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.

Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the first collection of essays on poet and public intellectual Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825). By international scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature, these new essays survey Barbauld's writing from early to late: her versatility as a stylist, her poetry, her books for children, her political writing, her performance as editor and reviewer. They explore themes of sociability, materiality, and affect in Barbauld's writing, and trace her reception and influence. Rooted in enlightenment philosophy and ethics and dissenting religion, Barbauld's work exerted a huge impact on the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on education and ideas about childhood far into the nineteenth century. William McCarthy's introduction explores the importance of Barbauld's work today, and co-editor Olivia Murphy assesses the commentary on Barbauld that followed her rediscovery in the early 1990s. Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the indispensible introduction to Barbauld's work and current thinking about it.

An innovative study of the Renaissance practice of making epitaphic gestures within other English genres. A poetics of quotation uncovers the ways in which writers including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Holinshed, Sidney, Jonson, Donne, and Elizabeth I have recited these texts within new contexts.

Shakespeare and Cognition challenges orthodox approaches to Shakespeare by using recent psychological findings about human decision-making to analyse the unique characters that populate his plays. It aims to find a way to reconnect readers and watchers of Shakespeare's plays to the fundamental questions that first animated them. Why does Othello succumb so easily to Iago's manipulations? Why does Anne allow herself to be wooed by Richard III, the man who killed her husband and father? Why does Macbeth go from being a seemingly reasonable man to a cold-blooded killer? Why does Hamlet take so long to kill Claudius? This book aims to answer these questions from a fresh perspective.

This volume completes the five-volume Longman Annotated Poets Edition of the poems of John Dryden, the major poet of Restoration England. It provides a modernized text along with full explanatory annotation. The poems include Dryden's spirited translation from Ovid, Homer, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. This volume presents, in newly-edited texts and with a substantial editorial commentary, the complete non-dramatic poetry of John Dryden's later years. It contains the full text of Dryden's final collection, Fables Ancient and Modern, including its prose Dedication and Preface, together with a number of other poems of the late 1690s, and some posthumously published items.

The interplay between colonialism and gender is the focus of this book, which concentrates on Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene in the context of English history. Spenser's attitudes toward the Irish are drawn out of the text of his poetry, especially his preoccupations with sexual promiscuity, Catholicism, and miscegenation. The underlying textual dynamics are analyzed in terms of Spenser's relationship with Queen Elizabeth and his residence in Ireland.

One of the most important novelists of the early 19th century, Jane Austen (1775-1817) continues to be read and studied today. Throughout her novels, she creates characters who embody various virtues and limitations. The best characters represent the best behavior, just as the less admirable ones behave in less admirable ways. The courtesy books of the 18th century advise certain moral behavior for character development. This book studies Austen's parallels to 18th century courtesy books. Educational and recreational activities in Austen's novels, such as reading, dancing, card-playing, and theatre-going, are often similar to those activities recommended in the courtesy books with which Austen would have been familiar. So too, various social activities and personal characteristics depicted in Austen's novels frequently accord with courtesy book recommendations.

Proper behavior was of great concern to Austen's contemporaries. Throughout the 18th century, numerous courtesy books were written, advocating certain moral behavior for character development. Austen would have been familiar with these books, for they were influential during the late 18th century, when she grew up, and in the early 19th century, when her works were published.

Although Austen is known as a novelist of manners, surprisingly little work has been done to compare the manners recommended by the courtesy books of the time with the manners of the characters in her novels. This study demonstrates Austen's parallels with 18th century courtesy books in shaping her characters. Educational and recreational activities in her works are often similar to the activities recommended by the courtesy books of her time. So too, the social activities and personal characteristics she presents frequently accord with the recommendations of the courtesy books. Austen's reliance on courtesy books is of great importance, for scholars have generally held that her novels are reflective of the manners of the period. Without the documentation that this study provides, such assertions would remain empty of authority.

First published in 1956. Arthur Waley here presents an engrossing account of the works and life of Yuan Mei (1716-1797), the best-known poet of his time. Gaiety is the keynote of his works and the poet was a friend of the Manchu official with whom Commodore Anson had dramatic dealings at Canton in 1743. Yuan Mei gives an account (not previously translated) of Anson's interview with the Manchu authorities. The book contains many translations of Yuan Mei's verse and prose.

First published in 1928. This book collects together over one hundred sources by Elizabethan authors which show English life in English literature. Most of them have been selected as much to catch the atmosphere as the moods of the period, and come from the great Elizabethan writers who can transmit the essence of the time. A 'gallery of Elizabethan pictures' rather than a complete survey of life in Shakespeare's day, the spelling and punctuation have been modernized throughout. To enable those who wish to read the extracts in their context, references are given to the most accessible editions.

Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) exerted a remarkably wide-ranging influence on the medical, political, and social life of the emerging American nation. He fulfilled the multiple roles of first American professor of chemistry, signer of the Declaration of Independence, foremost American physician, father of American psychiatry, pioneer abolitionist, educator, advocate of temperance, and proponent of prison reform. The success of these endeavors rested largely on the strength and size of his literary output, which was unparalleled by any of the other founding fathers. This bibliographic guide is the only work to identify all of Rush's published writings as well as hundreds of writings about him.

The Introduction surveys Rush's published writings on a variety of topics and places them in their late 18th and early 19th century context. Part one provides a comprehensive chronological listing of Rush's published works, including articles, pamphlets, and books in all their editions. Part one also includes comments from Rush scholars on the nature and significance of many of the works, along with references to contemporary reviews. Extensive cross-references show the relationship between documents. Aids to locating the documents in their original, reprinted, and microtext forms are also provided. Part two lists over 500 publications about Rush and his role in American history. The work includes a title and general index to part one and an author and general index to part two.

Maps make the world visible, but they also obscure, distort, and idealize. This wide-ranging study traces the impact of cartography on the changing cultural meanings of space. Combining cartographic history with crucial cultural studies and literary analysis, this book examines the construction of social and political space in maps, in cosmography and geography, in historical and political writing, and in he literary works of Marlowe. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Drayton.

Focusing on dramatic criticism, this book explores the self authorizing strategies of writers such as Jonson, Dryden, Aphra Behn, Thomas Rymer, Jeremy Collier and Joseph Addison. Cannan focuses on how they established themselves as critics, and paved the way for the birth of dramatic criticism in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England.

This inter-disciplinary study is the first to consider how representations of pirates addressed both national political issues and the agenda of particular interest groups. Looking at a variety of well-known and neglected figures and texts, as well as canonical ones, it shows how attitudes to piracy and privateering were debated and contested between 1550 and 1650. This collection of broad-ranging essays by international figures offers a new perspective on an early modern cultural phenomenon, and satisfies the need for a scholarly, in-depth analysis of this important topic in Renaissance history.

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.

In the early eighteenth century, the household accountant was traditionally female. However, just as women were seen as financial accountants, they were also deeply associated with the literary and narrative accounting inherent in letters and diaries. These are examined alongside property, originality and the development of the early novel.

This book re-places Lamb - as reader, writer and friend - in the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s.It taps into current interest in 'romantic sociability', a close study of the affiliations of writers who used to be grouped as 'the Wordsworth circle' and 'the Keats circle'. This book makes valuable contribution to emerging critical studies of Lamb and his writings. It offers the first book-length study of Lamb's early works and their relationship to other Romantic writers. It discusses Lamb's friendship with key Romantic writers, including Coleridge and Wordsworth and how their relationships informed their works. It gives attention to allusive practices of the time and the development of the essay as a genre.This book makes the case for a re-placing of Lamb as reader, writer and friend in the midst of the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s. Reading his little-known early works alongside others by the likes of Coleridge and Wordsworth, it allows a revealing insight into the creative dynamics of early Romanticism.

This book assesses the mediating role played by 'affections' in eighteenth-century contestations about reason and passion, questioning their availability and desirability outside textual form. It examines the formulation and idealization of this affective category in works by Isaac Watts, Lord Shaftesbury, Mary Hays, William Godwin, Helen Maria Williams, and William Wordsworth. Part I outlines how affections are invested with utopian potential in theology, moral philosophy, and criticism, re-imagining what it might mean to know emotion. Part II considers attempts of writers at the end of the period to draw affections into literature as a means of negotiating a middle way between realism and idealism, expressivism and didacticism, particularity and abstraction, subjectivity and objectivity, femininity and masculinity, radicalism and conservatism, and the foreign and the domestic.

This ground-breaking collection explores the assumptions behind and practices for performance implicit in the manuscripts and playtexts of the medieval and early modern eras, focusing on work which engages with performance-oriented research.

William Blake and the Daughters of Albion offers a challenge to the Blake establishment. By placing some of Blake's early prophetic works in startlingly new historical contexts (most provocatively those of female conduct and pornography) a very different image of the radical Blake emerges. The book shows what can be achieved when a challenging methodology, feminist historicism, is brought to bear on a canonical writer and on now canonized interpretations of his work.

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.

A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies provides an authoritative guide to debate on Elizabethan England's poet laureate. Its twelve chapters cover key topics (such as politics and gender) and provide reception histories for all of the primary texts. Some of today's most prominent Spenser scholars offer lively accounts of debates on the poet, from the Renaissance to the present day. Essential for those producing new research on Spenser, the Companion also provides an ideal introduction to the non-specialist.

As cultural practice, the early modern duel both indicated and shaped the gender assumptions of wealthy young men; it served, in fact, as a nexus for different, often competing, notions of masculinity. As Jennifer Low illustrates by examining the aggression inherent in single combat, masculinity could be understood in spatial terms, social terms, or developmental terms. Low considers each category, developing a corrective to recent analyses of gender in early modern culture by scrutinizing the relationship between social rank and the understanding of masculinity. Reading a variety of documents, including fencing manuals and anti-dueling tracts as well as plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and other dramatists, she demonstrates the interaction between the duel as practice, as stage-device, and as locus of early modern cultural debate.

A Year of Shakespeare gives a uniquely expert and exciting overview of the largest Shakespeare celebration the world has ever known: the World Shakespeare Festival 2012. This is the only book to describe and analyse each of the Festival's 73 productions in well-informed,lively reviews by eminent and up-and-coming scholars and critics from the UK and around the world. A rich resource of critical interest to all students, scholars and lovers of Shakespeare, the book also captures the excitement of this extraordinary event. A Year of Shakespeare provides: * a ground-breaking collection of Shakespearean reviews, covering all of the Festival's productions; * a dynamic visual record through a wide range of production photographs; * incisive analysis of the Festival's significance in the wider context of the Cultural Olympiad 2012. All the world really is a stage, and it's time for curtain-up...

Virginia H. Cope analyzes the transition to modern ideals of identity by tracking a character type, here called the Heroine of Disinterest, that dominated late eighteenth-century British fiction. Best represented in Frances Burney's 1778 Evelina, the Heroine of Disinterest is a young woman of uncertain birth but unshakeable virtue, manifested in her acts of charity and absolute imperviousness to the lure of wealth and status. Although the selfless heroine and the inheritance plot in which she figures are often dismissed as conventional, this book demonstrates that the character was central to mediating the vexed relations among property, education, and identity, unsettled by the rise of a capitalist ethos. Associating disinterest with women rescued the ancient ideal from extinction while also providing the discursive means to divide subjectivity from proprietorship, opening the way for the Romantic ideal of selfhood as the product of experience and reflection rather than inherited wealth and lineage.