Making the Novel advances a new cultural reading of the formation of the British novel. Rejecting a teleological narrative of the genre's 'rise', the study examines pre-Defovian fiction, anti-novel discourse, the Richardson-Fielding rivalry, mid-century experimentalism, Sterne and sentimental fiction, representations of Britain, and the creation of a national canon. Through close analysis of key texts, the authors present a dynamic picture of the emergence of the novel, which focuses upon formal innovation, social engagement, and artistic and commercial competition.

This succinct authoritative book offers readers an overview of the origins, characteristics, and changing status of tragicomedy from the 17th century to the present. It explores the work of some of the key English and Irish playwrights associated with the form, the influence of Italian and Spanish theorist-playwrights and the importance of translations of Pierre Corneille's Le Cid. At the turn of the 17th century, English dramatists such as John Marston, John Fletcher, and William Shakespeare began experimenting with plays that mixed elements of tragedy and comedy, producing a blended mode that they themselves called 'tragicomedy'. This book begins by examining the sources of their inspiration and the theatrical achievement that they hoped to gain by confronting an audience with plays that defied the plot and character expectations of 'pure' comedy and tragedy. It goes on to show how, reacting to French models, John Dryden, Shakespeare 'improvers' and other English playwrights developed the form while sowing the seeds of its own vulnerability to parody and obsolescence in the eighteenth century. Discussing nineteenth-century melodrama as in some respects a resurrection of tragicomedy, the final chapter concentrates on plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, and Beckett as examples of the form being revived to create theatrical modes that more adequately represent the perceived complexity of experience.

On December 1727 an intriguing play called Double Falshood; Or, The Distrest Lovers was presented for production by Lewis Theobald, who had it published in January 1728 after a successful run at the TheatreRoyal, Drury Lane, London. The title page to the published version claims that the play was 'Written Originally by W.SHAKESPEARE'. Double Falsehood's plot is a version of the story of Cardenio found in Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605) as translated by Thomas Shelton, published in 1612 though in circulation earlier. Documentary records testify to the existence of a play, certainly performed in 1613, by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, probably entitled The History of Cardenio and presumed to have been lost. The audience in 1727 would certainly have recognised stage situations and dramatic structures and patterns reminiscent of those in Shakespeare's canonical plays as well as many linguistic echoes. This intriguing complex textual and performance history is thoroughly explored and debated in this fully annotated edition, including the views of other major Shakespeare scholars. The illustrated introduction provides a comprehensive overview of the debates and opinions surrounding the play and the text is fully annotated with detailed commentary notes as in any Arden edition.

This succinct authoritative book offers readers an overview of the origins, characteristics, and changing status of tragicomedy from the 17th century to the present. It explores the work of some of the key English and Irish playwrights associated with the form, the influence of Italian and Spanish theorist-playwrights and the importance of translations of Pierre Corneille's Le Cid. At the turn of the 17th century, English dramatists such as John Marston, John Fletcher, and William Shakespeare began experimenting with plays that mixed elements of tragedy and comedy, producing a blended mode that they themselves called 'tragicomedy'. This book begins by examining the sources of their inspiration and the theatrical achievement that they hoped to gain by confronting an audience with plays that defied the plot and character expectations of 'pure' comedy and tragedy. It goes on to show how, reacting to French models, John Dryden, Shakespeare 'improvers' and other English playwrights developed the form while sowing the seeds of its own vulnerability to parody and obsolescence in the eighteenth century. Discussing nineteenth-century melodrama as in some respects a resurrection of tragicomedy, the final chapter concentrates on plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, and Beckett as examples of the form being revived to create theatrical modes that more adequately represent the perceived complexity of experience.

On December 1727 an intriguing play called "Double Falshood; Or, The Distrest Lovers" was presented for production by Lewis Theobald, who had it published in January 1728 after a successful run at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London. The title page to the published version claims that the play was 'Written Originally by W.SHAKESPEARE'. Double Falsehood's plot is a version of the story of Cardenio found in Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605) as translated by Thomas Shelton, published in 1612 though in circulation earlier. Documentary records testify to the existence of a play, certainly performed in 1613, by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, probably entitled The History of Cardenio and presumed to have been lost. The audience in 1727 would certainly have recognized stage situations and dramatic structures and patterns reminiscent of those in Shakespeare's canonical plays as well as many linguistic echoes. This intriguing complex textual and performance history is thoroughly explored and debated in this fully annotated edition, including the views of other major Shakespeare scholars. The illustrated introduction provides a comprehensive overview of the debates and opinions surrounding the play and the text is fully annotated with detailed commentary notes as in any Arden edition.

This book advances a new cultural reading of the formation of the British novel. Rejecting a teleological narrative of the genre's 'rise' and through close analysis of key texts, the authors present a dynamic picture of the emergence of the novel, which focuses upon formal innovation, social engagement, and artistic and commercial competition.

This book offers an accessible, single-volume introduction to a wider range of Jonathan Swift's writing than is usually covered in such treatments of him. Primarily a work of biographically-inflected literary criticism, it draws on insights furnished by feminist and postcolonial literary theories when those are relevant. Its portrait of this charismatic writer confronts the complexities in character, style, and rhetorical posture that make him enduring and important. Swift is situated as a career-clergyman rather than an imaginative writer, whose ecclesiastical politics, geographical and national situation in Ireland, and obliquities of temperament made him the challenging writer he was. Commencing with an account of the domestic and foreign contexts in which Swift's life was rooted, the book provides a chronological account of that life, putting appropriate emphasis on its controversial and contested nature. His writing is examined chronologically, progressing through his early writing, early religious satire, English political and personal writings, and the Irish phase of his life and writing. Intersecting those sequential chapters are thematic and textual chapters. The thematic chapters engage with the nature of Swift's religion and of his relationships with women. Textual chapters are devoted to Swift's too often neglected poetic achievement and to Gulliver's Travels. The book's privileging of Gulliver's Travels needs no apology: this is still the work of fiction upon which Swift's reputation as an imaginative writer rests. Two full chapters are accorded to it in which it is restored to the Irish context of its composition. Additionally, in the chapter on Swift's Irish religious and political writings, the missing religious dimension of Gulliver's Travels a work that draws on Utopian writing and might have said something about Utopian religion is considered as part of an analysis of Swift's religious vocation.