Is modernity synonymous with progress? Did the Renaissance really break with the cyclical, agrarian time of the Middle Ages, inaugurating a new concept of irreversible time in a secular culture defined by development? How does methodology affect scholarly responses to the idea of the future in the past? This collection of interdisciplinary essays from the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies, politics and intellectual history offers new answers to these commonplace questions. They explore elite and popular culture, women and men's experiences, and the encounter between East and West, providing a comparative view on the range of personal, political and social practices with which early modern people planned for, imagined, manipulated or even rejected the future. Examining poetry, architecture, colonial exploration, technology, drama, satire, wills, childbirth and deathbed rituals, humanism, religious radicalism and republicanism, this collection provides new readings of canonical early modern texts and insights into popular culture.

With a foreword by Peter Burke.

Is modernity synonymous with progress? Did the Renaissance really break with the cyclical, agrarian time of the Middle Ages, inaugurating a new concept of irreversible time in a secular culture defined by development? How does methodology affect scholarly responses to the idea of the future in the past? This collection of interdisciplinary essays from the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies, politics and intellectual history offers new answers to these commonplace questions. They explore elite and popular culture, women and men's experiences, and the encounter between East and West, providing a comparative view on the range of personal, political and social practices with which early modern people planned for, imagined, manipulated or even rejected the future. Examining poetry, architecture, colonial exploration, technology, drama, satire, wills, childbirth and deathbed rituals, humanism, religious radicalism and republicanism, this collection provides new readings of canonical early modern texts and insights into popular culture. With a foreword by Peter Burke.

An innovative suite of poems for the drone age The Blue Split Compartments is a complex and powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring the relationships between military drone operators and their victims. Drawing on chatroom logs, military policy manuals, pattern of life archives, and accounts by witnesses around the world, these poems document the consequences of the perpetual and 'everywhere war.' With its sophisticated interplay of diction, rhetoric, syntax, positioning, allusion, and sonic quality, this book offers a linguistically virtuosic and deeply humane x-ray of the discursive and militaristic systems that join us in mutual dissolution. Excerpt from "Opened" This is the box, frozen against hierarchy at a value of some $10m, simply a form of being; surgeon's box, patient's wound, an idea of enclosure that can fit any medium. The gaze is on the side of things. The angel of evil could not have done that. A child is in heaven. The box is empty, saying nothing but "construction." It really is like swatting flies; we can do it forever easily and you feel nothing.

Poetry and Bondage is a groundbreaking and comprehensive study of the history of poetic constraint. For millennia, poets have compared verse to bondage - chains, fetters, cells, or slavery. Tracing this metaphor from Ovid through the present, Andrea Brady reveals the contributions to poetics of people who are actually in bondage. How, the book asks, does our understanding of the lyric - and the political freedoms and forms of human being it is supposed to epitomise - change, if we listen to the voices of enslaved and imprisoned poets? Bringing canonical and contemporary poets into dialogue, from Thomas Wyatt to Rob Halpern, Emily Dickinson to M. NourbeSe Philip, and Phillis Wheatley to Lisa Robertson, the book also examines poetry that emerged from the plantation and the prison. This book is a major intervention in lyric studies and literary criticism, interrogating the whiteness of those disciplines and exploring the possibilities for committed poetry today.

The Strong Room collects poems found, co-produced and overheard, as charms against damage. In times of accelerated peril the poem's fragile stanzas can be a holding space, whose strength is too weak to contain the world, and too strong to resist it. These poems seek to build this paradoxical space of safety, pleasure, anger and danger as an expanding room for everyone who lives in love or fear.

ANDREA BRADY was born in Philadelphia in 1974, and has lived in the UK since 1996. She studied at Columbia and Cambridge University, and now teaches at Queen Mary University of London. She is the director of the Archive of the Now and co-publisher of Barque Press. This is her fifth book of poems, comprising two sequences, Embrace (previously published separately) and Presenting.

An innovative suite of poems for the drone age The Blue Split Compartments is a complex and powerful sequence of lyric poems exploring the relationships between military drone operators and their victims. Drawing on chatroom logs, military policy manuals, pattern of life archives, and accounts by witnesses around the world, these poems document the consequences of the perpetual and 'everywhere war.' With its sophisticated interplay of diction, rhetoric, syntax, positioning, allusion, and sonic quality, this book offers a linguistically virtuosic and deeply humane x-ray of the discursive and militaristic systems that join us in mutual dissolution. Excerpt from "Opened" This is the box, frozen against hierarchy at a value of some $10m, simply a form of being; surgeon's box, patient's wound, an idea of enclosure that can fit any medium. The gaze is on the side of things. The angel of evil could not have done that. A child is in heaven. The box is empty, saying nothing but "construction." It really is like swatting flies; we can do it forever easily and you feel nothing.