This book situates John Clare's long, prolific but often badly neglected literary life within the wider cultural histories of the Regency and earlier Victorian periods. The first half considers the construction of the Regency peasant-poet and how Clare performed this role on stages such as the London Magazine. It also looks at the way in which it went out of fashion as Regency mentalities were replaced by early Victorian ones. The second half recreates asylum culture and places Clare's performances as Regency boxers and Lord Byron within this bleak new world.

During the Renaissance, horses--long considered the privileged, even sentient companions of knights-errant--gradually lost their special place on the field of battle and, with it, their distinctive status in the world of chivalric heroism. Parrots, once the miraculous, articulate companions of popes and emperors, declined into figures of mindless mimicry. Cats, which were tortured by Catholics in the Middle Ages, were tortured in the Reformation as part of the Protestant attack on Catholicism. And sheep, the model for Agnus Dei imagery, underwent transformations at once legal, material, and spiritual as a result of their changing role in Europe's growing manufacturing and trade economies. While in the Middle Ages these nonhumans were endowed with privileged social associations, personal agency, even the ability to reason and speak, in the early modern period they lost these qualities at the very same time that a new emphasis on, and understanding of, human character was developing in European literature.In "Animal Characters" Bruce Thomas Boehrer follows five species--the horse, the parrot, the cat, the turkey, and the sheep--through their appearances in an eclectic mix of texts, from romances and poetry to cookbooks and natural histories. He shows how dramatic changes in animal character types between 1400 and 1700 relate to the emerging economy and culture of the European Renaissance. In early modern European culture, animals not only served humans as sources of labor, companionship, clothing, and food; these nonhuman creatures helped to form an understanding of personhood. Incorporating readings of Shakespeare's plays, Milton's "Paradise Lost," Margaret Cavendish's "Blazing World," and other works, Boehrer's series of animal character studies illuminates a fascinating period of change in interspecies relationships.

This book defines the previously unaddressed, early evolution of the American frontier hero in literature and popular culture. Denise MacNeil resituates the literary origins of this hero from the nineteenth century to the seventeenth century by tracing its roots to Mary Rowlandson's narration of her experiences as a prisoner. This study follows the subsequent evolution through works by Unca Eliza Winkfield, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and the film-maker John Ford and actor John Wayne. This book exposes complex gender and racial roots and clarifies a cultural stereotype that has become one of those most highly coded as white and masculine within American literature and culture.

A scholarly edition of works by by Ben Jonson. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This edition of Swift's classic novel presents the 1965 Herbert Davis Edition (based on the Faulkner Edition of 1735) along with five critical essays -- newly commissioned or revised for a student audience.

This interdisciplinary collection explores the divergence or convergence of freedom and terror in a range of Byron's works. Challenging the binary opposition of historicism and critical theory, it combines topical debates in a manner that is sensitive both to the circumstances of their emergence and to their relevance for the twenty-first century.

Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism is the first book-length study of Jonson's literary criticism, and examines the ways that criticism defines his unprecedented role as a professional author. Each chapter explores a different facet: 'The Lone Wolf' looks at Jonson's role in creating a critical discourse to respond to a new literary market-place; 'Poet and Critic' explores the relationship between his 'creative' and 'critical' writing; 'Poet and State' traces his accommodations as an author with censorship and other forms of authority; 'The Laws of Poetry' relates his appeals to classical precedent to his insecurity in a world where literary conditions were very different from those of ancient Greece and Rome; 'Jonson and Shakespeare' examines the old supposed rivalry as evidence of competing definitions of authorship. Throughout Richard Dutton suggests how Jonson's criticism set the terms for the profession of letters in England for more than a century. Finally an appendix provides a representative selection of Jonson's critical work.

The Scottish Invention of English Literature explores the origins of the teaching of English literature in the academy. It demonstrates how the subject began in eighteenth-century Scottish universities before being exported to America and other countries. The emergence of English as an institutionalised university subject was linked to the search for distinctive cultural identities throughout the English-speaking world. This book explores the role the discipline played in administering restraints on the expression of indigenous literary forms, and shows how the growing professionalisation of English as a subject offered a breeding ground for academics and writers with an interest in native identity and cultural nationalism. This book is a comprehensive account of the historical origins of the university subject of English literature and provides a wealth of new material on its particular Scottish provenance.

Destabilizing Milton challenges the widely accepted view of Milton as a poet of absolute, unquestioning certainty. In Paradise Lost , Milton confronts the failure of the Revolution by creating a poem that refuses to grant the reader any interpretive stability or certainty. Doubts can no longer be contained and concepts once marked by a 'fundamental immobility' now seem unstable at best. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes equally reflect Milton's deep ambivalences after the collapse of the Republic. Far from confirming his earlier ideals, in his later poetry, Milton subjects his culture's most cherished beliefs, such as the goodness of God, to withering scrutiny, while refusing the comfort of orthodox answers.

In this key anthology Derek Pearsall offers a radically new approach to those teaching and studying English writing from Geoffrey Chaucer to the early work of Edmund Spenser.

This is a highly original study, which offers an innovative new approach towards the study of early modern drama. This book examines the work of the Elizabethan playwright, Robert Greene, arguing that his plays are innovative in their use of spectacle. This study's most striking feature is the use of the one-to-one analogies between Greene's drama and modern cinema, in order to explore the plays' stage effects. While recent Shakespearean criticism interprets his drama through the lens of performance, criticism of non-Shakespearean drama continues to disconnect the plays from even the scarce performances of them today. This book aims to bring the study of performance into the realm of non-Shakespearean drama so that the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries might not descend further into obscurity. This innovative study advocates the rejection of a purely text-based interpretation of drama and emphasizes the powerful visual dimension of the early modern stage.

"Shakespearean Neuroplay" provides a methodology for applying cognitive science to the study of drama and performance. With Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" as a test subject and the cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual blending as a tool, Cook unravels the “mirror held up to nature” at the center of Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet’s mirror becomes a conceptual structure that invisibly scaffolds our understanding of the play. A lucid explanation of both contemporary science and "Hamlet," "Shakespearean Neuroplay" unveils Shakespeare’s textual theatrics and sheds light on blind spots in theatre and performance theory.

The stigmatisation of parody as "the worst enemy" of creativity has been pervasive in our literary culture. Although recent theoretical approaches have compelled critics to rethink many received notions regarding the significance of contemporary parodic activity, the perception remains that parody existed only on the disreputable margins of earlier literary cultures. This study places parody firmly (if paradoxically) where it belongs: at the centre of the literary-creative process in much of the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In the late Renaissance and Early Modern period, man's relationship to nature changed dramatically. An important part of this change occurred in the way that beauty was perceived in the natural world and in the particular features which became privileged objects of aesthetic gratification. This study explores the shift in aesthetic attitude towards the mountain that took place between 1450 and 1750. Over the course of these 300 years the mountain transformed from a fearful and ugly place to one of beauty and splendor. Accepted scholarly opinion claims that this change took place in the vernacular literature of the early and mid-18th century. Based on previously unknown and unstudied material, this volume now contends that it took place earlier in the Latin literature of the late Renaissance and Early Modern period. The aesthetic attitude shift towards the mountain had its catalysts in two broad spheres: the development of an idea of 'landscape' in the geographical and artistic traditions of the 16th century on the one hand, and the increasing amount of scientific and theological investigation dedicated to the mountain on the other, reaching a pinnacle in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The new Latin evidence for the change in aesthetic attitude towards the mountain unearthed in the course of this study brings material to light which is relevant for the current philosophical debate in environmental aesthetics. The book's concluding chapter shows how understanding the processes that produced the late Renaissance and Early Modern shift in aesthetic attitude towards the mountain can reveal important information about the modern aesthetic appreciation of nature. Alongside a standard bibliography of primary literature, this volume also offers an extended annotated bibliography of further Latin texts on the mountains from the Renaissance and Early Modern period. This critical bibliography is the first of its kind and constitutes an essential tool for further study in the field.

What is the Gothic? Few literary genres have attracted so much praise and critical disdain simultaneously. This Guide returns to the Gothic novel's first wave of popularity, between 1764 and 1820, to explore and analyse the full range of contradictory responses that the Gothic evoked. Angela Wright appraises the key criticism surrounding the Gothic fiction of this period, from eighteenth-century accounts to present-day commentaries. Adopting an easy-to-follow thematic approach, the Guide examines: - contemporary criticism of the Gothic - the aesthetics of terror and horror - the influence of the French Revolution - religion, nationalism and the Gothic - the relationship between psychoanalysis and the Gothic - the relationship between gender and the Gothic. Concise and authoritative, this indispensable Guide provides an overview of Gothic criticism and covers the work of a variety of well-known Gothic writers, such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and many others.

This classic edition of Donne's Divine Poems contains an extensive and invaluable critical apparatus by Helen Gardner.

"The Gothic and the Rule of Law" is the first full-length theoretical and historical study of the relation between early Gothic fiction and an emerging modern rule of law. The work identifies not only a political and cultural, but also an ontological relation between what critics have conceptualized as 'Gothic' and the nature and function of modern juridical power. It represents a highly significant contribution to Gothic criticism and to law and literature scholarship.

A celebratory history and appreciation of the varied, wildly experimental nature of fiction in eighteenth-century England In this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early history of the English novel. Novel Beginnings departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding's The Cry (a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change. Investigating fiction throughout the 1700s, Spacks delineates the individuality of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential narratives, psychological thrillers, romans a clef, sentimental parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others. These multiple narrative experiments show the impossibility of thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the nineteenth-century novel, Spacks shows. Instead, the vast variety of engagements with the problems of creating fiction demonstrates that literary history-by no means inexorable-might have taken quite a different course.

This book argues that Romantic-era writers used the figure of the minstrel to imagine authorship as a social, responsive enterprise unlike the solitary process portrayed by Romantic myths of the lone genius. Simpson highlights the centrality of the minstrel to many important literary developments from the Romantic era through to the 1840s.

Sir Walter Ralegh created a powerful public identity by means of the prose texts he wrote from prison. This new study not only offers a much-needed analysis of these neglected political writings, but also demonstrates the ways in which his readers modified Ralegh's public identity in a series of fascinating posthumous reinterpretations. By focusing on both Ralegh and his interpreters, this book contributes to the growing body of work on the politics and practice of writing and reading in early-modern England.

This book studies the uses of orality in Italian society, across all classes, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, with an emphasis on the interrelationships between oral communication and the written word. The Introduction provides an overview of the topic as a whole and links the chapters together. Part 1 concerns public life in the states of northern, central, and southern Italy. The chapters examine a range of performances that used the spoken word or song: concerted shouts that expressed the feelings of the lower classes and were then recorded in writing; the proclamation of state policy by town criers; songs that gave news of executions; the exercise of power relations in society as recorded in trial records; and diplomatic orations and interactions. Part 2 centres on private entertainments. It considers the practices of the performance of poetry sung in social gatherings and on stage with and without improvisation; the extent to which lyric poets anticipated the singing of their verse and collaborated with composers; performances of comedies given as dinner entertainments for the governing body of republican Florence; and a reading of a prose work in a house in Venice, subsequently made famous through a printed account. Part 3 concerns collective religious practices. Its chapters study sermons in their own right and in relation to written texts, the battle to control spaces for public performance by civic and religious authorities, and singing texts in sacred spaces.

The Narrative Grotesque examines late medieval narratology in two Older Scots poems: Gavin Douglas's The Palyce of Honour (c.1501) and William Dunbar's The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c.1507). The narrative grotesque is exemplified in these poems, which fracture narratological boundaries by fusing disparate poetic forms and creating hybrid subjectivities. Consequently, these poems interrogate conventional boundaries in poetic making. The narrative grotesque is applied as a framework to elucidate these chimeric texts and to understand newly late medieval engagement with poetics and narratology. -- .

Shakespeare has been misread for centuries as having modern ideas about sex and gender. This book shows how in the Restoration and Eighteenth century, Shakespeare's plays and other Renaissance texts were adapted to make them conform to these modern ideas. Through readings of Shakespearean texts, including "King Lear," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Othello," and other Renaissance drama, the book reveals a sexual world before heterosexuality. "Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature Before Heterosexuality" shows how revisions and criticism of Renaissance drama contributed to the emergence of heterosexuality. It also shows how changing ideas about status, adultery, friendship, and race were factors in that emergence.

Overturning the common characterization of seventeenth-century English prose romance as an exhausted, imitative genre with little bearing on the evolution of the novel, this book argues for the centrality of seventeenth-century romance in key political and moral philosophical debates of its time. Concentrating especially on the intersection between romance and the late humanist problem of self-interest, the book discerns the deeply moral philosophical aspect of prose romances from Sidney's "Arcadia," through Wroth's "Urania" and Barclay's "Argenis," to the dozen or so now little-known Royalist romances from the mid-seventeenth century. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of the history of prose fiction and the novel, early modern women's writing, and those concerned with the political valences of genre and the intersections between literature and moral philosophy.

This title concerns itself with dress in the novels of Samuel Richardson, and how attire confirms, contributes to, or challenges the characters' fashioning of self, and the self as others (characters or readers) perceive it.