This collection of essays by experts in Renaissance and Gothic studies tracks the lines of connection between Gothic sensibilities and the discursive network of the Renaissance. The texts covered encompass poetry, epic narratives, ghost stories, prose dialogues, political pamphlets and Shakespeare's texts, read alongside those of other playwrights. The authors show that the Gothic sensibility addresses subversive fantasies of transgression, be this in regard to gender (troubling stable notions of masculinity and femininity), social orders (challenging hegemonic, patriarchal or sovereign power), or disciplinary discourses (dictating what is deemed licit and what illicit or deviant). They relate these issues back to the early modern period as a moment of transition, in which categories of individual, gendered, racial and national identity began to emerge, and connect the religious and the pictorial turn within early modern textual production to a reassessment of Gothic culture. -- .

Ecocritical Concerns and the Australian Continent investigates literary, historical, anthropological, and linguistic perspectives in connection with activist engagements. The necessary cross-fertilization between these different perspectives throughout this volume emerges in the resonances between essays exploring recurring concerns ranging from biodiversity and preservation policies to the devastating effects of the mining industries, to present concerns and futuristic visions of the effects of climate change. Of central concern in all of these contexts is the impact of settler colonialism and an increasing turn to indigenous knowledge systems. A number of chapters engage with questions of ecological imperialism in relation to specific sociohistorical moments and effects, probing early colonial encounters between settlers and indigenous people, or rereading specific forms of colonial literature. Other essays take issue with past and present constructions of indigeneity in different contexts, as well as with indigenous resistance against such ascriptions, while the importance of an understanding of indigenous notions of “care for country� is taken up from a variety of different disciplinary angles in terms of interconnectedness, anchoredness, living country, and living heritage. 

A pioneering collection of articles on fictionalized biographies of the Romantics in contemporary fiction and drama. It appears that the lives of the British Romantics and the myths surrounding them have a special appeal for contemporary writers.The present volume sets out to explore this renewed interest in Romantic artist-figures in the context of the current renaissance of 'life-writing'. The essays collected here deal with Romantic 'biofictions' by such authors as Peter Ackroyd, Adrian Mitchell, Ann Jellicoe, Liz Lochhead, Judith Chernaik, Amanda Prantera, Robert Nye, Tom Stoppard, Howard Brenton, Edward Bond, and others. Thomas Chatterton, William Blake, James Hogg, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Polidori, John Clare, and -- most prominently -- Lord Byron featureas the 'biographical subjects' in the works discussed.