Vitalism is usually associated with Romantic theories of nature, but the supposition of a 'vital principle' or life-force recurred throughout eighteenth-century natural philosophy, to counter the inadequacy of mechanism to understand the operation of natural life. This book traces the persistent presence of a language of vital nature not only in eighteenth-century science, but in literary and philosophical writing too: in moral philosophy, theories of sensibility and political economy, and in the radical journalism and women's writing of the 1790s. It explores the influence of the Scottish vitalist physiology of Robert Whytt and others on writers and thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith, David Hume, Erasmus Darwin, John Hunter, John Thelwall and Mary Wollstonecraft. In doing so, it shows the centrality of vitalism to eighteenth-century accounts of the body, nature, matter and life, and offers a new way of understanding the relationship between eighteenth-century science and culture and that of the Romantic period.

In the eight volumes of this edition I.F. Clarke presents readers with selected primary texts in the genre now generally known as future fiction. He begins with the anonymous Tory utopia, The Reign of George VI, 1900-1925 (1763). Volume by volume he reveals the entrance of new themes: coming wars, better future worlds, the marvels of engineering, the imminent triumph of women, and the end of the world. In linking passages between the selected entries he notes the changes - social, political, technological, that keep pace with the rapid development of the genre; and, in particular he shows how the unprecedented advances and inventions of the 19th century provided ideas and reasons for projections of world states, vast flying machines, perfectly planned cities, and universal peace.

For this edition David Norbrook has provided an extensive introduction which gives an overview of developments in methodology and research since the first edition in 1984, responds to some criticisms, and points the way to further inquiry. Footnotes have been updated to take account of the current state of knowledge, and a chronological table has been provided for ease of reference. Norbrook brings out the range and adventurousness of early modern poets' engagements with the public world The first part of the book establishes the more radical currents of thought shaping Renaissance poetry: civic humanism and apocalyptic Protestantism. Norbrook then shows how such leading Elizabethan poets as Sidney and Spenser, often seen as conservative monarchists, responded powerfully though sometimes ambivalently to more radical ideas. A chapter on Fulke Greville shows how that ambivalence reaches an extreme in some remarkable poetry.

An intriguing case study on how popular images of Oceania, mediated through a developing culture of celebrity, contributed to the formation of British identity both domestically and as a nascent imperial power in the eighteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century metropolitan Britain was entranced by stories emanating from the furthest edge of its nascent empire. In the experience of eighteenth-century Britain, Oceania was both a real place, evidencedby the journals of adventurers like Joseph Banks, the voyage books of Captain James Cook and the growing collection of artefacts and curiosities in the British Museum, and a realm of fantasy reflected in theatre, fashion and the new phenomenon of mass print. In this innovative study Ruth Scobie shows how these multiple images of Oceania were filtered to a wider British public through the gradual emergence of a new idea of fame - commodified, commercial, scandalous - which bore in some respects a striking resemblance to modern celebrity culture and which made figures such as Banks and Cook, Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers on Pitcairn Island into public icons. Bringing together literary texts, works of popular culture, visual art and theatrical performance, Scobie argues that the idea of Oceania functioned variously as reflection, ideal and parody both in very local debates over the problemsof contemporary fame and in wider considerations of national identity, race and empire. RUTH SCOBIE is a Stipendiary Lecturer at Mansfield College, University of Oxford.

This book examines the relationship between Romantic-period writing and the activity that Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened 'mountaineering' in 1802. It argues that mountaineering developed as a pursuit in Britain during the Romantic era, earlier than is generally recognised, and shows how writers including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Walter Scott were central to the activity's evolution. It explores how the desire for physical ascent shaped Romantic-period literary culture and investigates how the figure of the mountaineer became crucial to creative identities and literary outputs. Illustrated with 25 images from the period, the book shows how mountaineering in Britain had its origins in scientific research, antiquarian travel, and the search for the picturesque and the sublime. It considers how writers engaged with mountaineering's power dynamics and investigates issues including the politics of the summit view (what Wordsworth terms 'visual sovereignty'), the relationships between different types of 'mountaineers', and the role of women in the developing cultures of ascent. Placing the work of canonical writers alongside a wide range of other types of mountaineering literature, this book reassesses key Romantic-period terms and ideas, such as vision, insight, elevation, revelation, transcendence, and the sublime. It opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between Romantic-period writers and the world that they experienced through their feet and hands, as well as their eyes, as they moved through the challenging landscapes of the British mountains.

Writing and Society is a stunning exploration of the relationship between the growth in popular literacy and the development of new readerships and the authors addressing them. It is the first single volume to provide a year-by-year chronology of political events in relation to cultural production.
This overview of debates in literary critical theory and historiography includes facsimile pages with commentary from the most influential books of the period. The author describes and analyses:
* the development of literacy by status, gender and region in Britain
* structures of patronage and censorship
* the fundamental role of the publishing industry
* the relation between elite literary and popular cultures
* and the remarkable growth of female literacy and publication.

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A brochure listing each title in the "International Library of Psychology" series is available upon request.

This book is about two very different kinds of company. On the one hand it concerns Shakespeare's poet-playwright contemporaries, such as Marlowe, Jonson, and Fletcher. On the other, it examines the contribution of his fellow actors, including Burbage, Armin, and Kemp. Traditionally, criticism has treated these two influences in separation, so that Shakespeare is considered either in relation to educated Renaissance culture, or as a man of the theatre. Shakespeare in Company unites these perspectives. Bart van Es argues that Shakespeare's decision, in 1594, to become an investor (or 'sharer') in the newly formed Chamberlain's acting company had a transformative effect on his writing, moving him beyond the conventions of Renaissance dramaturgy. On the basis of the physical distinctiveness of his actors, Shakespeare developed 'relational drama', something no previous dramatist had explored. This book traces the evolution of that innovation, showing how Shakespeare responded to changes in the personnel of his acting fellowship and to competing drama, such as that produced for the children's companies after 1599. Covering over two decades of theatrical history, van Es explores the playwright's career through four distinct phases, ending on the conditions that shaped Shakespeare's late style. Paradoxically, Shakespeare emerges as a playwright unique 'in company'--special, in part, because of the unparalleled working conditions that he enjoyed.

Washington Irving remains one of the most recognized American authors of the nineteenth century, remembered for short stories like Rip van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He also accomplished other writing feats, including penning George Washington's biography and other life stories. Throughout his life, Irving was at odds with socially-approved ways of "being a man." Irving purportedly saw himself and was seen by others as feminine, shy, and non-confrontational. Likely related to this, he chose to engage with other men's fortunes and adventures by writing, defining his male identity vicariously, through masculine archetypes both fictional and non-fictional. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies and masculinity studies, this reading reconstructs Irving's life-long struggle to somehow win a place among other men. Readers will recognize masculine themes in his tales from the Spanish period, his western adventures, as well as in historical biographies of Columbus, Mahomet, and Washington. In many writings by Irving, especially The Legend of Sleepy Hallow, readers will observe themes dominated by masculinity. The book is the first of its kind to encompass and examine Irving's writings.

This book explores shifting representations and receptions of the arms-bearing woman on the British stage during a period in which she comes to stand in Britain as a striking symbol of revolutionary chaos. The book makes a case for viewing the British Romantic theatre as an arena in which the significance of the armed woman is constantly remodelled and reappropriated to fulfil diverse ideological functions. Used to challenge as well as to enforce established notions of sex and gender difference, she is fashioned also as an allegorical tool, serving both to condemn and to champion political and social rebellion at home and abroad. Magnifying heroines who appear on stage wielding pistols, brandishing daggers, thrusting swords, and even firing explosives, the study spotlights the intricate and often surprising ways in which the stage amazon interacts with Anglo-French, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-German, and Anglo-Spanish debates at varying moments across the French revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. At the same time, it foregrounds the extent to which new dramatic genres imported from Europe -notably, the German Sturm und Drang and the French-derived melodrama- facilitate possibilities at the turn of the nineteenth century for a refashioned female warrior, whose degree of agency, destructiveness, and heroism surpasses that of her tragic and sentimental predecessors.

Writing and Society is a stunning exploration of the relationship between the growth in popular literacy and the development of new readerships and the authors addressing them. It is the first single volume to provide a year-by-year chronology of political events in relation to cultural production.
This overview of debates in literary critical theory and historiography includes facsimile pages with commentary from the most influential books of the period. The author describes and analyses:
* the development of literacy by status, gender and region in Britain
* structures of patronage and censorship
* the fundamental role of the publishing industry
* the relation between elite literary and popular cultures
* the remarkable growth of female literacy and publication.

Shakespeare and the Young Writer presents fascinating and impressive accounts of primary school children encountering Shakespeare's work for the first time.
Fred Sedgwick shows how careful selection of scenes, lines and images from the plays and sonnets - in their original language - can be used to great effect as the starting point for children's writing. Examples of children's work show just how powerful the stimulus can be. The book will be of great value to all teachers looking for new ideas to improve their practice in teaching literacy.

Revels stuff. . . .|This Edition of George Chapman's tragedy differs from all other modern editions in being primarily based on the Quarto of 1607 in preference to the much revised Quarto of 1641. N. S. Brooke believes that the earlier text gives a more certain indication of Chapman's intentions and he has supported this view in an introduction and by a bibliographical and critical study of the play. The divergence between the texts of 1607 and 1641 are set out clearly in this volume, which includes the usual textual and critical apparatus found in the Revels series. -- .

With its fantasy of magical travel and inexhaustible riches, Thomas Dekker's Old Fortunatus is the quintessential early modern journeying play. The adventures of Fortunatus and his sons, aided by a magical purse and wishing-hat, offers the period's most overt celebration of the pleasures of travel, as well as a sustained critique of the dangers of intemperance and prodigality. Written following a period of financial difficulty for Dekker, the play is also notable for its fascination with the symbolic, mercantile and ethical uses of gold. This Revels Plays edition is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Old Fortunatus. It offers scholarly discussion of the play's performance and textual history, including attention to the German version printed and performed in the early seventeenth century. It provides a long overdue critical reappraisal of this unjustly neglected play. -- .

Dante, the pilgrim, is the image of an author who stubbornly looks ahead, seeking and building the "Great Beyond" (Manguel). Following in his footsteps is therefore not a return to the past, going a rebours, but a commitment to the future, to exploring the potential of humanity to "transhumanise". This dynamic of self-transcendence in Dante's humanism (Ossola), which claims for European civilisation a vocation for universalism (Ferroni), is analysed in the volume at three crucial moments: Firstly, the establishment of an emancipatory relationship between author and reader (Ascoli), in which authorship is authority and not power; secondly, the conception of vision as a learning process and horizon of eschatological overcoming (Mendonca); finally, the relationship with the past, which is never purely monumental, but ethically and intertextually dynamic, in an original rewriting of the original scriptural, medieval, and classical culture (Nasti, Bolzoni, Bartolomei). A second group of contributions is dedicated to the reconstruction of Dante's presence in Portuguese literature (Almeida, Espirito Santo, Figueiredo, Marnoto, Vaz de Carvalho): they attest to the innovative impact of Dante's work even in literary traditions more distant from it.

This three-volume set brings together all that Samuel Richardson himself published on the composition, printing and interpretation of "Clarissa". The various short works reveal Richardson's reactions to the concerns and issues raised by contemporary readers.

John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination reassesses Thelwall's eclectic body of work from the perspective of his heterodox materialist arguments about the imagination, political reform, and the principle of life itself, and his contributions to Romantic-era science.

The volume explores Elizabeth I's impact on English and European culture during her life and after her death, through her own writing as well as through contemporary and later writers. The contributors are codicologists, historians and literary critics, offering a varied reading of the Queen and of her cultural inheritance.

This book focuses on the different forms in which authorship came to be expressed in eighteenth-century Italian publishing. It analyses both the affirmation of the "author function", and, above all, its paradoxical opposite: the use of anonymity, a centuries-old practice present everywhere in Europe but often neglected by scholarship. The reasons why authors chose to publish their works anonymously were manifold, including prudence, fear of censorship, modesty, fear of personal criticism, or simple divertissement. In many cases, it was an ethical choice, especially for ecclesiastics. The Italian case provides a key perspective on the study of anonymity in the European context, contributing to the analysis of an overlooked topic in academic studies.

Henry Fielding (1707-54) began his writing career as a playwright and before the age of 30 produced a great number of comedies, farces and burlesques. His wit was already apparent, and his admirers included Swift who particularly enjoyed his "Tom Thumb". His "Pasquin, A Dramatick Satire on the Times" was in part responsible for the ensuing restrictive censorship of plays with the Licensing Act of 1737. Fielding practised at law, wrote essays and poems, ran a few journals - but remains most famous for his novels. He began "Joseph Andrews" as a parody of the sentimentalism of Richardson's "Pamela", and quickly developed his humourous and satirical style in "Tom Jones", "Jonathan Wild" and "Amelia". Admired by writers and readers alike, Fielding is one of the true founders of the English novel whose influence can be traced into the 19th century and the works of Dickens and Thackeray. This boxed collection of ten volumes includes all his work and a biographical essay.

This book explores the work of Cervantes in relation to the ideas about the mind that circulated in early modern Europe and were propelled by thinkers such as Juan Luis Vives, Juan Huarte de San Juan, Oliva Sabuco, Andres Laguna, Andres Velasquez, Marsilio Ficino, and Gomez Pereira. The editors bring together humanists and scientists: literary scholars and doctors whose interdisciplinary research integrates diverse types of sources (philosophical and medical treatises, natural histories, rhetoric manuals, pharmacopoeias, etc.) alongside Cervantes's works to examine themes and areas including emotion, human development, animal vs. human consciousness, pathologies of the mind, and mind-altering substances. Their chapters trace the cognitive themes and points of inquiry that Cervantes shares with other early modern thinkers, showing how he both echoes and contributes to early modern views of the mind.

This study explores why women in the English Renaissance wrote so few sonnet sequences, in comparison with the traditions of Continental women writers and of English male authors. In this focus on a single genre, Rosalind Smith examines the relationship between gender and genre in the early modern period, and the critical assumptions currently underpinning questions of feminine agency within genre.

What did it mean to be happy in early modern Europe? Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture includes essays that reframe historical understandings of emotional life in the Renaissance, focusing on under-studied feelings such as mirth, solidarity, and tranquillity. Methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary, these essays draw from the history of emotions, affect theory and the contemporary social and cognitive sciences to reveal rich and sustained cultural attention in the early modern period to these positive feelings. The book also highlights culturally distinct negotiations of the problematic binary between what constitutes positive and negative emotions. A comprehensive introduction and afterword open multiple paths for research into the histories of good feeling and their significances for understanding present constructions of happiness and wellbeing. -- .

This scholarly study presents a new political Wordsworth: an artist interested in "autonomous" poetry's redistribution of affect. No slave of Whig ideology, Wordsworth explores emotion for its generation of human experience and meaning. He renders poetry a critical instrument that, through acute feeling, can evaluate public and private life.

Unediting the Renaissance is a path-breaking and timely look at the issues of the textual editing of Renaissance works. Both erudite and accessible, it will be a fascinating and provocative read for any Renaissance student or scholar.
Marcus focuses on key Renaissance works - Dr Faustus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet and poems by Milton, Donne and Herrick - to re-exmaine how editorial intervention shapes the texts which are widely accepted as `definitive'.
A lively critique of current theoretical practices, Unediting the Renaissance will shift the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries are edited and read.