced play, putting it in its historical context as well as discussing how it resonates with modern audiences and readers today.

This book examines the relationship between religion and the state in a comparative perspective with special attention paid to the Western and Middle-Eastern experiences. It examines the resurgence of "fundamentalism" not only in developing nations but also in economically affluent "post-modern" societies. It seeks to elucidate whether the fusion between religion and politics is compatible with tolerance and individual freedom; or whether the Jeffersonian "wall of separation" is necessary to insure the flowering of democracy.

From the 16th to the 18th Century, hermaphrodites were discussed and depicted in a range of artistic, mythological, scientific, and erotic contexts. Early Modern Hermaphrodites looks at some of those representations to explore the stories they tell about ambiguous sex and gender in early modern England. Gilbert examines the often contradictory ways in which hermaphrodites were represented as both spiritual ideals and sexual grotesques; as freaks, erotic objects, and medical curiosities; and as literary metaphors and signs of social decay.

An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction deals with fiction of the "long 18th century", using a clearly defined pool of texts and corpus of writers. The first part of the study discusses the broader issues of definitions and approaches, genre and gender, and canon formation; the second part, after a more general discussion of Richardson and Fielding, offers a series of five paired readings, juxtaposing texts by Behn and Defoe, Sterne and Smollett, Lennox and Burney, Radcliffe and Godwin and Austen.

This collection explores the concept of civility in the early modern period. It addresses a range of writings in English and Scottish--among them, conduct manuals, colonial tracts, diaries, letters, dialogues, poetry, drama, chronicles--by English, Welsh and Scots men and women in and about the Atlantic archipelago. It explores the many meanings of civility in the early modern period; it recovers some of the lost associations of civility as well as the complex use of the adjectives "civil" and "barbarous" in cultural and colonial encounters.

This text analyzes how writing over the period of a century justified and was affected by the introduction and extension of British domination of India, demonstrating the link between written representations and the ideological, economic and political climate, and debates. By showing how the representations of Britons in India, Indian religion and Indian society and government evolved over the period 1740 to 1840, the book fills the gap between the early colonial "exotic East" and the later "primitive subject nation" perceptions.

Work on Ben Jonson has long been dominated by the 11-volume Oxford text of his Works , edited by C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson (1925-52). In this monumental edition, Jonson seems a remote and forbidding figure, an author of formidable learning and literariness. This collection of essays by twelve leading scholars, editors, historians and bibliographers explores ways in which modern understanding of Jonson's texts has undermined the emphasis of the Oxford edition, and generated a Jonson whose Works and career look quite different. Addressing the competing needs of future readers, teachers and performers, it asks how this reconceptualized Jonson might best be transmitted into the next century. The volume also includes a new Jonson text, The Entertainment at Britain's Burse , written in 1609 to celebrate the royal opening of the Earl of Salisbury's commercial development in the Strand. Discovered in 1996, it is the most significant addition to Jonson's canon this century, and is here printed for the first time.

This new volume of essays examines the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality. Why did so many literary Modernists embrace Catholicism? What is their relationship between historical homophobia and contemporary struggles between the Church and the homosexual? Moving from the Gothic to the late Twentieth-century, from Britain to America and France, "Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives" interrogates what is queer about Catholicism and what is modern about homosexuality. The result is a radical revision of the sacred - in life and art, the body and devotion.

A poet of the seventeenth century, Milton with his future gaze may prove to be (singularly among the triumvirate of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton) the poet "for" the new millennium--the poet "for" the twenty-first century. Milton will be so to the extent that through him we see the upheavals in the humanities as deriving not from a revision of the canon but rather, as Bill Readings insists in "The University in Ruins, " from "a crisis in the "function" of the canon" and, then, to the extent that Milton shocks us into the recognition that poets sometimes deliver messages at odds with those with which they are credited.

This book explores the changing representation on the early modern stage of the built environment of London. It covers a period in which the city underwent rapid growth to become the country's first metropolis, and it examines how the urban environment becomes part of the frame of reference of the drama that is set there.

Richard Hooker (1554-1600) is often credited with being the founding father of Anglican moral theology. This book is the first major study to examine in depth the extent to which this claim is justified, and to evaluate the nature of Hooker's contribution to this aspect of Anglican tradition. The study roots Hooker firmly within his own historical context and considers his text principally on its own terms; thus it avoids many of the problems that have bedevilled modern Hooker scholarship, particularly where attempts have been made to 'claim' him for one particular theological tradition over another, or to approach his work primarily with an eye to its continued relevance to contemporary debate within Anglicanism, both of which can lead to significant distortions in the way in which Hooker is read and interpreted. What emerges amounts to a significant re-evaluation of much of the conventional wisdom about Hooker's place within Anglicanism, as well as a range of original insights into the nature, content, and style of his work and its wider significance.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

Misogyny and its opposite, philogyny, have been perennial topics in Western literature from its earliest days to the present day, but only at certain historic periods have pro-woman authors challenged fundamental negative assumptions about women by engaging in formal debate with misogynists and juxtaposing these two attitudes toward women in pairs or series of texts devoted exclusively to discussing womankind. This dialectic of attack on and defence of the female sex, known as the querelle des femmes (debate about women), was especially popular among authors and readers during the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries in England. At least 36 texts exclusively devoted to attacking and/or defending women were published in the hundred years between 1540 and 1640. The works included in these two volumes exemplify the content and the methods of debate in England during those two centuries. Volume one includes texts from 1521 through to 1615.