Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare's original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear, the question of what comprises 'the play' is both complex and fragmentary. These issues of identity and authenticity across time and across mediums are outlined, debated, and considered critically by the contributors to this volume. Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essays offer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear. This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive anthology of textual scholarship, performance research, and critical writing on one of Shakespeare's most important and perplexing tragedies. Contributors Include: R.A. Foakes, Richard Knowles, Tom Clayton, Cynthia Clegg, Edward L. Rocklin, Christy Desmet, Paul Cantor, Robert V. Young, Stanley Stewart and Jean R. Brink

Usury is entrenched in the twenty-first century world. Recently, however, public opinion has been shifting back to the strongly hostile view of usury held by humanity for millennia before the rise of capitalism. This book examines the ways in which usury was perceived and portrayed at the very beginning of its rise to power. David Hawkes examines early modern English depictions of usury in a wide variety of literary media: plays, pamphlets, poems, political economy, and parliamentary debates. It suggests that knowledge of such portrayals may help us settle accounts with the vastly expanded form taken by usury in our own time.

Concentrating on the period 1660-1781, this book explores how the English literary past was made. It charts how antiquarians unearthed the raw materials of the English (or more widely) British tradition; how scholars drafted narratives about the development of native literature; and how critics assigned the leading writers to canons of literary greatness. The author claims that the opening up and ordering of the English literary past occurs earlier than is generally supposed.

Salvaging Spenser is a major new work of literary revision which places Edmund Spenser's corpus, from The Shepheardes Calender to A View of the Present State of Ireland, within an elaborate cultural and political context. The author refuses to engage in the sterile opposition between apology and attack that has marred studies of Spenser and Ireland, seeking neither to savage nor to save, but rather, in a project of critical recovery, to salvage Spenser from the wreckage of Irish history.

Once celebrated as "the English Sappho," Mary Robinson was a major figure in British Romanticism. This volume offers a comprehensive study of Robinson's achievement as a poet, professional writer, formative influence on the Romantic movement, and a participant in the literary, political, and social scene of the late 1700s.

The British Romantic poets were among the first to realize the centrality of the "Divine Comedy" for the evolution of the European epic. This study explores the significance of Dante for Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and William Blake. What was their idea of Dante? Why did they feel the need to approach his Christian epic on the afterlife? This study aims to answer these questions by focusing on the three poets' preoccupation with form and language.

Montaigne is one of the most cross-cultural writers ever - both in the assimilation of writings from other cultures into his own work and in the subsequent translations, critical receptions, and creative adaptations of the Essais by other writers throughout the world for the last four hundred years. His work is generally considered as exemplary of the European Renaissance, yet also demonstrates a remarkable relevance to the literary and intellectual activity at the present time. However, whereas there has been an abundance of commentary on Montaigne during the first centuries after his death, much less attention has been paid to his impact on writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly those outside France. This study redresses the imbalance. By establishing a stylistic and ideological relationship between Montaigne's work and that of such writers as Emerson, Nietzsche, Pater, Woolf, and Sollers, we not only gain a greater appreciation of the richness of the Essays, but also of some of the roots of modernist and postmodernist writing.

The eponymous alchemist of Ben Jonson's quick-fire comedy is a fraud: he cannot make gold, but he does make brilliant theatre. "The Alchemist "is a masterpiece of wit and form about the self-delusions of greed and the theatricality of deception. This guide will be useful to a diverse assembly of students and scholars, offering fresh new ways into this challenging and fascinating play.

The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821) are rare and fragile documents which present a unique view of Romantic-era Britain. An energetic woman, Inchbald achieved fame as an actress, novelist, playwright and critic. Her career introduced her to a wide group of people and she counted William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble among her friends. Published here for the first time, her eleven surviving diaries are a fascinating vignette of everyday life in the theatrical and literary circles of eighteenth-century London. They record Inchbald's reading habits, social contacts and professional activities, itemize her day-to-day expenditure, and chart the development of current affairs such as the Napoleonic Wars and the trial of Queen Caroline. The diaries are fully transcribed, but a sense of the original documents is preserved through selected photographic reproductions, and descriptions of the physical notebooks. The editorial apparatus also contextualises the diaries and provides biographical details for Inchbald and the other figures she encountered. Full editorial apparatus includes a substantial general introduction, a chronology of Inchbald's life, brief introductions to each diary, bibliographical guides to figures mentioned, and textual notes. There is a consolidated index in the final volume.

This set provides a detailed and intimate account of the Elizabethan and Jacobean World picture. The volumes vividly convey life as it was in the days of Shakespeare; King James; the first voyage to the West Indies; the Great Plague of 1603; the Gunpowder Plot; the Civil War, and the first impact of Galileo's discoveries. In compiling these volumes, G.B. Harrison undertook a massive trawl of original sources of British social and political history of the period. Each journal contains a chronology of key events of the period, unfolding as they would for contemporaries. This rare panorama of one of England's most colourful periods in history provides an essential background for enlightened reading of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, offering as it does, crucial insights into influences affecting the literature and attitudes of the time.

Shakespeare had extraordinary intelligence, unheard-of powers of observation and interpretation, a soaring imagination, a way with words that defies description, and a defining interest in the theater. He brought kings, queens, heroes, and peasantry to the stage so they could be seen in a more realistic fashion. Even so, in modern times, assistance is often needed to interpret Shakespeare's work.

In "A Leg Up on the Canon," author Jim McGahern provides an extensive biography of Shakespeare and offers an introductory guide to his histories, comedies, tragedies, romances, and poems. McGahern presents summaries of the texts, explanations of difficult passages, extensive historical context, and glossaries of terms no longer in use. In each volume, he outlines the plot of plays in that category and then delivers a one-act play with inclusive commentary. McGahern includes pertinent remarks and important speeches and soliloquies interlaced with brief explanations and descriptions of the actions on stage as well as plot developments.

"A Leg Up on the Canon," a four-volume series, provides insights into the word music of the talented man from Stratford.

A constellation of new essays on authorship, politics and history, British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History presents the latest thinking about the debates raised by scholarship on gender and women's writing in the long eighteenth century. The essays highlight the ways in which women writers were key to the creation of the worlds of politics and letters in the period, reading the possibilities and limits of their engagement in those worlds as more complex and nuanced than earlier paradigms would suggest. Contributors include Norma Clarke, Janet Todd, Brian Southam , Harriet Guest, Isobel Grundy and Felicity Nussbaum. Published in association with the Chawton House Library, Hampshire - for more information, visit http://www.chawton.org/

Dangerous Enthusiasm considers Blake's prophetic books written during the 1790s in the light of the French Revolution controversy raging at the time; his works are shown to be less the expressions of isolated genius than the products of a complex response to the cultural politics of his contemporaries. William Blake's work presents a stern challenge to historical criticism. Jon Mee's new study meets the challenge by investigating contexts outside the domains of standard literary histories. He traces the distinctive rhetoric of the illuminated books to the French Revolution controversy of the 1790s and Blake's fusion of the diverse currents of radicalism abroad in that decade. The study is supported by a wealth of original research which will be of interest to historians and literary critics alike. Blake emerges from these pages as a 'bricoleur' who fused the language of London's popular dissenting culture with the more sceptical radicalism of the Enlightenment. Dangerous Enthusiasm presents a more comprehensively politicized picture of Blake than any previous study.

The principal text translated in this volume is the "Ta'r?kh Al-s?d?n" of the seventeenth-century Timbuktu scholar 'Abd al-Ra?m?n al-Sa'd?. Thirty chapters are included, dealing with the history of Timbuktu and Jenne, their scholars, and the political history of the Songhay empire from the reign of Sunni 'Al? (1464-1492) through Moroccan conquest of Songhay in 1591 and down to the year 1613 when the Pashalik of Timbuktu became an autonomous ruling institution in the Middle Niger region. The year 1613 also marked the effective end of Songhay resistance. The other contemporary documents included are a new English translation of Leo Africanus's description of West Africa, some letters relating to Sa'd?an diplomacy and conquests in the Sahara and Sahel, al-Ifr?n?'s account of Sa'd?an conquest of Songhay, and an account of this expedition by an anonymous Spaniard. This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.

This collection is the first to historicise the term ephemera and its meanings for early modern England and considers its relationship to time, matter, and place. It asks: how do we conceive of ephemera in a period before it was routinely employed (from the eighteenth century) to describe ostensibly disposable print? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-when objects and texts were rapidly proliferating-the term began to acquire its modern association with transitoriness. But contributors to this volume show how ephemera was also integrally related to wider social and cultural ecosystems. Chapters explore those ecosystems and think about the papers and artefacts that shaped homes, streets, and cities or towns and their attendant preservation, loss, or transformation. The studies here therefore look beyond static records to think about moments of process and transmutation and accordingly get closer to early modern experiences, identities, and practices.

This book examines continuities and changes in narrative strategies deployed to deal with female desire in a broad range of fiction from the late sixteenth-century to the early nineteenth-century. By focussing on 'designing women' and the lengths to which they can and should go as agents of their desires, this book investigates the way generic and moral or social issues intersect in the depiction of female subjectivity. The book examines narrative strategies deployed in the representation of female desire in a broad range of fiction from the late sixteenth-century to the early-nineteenth century, discussing key texts such as Jane Eyre, Pamela, Pride and Prejudice and Arcadia

In the eighteenth century, critics of capitalism denounced the growth of luxury and effeminacy while others celebrated the increase of refinement and the improved status of women. This pioneering study demonstrates the way the association of commerce and femininity permeated cultural production. It looks at the first use of a female author as an icon of modernity in the Athenian Mercury in the 1690s, reappraises misogynist representations in the work of Mandeville, Defoe and Pope in the light of the stock market crash of 1720, and considers in detail the turbulent careers of the poets Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Elizabeth Carter. The novels of Samuel Richardson represent the culmination of the English debate, while contemporary essays by David Hume move towards a fully-fledged enlightenment theory of feminization. Clery's book is essential reading not only for students of eighteenth-century literature, but for those interested in the emergence of commercial ideology and the evolution of theories of gender.

Comprises of individual volumes on: Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and John Webster. 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 oxes) and as individual volumes.

A Spenser Chronology is the first serious attempt to map out in concrete detail all of the known facts concerning the poet Edmund Spenser, a major canonical author whose entire literary career was spent in Ireland. This book charts Spenser's parallel vocations of Elizabethan planter and Renaissance writer, outlining the activities, appointments and whereabouts of a prominent Irish colonist, and shedding new light on the life of one of the most important figures in English literary history.

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 the material themselves.

This set comprises of separate volumes on: Earl of Rochester, John Dryden, William Congreve, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift. Routledge is pleased to publish the Collected edition of the Critical Heritage series. 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 student and reserchers 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, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 67 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

Comprises of individual volumes on: Thomas Wyatt, John Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell. 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.

"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 the material themselves.

"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 student and researcher to read the material themselves.

Carter explores early modern culture's reception of Ovid through the manipulation of Ovidian myth by Shakespeare, Middleton, Heywood, Marlowe and Marston. With a focus on sexual violence, homosexuality, incest and idolatry, Carter analyses how depictions of mythology represent radical ideas concerning gender and sexuality.