Drawing on published collections and also manuscripts from Mantuan archives, Commedia dell' arte and the Mediterranean locates commedia dell' arte as a performance form reflective of its cultural crucible in the Mediterranean. The study provides a broad perspective on commedia dell' arte as an expression of the various cultural, gender and language communities in Italy during the early-modern period, and explores the ways in which the art form offers a platform for reflection on power and cultural exchange. While highlighting the prevalence of Mediterranean crossings in the scenarios of commedia dell' arte, this book examines the way in which actors embodied characters from across the wider Mediterranean region. The presence of Mediterranean minority groups such as Arabs, Armenians, Jews and Turks within commedia dell' arte is marked on stage and 'backstage' where they were collaborators in the creative process. In addition, gendered performances by the first female actors participated in 'staging' the Mediterranean by using the female body as a canvas for cartographical imaginings. By focusing attention on the various communities involved in the making of theatre, a central preoccupation of the book is to question the dynamics of 'exchange' as it materialized within a spectrum inclusive of both cultural collaboration but also of taxation and coercion.

This monograph studies how, across the Folio of 1681, Marvell's poems engage not merely with different kinds of loss and aspiration, but with experiences of both that were, in mid-seventeenth-century England, disturbingly new and unfamiliar. It particularly examines Marvell's preoccupation with the search for home, and with redefining the homeland, in times of civil upheaval. In doing so it traces his progression from being a poet who plays sophisticatedly with received myth to being one who is a national mythmaker in rivalry with his poetic contemporaries such as Waller and Davenant. Although focusing primarily on poems in the Folio of 1681, this book considers those poems in relation to others from the Marvell canon, including the Latin poems and the satires from the reign of Charles II. It closely considers them as well in relation to verse by poets from the classical past and the European, especially English, present.

In the first full-length study of Christopher Smart's translations and the place and function of translation in Smart's poetry, Rosalind Powell proposes a new approach to understanding the relationship between Smart's poetics and his practice. Drawing on translation theory from the early modern period to the present day, this book addresses Smart's translations of Horace, Phaedrus and the Psalms alongside the better-known religious works such as Jubilate Agno and A Song to David. Five recurrent threads run throughout Powell's study: the effect of translation on the identity of a narrative voice in a rewritten text; the techniques that are used to present translated texts to a new literary, cultural and linguistic readership; performance and reading contexts; the translation of great works as an attempt to achieve literary permanence; and, finally, the authorial influence of Smart himself in terms of the overt religiosity and nationalism that he champions in his writing. In exploring Smart's major translation projects and revisiting his original poems, Powell offers insights into classical reception and translation theory; attitudes towards censorship; expressions of nationalism in the period; developments in liturgy and hymnody; and the composition of children's books and school texts in the early modern era. Her detailed analysis of Smart's translating poetics places them within a new, contemporary context and locality to uncover the poet's works as a coherent project of Englishing.

Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama examines the development of neo-Senecan drama, also known as 'closet drama', during the years 1590-1613. It is the first book-length study since 1924 to consider these plays - the dramatic works of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Samuel Brandon, Fulke Greville, Sir William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary, along with the Roman tragedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd - as a coherent group. Daniel Cadman suggests these works interrogate the relations between sovereigns and subjects during the early modern period by engaging with the humanist discourses of republicanism and stoicism. Cadman argues that the texts under study probe various aspects of this dynamic and illuminate the ways in which stoicism and republicanism provide essential frameworks for negotiating this relationship between the marginalized courtier and the absolute sovereign. He demonstrates how aristocrats and courtiers, such as Sidney, Greville, Alexander, and Cary, were able to use the neo-Senecan form to consider aspects of their limited political agency under an absolute monarch, while others, such as Brandon and Daniel, respond to similarly marginalized positions within both political and patronage networks. In analyzing how these plays illuminate various aspects of early modern political culture, this book addresses several gaps in the scholarship of early modern drama and explores new contexts in relation to more familiar writers, as well as extending the critical debate to include hitherto neglected authors.

A decade after the Restoration of Charles II, a disturbing group of tragedies, dubbed by modern critics the horror or the blood-and-torture villain tragedies, burst onto the London stage. Ten years later they were gone - absorbed into the partisan frenzy which enveloped the theatre at the height of the Exclusion Crisis. Despite burgeoning interest, until now there has been no full investigation into why these deeply unsettling plays were written when they were and why they so fascinated audiences for the period that they held the stage. The author's contention is that the genre of horror gains its popularity at times of social dislocation. It reflects deep schisms in society, and English society was profoundly unsettled and in a (delayed) state of shock from years of social upheaval and civil conflict. Through recurrent images of monstrosity, madness, venereal disease, incest and atheism, Hermanson argues that the horror dramatists trope deep-seated and unresolved anxieties - engaging profoundly with contemporary discourse by abreacting the conspiratorial climate of suspicion and fear. Some go as far as to question unequivocally the moral and political value of monarchy, vilifying the office of kingship and pushing ideas of atheism further than in any drama produced since Seneca. This study marks the first comprehensive investigation of these macabre tragedies in which playwrights such as Nathaniel Lee, Thomas Shadwell, Elkanah Settle, Thomas Otway and the Earl of Rochester take their audience on an exploration of human iniquity, thrusting them into an examination of man's relationship to God, power, justice and evil.

How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe? How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How do new disciplinary and geographic connections shape the ways we think about the early modern world, and the role of women and men in it? These are the questions that guide this volume, which includes articles by a select group of scholars from many disciplines: Art History, Comparative Literature, English, German, History, Landscape Architecture, Music, and Women's Studies. Each essay reaches across fields, and several are written by interdisciplinary groups of authors. The essays also focus on many different places, including Rome, Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and on texts and images that crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, or that portrayed real and imagined people who did. Many essays investigate topics key to the 'spatial turn' in various disciplines, such as borders and their permeability, actual and metaphorical spatial crossings, travel and displacement, and the built environment.

Women's life writing in general has too often been ignored, dismissed, or relegated to a separate category in those few studies of the genre that include it. The present work addresses these issues and offers a countervailing argument that focuses on the contributions of women writers to the study of autobiography in Spanish during the early modern period. There are, indeed, examples of autobiographical writing by women in Spain and its New World empire, evident as early as the fourteenth-century Memorias penned by DoA+/-a Leonor LA(3)pez de CordA(3)ba and continuing through the seventeenth-century Cartas of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. What sets these accounts apart, the author shows, are the variety of forms adopted by each woman to tell her life and the circumstances in which she adapts her narrative to satisfy the presence of male critics-whether ecclesiastic or political, actual or imagined-who would dismiss or even alter her life story. Analyzing how each of these women viewed her life and, conversely, how their contemporaries-both male and female-received and sometimes edited her account, Howe reveals the tension in the texts between telling a 'life' and telling a 'lie'.

Ecocriticism has steadily gained footing within the larger arena of early modern scholarship, and with the publication of well over a dozen monographs, essay collections, and special journal issues, literary studies looks increasingly 'green'; yet the field lacks a straightforward, easy-to-use guide to do with reading and teaching early modern texts ecocritically. Accessible yet comprehensive, the cutting-edge collection Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts fills this gap. Organized around the notion of contact zones (or points of intersection, that have often been constructed asymmetrically-especially with regard to the human-nonhuman dichotomy), the volume reassesses current trends in ecocriticism and the Renaissance; introduces analyses of neglected texts and authors; brings ecocriticism into conversation with cognate fields and approaches (e.g., queer theory, feminism, post-coloniality, food studies); and offers a significant section on pedagogy, ecocriticism and early modern literature. Engaging points of tension and central interest in the field, the collection is largely situated in the 'and/or' that resides between presentism-historicism, materiality-literary, somatic-semiotic, nature-culture, and, most importantly, human-nonhuman. Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts balances coverage and methodology; its primary goal is to provide useful, yet nuanced discussions of ecological approaches to reading and teaching a range of representative early modern texts. As a whole, the volume includes a diverse selection of chapters that engage the complex issues that arise when reading and teaching early modern texts from a green perspective.

This selection of sixty-two poems written by various Jesuit poets offers a unique and illuminating look at neo-Latin poetry. Includes original text, translations, notes, and vocabulary.

First published in 1969, this title examines the works of Jonathan Swift from both a literary and an historical perspective. W. A. Speck first presents Swift in his historical context, analysing in particular the interplay between his religious and political views. Light is thrown on the early pamphlets as well as on A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, alongside a fascinating chapter by Philip Roberts considering Swift's poetry. This illuminating title will be of value to any literature students with an interest in the writings of Swift and the historical context in which he worked.

William Blake (1757 - 1827) is one of the great figures in literature, by turns poet, artist and visonary. Profoundly libertarian in outlook, Blake's engagement with the issues of his day is well known and this - along with his own idiosynratic concerns - flows through his poetry and art. Like Milton before him, the prodigality of his allusions and references is little short of astonishing. Consquently, his longer viosnary poems can challege the modern reader, who will find in this avowedly open edition all they might need to interpret the poetry. W. H. Stevenson's Blake is a masterpiece of scrupulous scholarship. It is, as the editor makes clear in his introduction, 'designed to be widely, and fluently, read' and this Third Edition incorporates many changes to further that aim. Many of the headnotes have been rewritten and the footnotes updated. The full texts of the early prose tracts, All Religions are One and There is no Natural Religion, are included for the first time. In many instances, Blake's capitalisation has been restored, better to convey the expressive individuality of his writing. In addition, a full colour plate section contains a representation of Blake's most significant paintings and designs. As the 250th anniversary of his birth approaches, Blake has perhaps more readers than ever before; Blake: The Complete Poems will stand those readers, new and old, in good stead for many years to come.

First Published in 1966, The Art of Marvell's Poetry presents J.B. Leishman's appreciation of Andrew Marvell's poems by demonstrating a sensitive understanding of attitudes peculiar to the seventeenth century and to Marvell. Leishman calls Marvell an "inveterate imitator and experimenter". His success depended on originality of combination rather than originality of invention. But while such phrases as "Musick, the Mosaique of the Air,'' "Desarts of vast Eternity,"- and "a green Thought in a green shade" were certainly inspired by others, they are distinctively and unquestionably Marvell's own. Marvell's poetry is shown to be the work of a man living at a certain moment in history; it is poetry which could not have been written at any other time, and its affinities to the work of contemporary poets are clearly demonstrated. The Art of Marvell's Poetry is a must read for scholars and researchers of English poetry, English literature, and European literature.

This study examines the presentation of suicide within the genre of the eighteenth-century novel. Referencing several key writers of the period, McGuire demonstrates that their work inscribes a nationalist imperative to frame suicide as self-sacrifice.

Although attention to the Book of Judith and its heroine has grown in recent years, this is the first full-length study to focus on adaptations of the Bible's Old Testament Book of Judith across a range of literary genres written in French during the early modern era. Author Kathleen Llewellyn bases her analysis on references to Judith in a number of early modern sermons as well as the 'Judith' texts of four early modern writers. The texts include two theatrical dramas, Le Mystere de Judith et Holofernes (c. 1500), believed to have been written by Jean Molinet, and Le Miroir des vefves: Tragedie sacree d'Holoferne & Judith by Pierre Heyns (1596), as well as two epic poems, La Judit (1574) by Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, and Gabrielle de Coignard's Imitation de la victoire de Judich (1594). Llewellyn's goal is to see Judith as she was envisioned by early modern French writers and their readers, and to understand how the sixteenth century shaped their view of the heroine. Noting aspects of that story that were emphasized by sixteenth-century authors, as well as elements that those writers altered to suit their purposes, she also examines the ways in which writers of this era made use of Judith's story as a means to explore interests and concerns of early modern writers, readers, and spectators. Representing Judith in Early Modern French Literature provides a deeper understanding of early modern ideas regarding the role of women, the use of exemplary stories in preaching and teaching, theories of vision, and the importance of community in Renaissance France.

Between the medieval conception of Christendom and the political visions of modernity, ideas of Europe underwent a transformative and catalytic period that saw a cultural process of renewed self-definition or self-Europeanization. The contributors to this volume address this process, analyzing how Europe was imagined between 1450 and 1750. By whom, in which contexts, and for what purposes was Europe made into a subject of discourse? Which forms did early modern 'Europes' take, and what functions did they serve? Essays examine the role of factors such as religion, history, space and geography, ethnicity and alterity, patronage and dynasty, migration and education, language, translation, and narration for the ways in which Europe turned into an 'imagined community.' The thematic range of the volume comprises early modern texts in Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, including plays, poems, and narrative fiction, as well as cartography, historiography, iconography, travelogues, periodicals, and political polemics. Literary negotiations in particular foreground the creative potential, versatility, and agency that inhere in the process of Europeanization, as well as a specifically early modern attitude towards the past and tradition emblematized in the poetics of the period. There is a clear continuity between the collection's approach to European identities and the focus of cultural and postcolonial studies on the constructed nature of collective identities at large: the chapters build on the insights produced by these fields over the past decades and apply them, from various angles, to a subject that has so far largely eluded critical attention. This volume examines what existing and well-established work on identity and alterity, hybridity and margins has to contribute to an understanding of the largely un-examined and under-theorized 'pre-formative' period of European identity.

Dr. Roper describes the mode of many of Dryden's original poems by redefining the royalism that provides the matter of some works and the metaphoric vocabulary of others. Dryden's royalism is seen both as an identifiable political attitude and a way of apprehending public life that again and again relates superficially non-political matters to the standards and assumptions of politics in order to determine their public significance. Dryden's Poetic Kingdoms, first published in 1965, principally through readings of ten poems, comes to the conclusion that Dryden's poems are most successful when they work to create a meaningful analogy between such topics as literature and politics or between the constitution of England and the constitution of Rome, the Garden of Eden, or Israel under David.

First published in 1986, this title examines a set of English Renaissance texts by Shakespeare, Spenser, Herbert, Marvell and Milton, within the theoretic framework of postmodern thought. Following an opening chapter that argues for the value of this conjunction as a way of understanding literary history, subsequent chapters draw upon Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of photocentrism and Jacques Lacan's analysis of the agency of the letter to offer fully theorized readings. Throughout, there is a sustained concern with the transformations of such Ovidian figures as Narcissus and Echo, Perseus and Medusa, Orpheus and Eurydice, and with the echo effects of Virgilian pastoral, as paradigms for the interplay of voice and writing.

The wives of rulers in early modern Europe did far more than provide heirs for their principalities and adornment for their courts. In this study, Judith Aikin examines the exceptionally well-documented actions of one such woman, Aemilia Juliana of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (1637-1706), in order to expand our understanding of the role of ruler's consort in the small principalities characteristic of Germany during this period. Aikin explores a wide range of writings by her subject, including informal letters to another woman, hundreds of devotional song texts, manuscript books both devotional and practical, and published pamphlets and books. Also important for this study are the plays, paintings, and musical works that adorned the court under Aemilia Juliana's patronage; the books, poems, and sermons published in her honor; and the massive memorial volume printed and distributed soon after her death. This material, when coupled with the more scanty record in official documents, reveals the nature and scope of Aemilia Juliana's role as full partner in the ruling couple. Among the most important findings based on this evidence are those related to Aemilia Juliana's advocacy for women of all social classes through her authorship and publications, her support for the education of girls, her efforts to ameliorate the fear and suffering of pregnant and birthing women, and her contributions to female support networks. In examining the career of a consort whose various activities are so well documented, this study helps to fill in the blanks in the documentary record of numerous consorts across early modern Europe, and serves as a model for future research on other consorts at other courts.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The author here reassesses the concept of 'masculinity', and argues that it cannot be seen as an absolute standard, but only as the product of perpetual conflict between competing and unstable models. The argument is sustained by a close reading of the problematic conflict between gendered values in eighteenth-century classical learning. Pope's Homer ensured the continuation of the tradition of using the Iliad and Odyssey to teach privileged boys how to become more 'manly'. This book examines this pedagogy in its socio-literary context, and concludes that Pope's Homer emerges as a relic of the struggle to preserve masculine dignity from the encroachments of feminine values in the text. This knowledge of classical and early modern literature has rarely been brought to bear on gender studies. First published in 1993, it remains a valuable contribution to debates concerning the reception of the Classical tradition.

The monarchs of seventeenth-century Europe put a surprisingly high priority on the abolition of dueling, seeing its eradication as an important step from barbarism toward a rational state monopoly on justice. But it was one thing to ban dueling and another to stop it. Duelists continued to kill each other with swords or pistols in significant numbers deep into the nineteenth century. In 1883 Maupassant called dueling "the last of our unreasonable customs." As a dramatic and forbidden ritual from another age, the duel retained a powerful hold on the public mind and, in particular, the literary imagination. Many of the greatest names in Western literature wrote about or even fought in duels, among them Corneille, Moliere, Richardson, Rousseau, Pushkin, Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Twain, Conrad, Chekhov, and Mann. As John Leigh explains, the duel was a gift as a plot device. But writers also sought to discover in duels something more fundamental about human conflict and how we face our fears of humiliation, pain, and death. The duel was, for some, a social cause, a scourge to be mocked or lamented; yet even its critics could be seduced by its risk and glamour. Some conservatives defended dueling by arguing that the man of noble bearing who cared less about living than living with honor was everything that the contemporary bourgeois was not. The literary history of the duel, as Touche makes clear, illuminates the tensions that attended the birth of the modern world.

This is the first critical study of Romantic-era annotation or marginalia - footnotes, endnotes, glossaries - which formed a vital site of literary interaction.

Romantic Localities explores the ways in which Romantic-period writers of varying nationalities responded to languages, landscapes - both geographical and metaphorical - and literatures.

"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."-Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination In Black and Blur-the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being-Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and Jose Esteban Munoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.

Through an examination of her complete works and public response to them, Robertson gauges the extent of Inchbald's reputation as the dignified Mrs Inchbald, as well as providing a clear sense of what it meant to be a female Romantic writer.