"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.

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.

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.

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.

Combining historical and interpretive work, this collection examines changing perceptions of and relations between human and nonhuman animals in Britain over the long eighteenth century. Persistent questions concern modes of representing animals and animal-human hybrids, as well as the ethical issues raised by the human uses of other animals. From the animal men of Thomas Rowlandson to the part animal-part human creature of Victor Frankenstein, hybridity serves less as a metaphor than as a metonym for the intersections of humans and other animals. The contributors address such recurring questions as the implications of the Enlightenment project of naming and classifying animals, the equating of non-European races and nonhuman animals in early ethnographic texts, and the desire to distinguish the purely human from the entirely nonhuman animal. Gulliver's Travels and works by Mary and Percy Shelley emerge as key texts for this study. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students who work in animal, colonial, gender, and cultural studies; and will appeal to general readers concerned with the representation of animals and their treatment by humans.

Elizabeth Cellier, the scandalous celebrity known as the 'Popish midwife', became the focus of a large number of pamphlets in 1680: accounts of her two trials, her self-vindication, Malice Defeated, her opponent Thomas Dangerfield's rejoinder, and various anonymous satiric attacks against her. She was tried twice: the first time for the more serious charge of treason, and the second for libel, for publishing Malice Defeated. She was acquitted the first time, but found guilty the second, though her punishment was to be pilloried, not executed. She reemerges as the author of tracts on midwifery, proposing to James II the establishment of a professional guild of midwives. Her writings exhibit her remarkable determination to publish her accusations of government torture and her advocation of the licensing of midwives as professional women, as well as exemplifying the importance of the printing press for enabling women to participate in the political public sphere.

This book fills a lacuna in the intellectual history of the seventeenth century by investigating the role that skepticism plays in the declining prestige of memory. It argues that Shakespeare and Donne revolutionize the art of memory, thanks to their skepticism, and thereby transform literary strategies like mimesis, exemplarity, and pastoral.

The correspondence of John Dryden is the definitive edition of the letters of the most important playwright and poet of the late seventeenth century. He defined an age and his newly transcribed disparate correspondence is placed in the context of contemporaneous and current debates about literature, politics and religion. It is also the most important account of the relationship between an author and his bookseller of the time. The illustrated correspondence contains a full biographical, textual introduction and calendar of letters. It is transcribed diplomatically and structured chronologically, with contextualising sections about particular correspondences. The readership will be undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students and academics with an interest in seventeenth century literature, politics, religion and culture. The editor won the MLA Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters. -- .

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 Sultan Speaks" is the first study of English historical plays about the Turks in relation to their sources and analogues, including histories originating in Greek, Arabic, and Turkish. Drawing on Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic and on narrative theory, McJannet traces the transmission of these eastern sources and analyzes Richard Knolles's citation of the "Turks' own chronicles," the historiographic equivalent of letting the sultan speak. She demonstrates that while the historians increasingly contain the sultan's words with adverse authorial commentary, playwrights such as Marlowe and Fulke Greville use both dialogue and commentary to" "enhance the sultan's stature and to mitigate his negative acts.

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

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/

A transcription and translation of Zaharje Orfelin's 1757 festival book, Festive Greeting to Mojsej Putnik, this book is one of the most comprehensive accounts of the festival life of the Orthodox hierarchy in the Habsburg lands. While the Festive Greeting remained just an outline for the spectacle and was never publicly performed in its entirety, it remains a fascinating embodiment of Church politics, an issue too dangerous to be made public in the political arena of the Catholic Empire. In addition to the transcription and translation of the festival book, Jelena Todorovic provides a full account of the background to the Mojsije Putnik's episcopal investiture, beginning with a study of the political and historical context to the foundation and establishment of the Orthodox Archbishopric in the Austrian Habsburg and moving on to an examine the religious politics of the Orthodox Archbishops during this period. With detailed surveys of the book's illustrations, proposed scenography and music, it concludes with an assessment of the place of the Festive Greeting in the history of spectacles in the Archbishopric as well as in the history of the Orthodox Church.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shakespeare's ghost appeared again and again at seance tables in London, Paris, Melbourne, and Cape Town, as well as in smaller, rural settings. This study concerns itself with a now-forgotten religious group, Spiritualists, and how its ensuing discussions of Shakespeare's meaning, his writing practices, his possible collaborations, and the supposed purity and/or corruption of his texts anticipated, accompanied, or silhouetted similar debates in Shakespeare studies.

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.

This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in American, British, French, and German literature before 1890 by examining motherless creations: Pygmalion's statue, Frankenstein's creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men. These beings typify what is now called artificial life, living systems made through manufactured means. Fantasies about creating life ex-utero were built upon misconceptions about how life began, sustaining pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body. Physicians, inventors, and authors of literature imagined generating life without women to control the process of reproduction and generate perfect progeny. Thus, some speculative fiction before 1890 belongs to the literary genealogy of transhumanism, the belief that technology will someday transform some humans into superior, immortal beings. Female motherless creations tend to operate as sexual companions. Male ones often emerge as subaltern figures analogous to enslaved beings, illustrating that reproductive rights inform readers' sense of who counts as human in fictions of artificial life.

In this detailed treatment of the myth of Adonis in post-Classical times, Carlo Caruso provides an overview of the main texts, both literary and scholarly, in Latin and in the vernacular, which secured for the Adonis myth a unique place in the Early Modern revival of Classical mythology. While aiming to provide this general outline of the myth's fortunes in the Early Modern age, the book also addresses three points of primary interest, on which most of the original research included in the work has been conducted. First, the myth's earliest significant revival in the age of Italian Humanism, and particularly in the poetry of the great Latin poet and humanist Giovanni Pontano. Secondly, the diffusion of syncretistic interpretations of the Adonis myth by means of authoritative sixteenth-century mythological encyclopaedias. Thirdly, the allegorical/political use of the Adonis myth in G.B. Marino's (1569-1625) "Adone," published in Paris in 1623 to celebrate the Bourbon dynasty and to support their legitimacy with regard to the throne of France.

Long before the physical advent of Blacks in Europe, Professor Dathorne asserts they featured over and over again in literature as marginalized Others, but rarely were real Blacks present. As English developed as a language, race came into the evolution of the signifiers, so that words like darkness, blackness, and so on became heavily charged with negative connotations.

Using travel literature as well as figures on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage and material from later writers, Dathorne shows how negative elements surrounding Blackness were transferred to Native Americans, to Indians from India, to South Pacific islanders, and others. A provocative analysis for scholars, students, and researchers involved with Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, and race.

Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play examines a key preoccupation of historical drama in the period 1538-1600: the threat presented by uncivil language. "Unlicensed" speech informs the presentation of political debate in Tudor history plays and it is also the subject of their most daring political speculations. By analysing plays by John Bale, Thomas Norton, Thomas Sackville, and Robert Greene, as well as Shakespeare, this study also argues for a more inclusive approach to the genre.

How can the concept of nostalgia illuminate the culturally specific ways in which societies understand the contested relationship between the past, present, and future? The word nostalgia was invented in the late seventeenth century to describe the debilitating effects of homesickness. Now widely defined as a sense of longing for a lost past, initially it was more closely linked with dislocation in space. By exploring some of its many textual, visual and musical manifestations in the tumultuous period between c. 1350 and 1800, this volume resists the assumption that nostalgia is a distinctive by-product of modernity. It also forges a fruitful link between three lively areas of current scholarly enquiry: memory, temporality, and emotion. The contributors deploy nostalgia as a tool for investigating perceptions of the passage of time and historical change, unsettling experiences of migration and geographical displacement, and the connections between remembering and forgetting, affect and imagination. Ranging across Europe and the Atlantic world, they examine the moments, sites and communities in which it arose, alongside how it was used to express both criticism and regret about the religious, political, social and cultural upheavals that shaped the early modern world. They approach it as a complex mixed feeling that opens a new window into individual subjectivities and collective mentalities.

Analyzing Romantic conservative critiques of modernity found in literature, philosophy, natural history, and agricultural periodicals, this book finds a common theme in the 'intergenerational imagination.' The conservative intergenerational imagination cultivates a counter-narrative to the optimistic telos of progress and the punctual, liberal individual by contending that current generations receive land and culture as a gift from previous generations, and that the current generation bears the responsibility to preserve that gift for future generations. First locating the intergenerational imagination in Burke's Reflections and Wordsworth's epitaphic poetry, which chronicle the consequences of modernity and plead for intergenerational continuity in land use, the book then explores regionalist texts of the Romantic period, including Thomas Bewick's natural histories, Maria Edgeworth's Irish tales, William Cobbett's agricultural periodicals, and John Clare's poetry.

This volume of original essays is designed to be of interest to students not only of Bunyan, but of the history, religion and literature of the seventeenth century

This collection of essays centres on Double Falsehood, Lewis Theobald's 1727 adaptation of the "lost" play of Cardenio, possibly co-authored by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. In a departure from most scholarship to date, the contributors fold Double Falsehood back into the milieu for which it was created rather than searching for traces of Shakespeare in the text. Robert D. Hume's knowledge of theatre history permits a fresh take on the forgery question as well as the Shakespeare authorship controversy. Diana Solomon's understanding of eighteenth-century rape culture and Jean I. Marsden's command of contemporary adaptation practices both emphasise the play's immediate social and theatrical contexts. And, finally, Deborah C. Payne's familiarity with the eighteenth-century stage allows for a reconsideration of Double Falsehood as integral to a debate between Theobald, Alexander Pope, and John Gay over the future of the English drama.

This volume presents a modernised edition of Christopher Marlowe's critical engagement with one of the bloodiest and traumatic episodes of the French Wars of Religion, the wholesale massacre of French Huguenots in Paris in August, 1572. Sensorily shocking and intellectually gripping, the play's dramatic action spans a tumultuous two decades in French history to unfold for its audience the tragic consequences of religious fanaticism, power politics, and dynastic rivalry. Comprehensively introduced and containing full commentary notes, this edition opens up this frequently neglected but historically significant and dramatically powerful play to student and scholar alike. The introduction examines such topics as the history of the massacre, the play's treatment of its sources, the play's dramatisation of trauma, and the play's exploration of notions of religious toleration. -- .

In the eighteenth century, critics of capitalism denounced the growth of luxury and effeminacy; supporters applauded the increase of refinement and the improved status of women. This pioneering study explores 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," and reappraises works by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mandeville, Defoe, Pope and Elizabeth Carter. Samuel Richardson's novels represent the culmination of the English debate, while contemporary essays by David Hume move towards a fully-fledged enlightenment theory of feminization.