This volume contains primary materials and introductory essays on the historical, critical and theoretical study of "national literature," focusing on the years 1550 ? 1850 and the impact of ideas of nationhood from this period on contemporary literature and culture.

The book is helpfully divided into three comprehensive parts. Part One contains a selection of primary materials from various English-speaking nations, written between the early modern and the early Victorian eras. These include political essays, poetry, religious writing, and literary theory by major authors and thinkers ranging from Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet and David Hume to Adam Kidd and Peter Du Ponceau. Parts Two and Three contain critical essays by leading scholars in the field: Part Two introduces and contextualizes the primary material and Part Three brings the discussion up-to-date by discussing its impact on contemporary issues such as canon-formation and globalization.

The volume is prefaced by an extensive introduction to and overview of recent studies in nationalism, the history and debates of nationalism through major literary periods and discussion of why the question of nationhood is important.

Reading the Nation in English is a comprehensive resource, offering coherent, accessible readings on the ideologies, discourses and practices of nationhood.

Contributors: Terence N. Bowers, Andrea Cabajsky, Sarah Corse, Andrew Escobedo, Andrew Hadfield, Deborah Madsen, Elizabeth Sauer, Imre Szeman, Julia M. Wright.

Locating John Milton's works in national and international contexts, and applying a variety of approaches from literary to historical, philosophical, and postcolonial, Milton and Toleration offers a wide-ranging exploration of how Milton's visions of tolerance reveal deeper movements in the history of the imagination. Milton is often enlisted in stories about the rise of toleration: his advocacy of open debate in defending press freedoms, his condemnation of persecution, and his criticism of ecclesiastical and political hierarchies have long been read as milestones on the road to toleration. However, there is also an intolerant Milton, whose defence of religious liberty reached only as far as Protestants. This book of sixteen essays by leading scholars analyses tolerance in Milton's poetry and prose, examining the literary means by which tolerance was questioned, observed, and became an object of meditation. Organized in three parts, 'Revising Whig Accounts, ' 'Philosophical Engagements, ' 'Poetry and Rhetoric, ' the contributors, including leading Milton scholars from the USA, Canada, and the UK, address central toleration issues including heresy, violence, imperialism, republicanism, Catholicism, Islam, church community, liberalism, libertinism, natural law, legal theory, and equity. A pan-European perspective is presented through analysis of Milton's engagement with key figures and radical groups. All of Milton's major works are given an airing, including prose and poetry, and the book suggests that Milton's writings are a significant medium through which to explore the making of modern ideas of tolerance.

Much has been written about women of the English Renaissance, but few examples of women's writing from that era have been readily available until now. This remarkable anthology assembles for the first time 144 primary texts and documents written by women between 1550 and 1700 and reveals an unprecedented view of the intellectual and literary lives of women in early modern England.
The writings range from poetry to philosophical treatises, addressing a wide array of subjects including law, gender, education, motherhood, medicine, religion, life-writing, and the arts. Each selection is paired with a beautifully reproduced facsimile of the text's original source manuscript, allowing a glimpse into the literary past that will lead the reader to truly appreciate the care and craft with which these women writers prepared their texts. This essential anthology is a captivating guide to the legacy of early modern women's literature and its authors that must not be overlooked.

Much has been written about women of the English Renaissance, but few examples of women's writing from that era have been readily available until now. This remarkable anthology assembles for the first time 144 primary texts and documents written by women between 1550 and 1700 and reveals an unprecedented view of the intellectual and literary lives of women in early modern England.
The writings range from poetry to philosophical treatises, addressing a wide array of subjects including law, gender, education, motherhood, medicine, religion, life-writing, and the arts. Each selection is paired with a beautifully reproduced facsimile of the text's original source manuscript, allowing a glimpse into the literary past that will lead the reader to truly appreciate the care and craft with which these women writers prepared their texts. This essential anthology is a captivating guide to the legacy of early modern women's literature and its authors that must not be overlooked.

John Milton lived at a time when English nationalism became entangled with principles and policies of cultural, religious, and ethnic tolerance. Combining political theory with close readings of key texts, this study examines how Milton's polemical and imaginative literature intersects with representations of English Protestant nationhood. Through detailed case studies of Milton's works, Elizabeth Sauer charts the fluctuating narrative of Milton's literary engagements in relation to social, political, and philosophical themes such as ecclesiology, exclusionism, Irish alterity, natural law, disestablishment, geography, and intermarriage. In so doing, Sauer shows the extent to which nationhood and toleration can be subjected to literary and historicist inquiry. Her study makes a salient contribution to Milton studies and to scholarship on early modern literature and the development of the early nation-state.

John Milton lived at a time when English nationalism became entangled with principles and policies of cultural, religious, and ethnic tolerance. Combining political theory with close readings of key texts, this study examines how Milton's polemical and imaginative literature intersects with representations of English Protestant nationhood. Through detailed case studies of Milton's works, Elizabeth Sauer charts the fluctuating narrative of Milton's literary engagements in relation to social, political, and philosophical themes such as ecclesiology, exclusionism, Irish alterity, natural law, disestablishment, geography, and intermarriage. In so doing, Sauer shows the extent to which nationhood and toleration can be subjected to literary and historicist inquiry. Her study makes a salient contribution to Milton studies and to scholarship on early modern literature and the development of the early nation-state.

The New Milton Criticism seeks to emphasize ambivalence and discontinuity in Milton's work and interrogate the assumptions and certainties in previous Milton scholarship. Contributors to the volume move Milton's open-ended poetics to the centre of Milton studies by showing how analysing irresolvable questions - religious, philosophical and literary critical - transforms interpretation and enriches appreciation of his work. The New Milton Criticism encourages scholars to embrace uncertainties in his writings rather than attempt to explain them away. Twelve critics from a range of countries, approaches and methodologies explore these questions in these new readings of Paradise Lost and other works. Sure to become a focus of debate and controversy in the field, this volume is a truly original contribution to early modern studies.

This volume contains primary materials and introductory essays on the historical, critical and theoretical study of "national literature", focusing on the years 1550 - 1850 and the impact of ideas of nationhood from this period on contemporary literature and culture. The book is helpfully divided into three comprehensive parts. Part One contains a selection of primary materials from various English-speaking nations, written between the early modern and the early Victorian eras. These include political essays, poetry, religious writing, and literary theory by major authors and thinkers ranging from Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet and David Hume to Adam Kidd and Peter Du Ponceau. Parts Two and Three contain critical essays by leading scholars in the field: Part Two introduces and contextualizes the primary material and Part Three brings the discussion up-to-date by discussing its impact on contemporary issues such as canon-formation and globalization. The volume is prefaced by an extensive introduction to and overview of recent studies in nationalism, the history and debates of nationalism through major literary periods and discussion of why the question of nationhood is important. Reading the Nation in English is a comprehensive resource, offering coherent, accessible readings on the ideologies, discourses and practices of nationhood. Contributors: Terence N. Bowers, Andrea Cabajsky, Sarah Corse, Andrew Escobedo, Andrew Hadfield, Deborah Madsen, Elizabeth Sauer, Imre Szeman, Julia M. Wright.

Books and Readers in Early Modern England Material Studies Edited by Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer. Afterword by Stephen Orgel "A fascinating collection."--"History" "Showcasing an innovative, interdisciplinary group of essays, "Books and Readers in Early Modern England" will interest scholars of bibliography, collections studies, literature, and history. This book should also prove useful in the classroom. . . . It is only fitting that a book so productively devoted to the history of textual consumption should itself appeal to a wide audience."--"Albion." "Books and Readers in Early Modern England" examines readers, reading, and publication practices from the Renaissance to the Restoration. The essays draw on an array of documentary evidence--from library catalogs, prefaces, title pages and dedications, marginalia, commonplace books, and letters to ink, paper, and bindings--to explore individual reading habits and experiences in a period of religious dissent, political instability, and cultural transformation. Chapters in the volume cover oral, scribal, and print cultures, examining the emergence of the "public spheres" of reading practices. Contributors, who include Christopher Grose, Ann Hughes, David Scott Kastan, Kathleen Lynch, William Sherman, and Peter Stallybrass, investigate interactions among publishers, texts, authors, and audience. They discuss the continuity of the written word and habits of mind in the world of print, the formation and differentiation of readerships, and the increasing influence of public opinion. The work demonstrates that early modern publications appeared in a wide variety of forms--from periodical literature to polemical pamphlets--and reflected the radical transformations occurring at the time in the dissemination of knowledge through the written word. These forms were far more ephemeral, and far more widely available, than modern stereotypes of writing from this period suggest. Jennifer Andersen teaches English at California State University, San Bernardino. Elizabeth Sauer is Professor of English at Brock University, Canada. Material Texts 2001 312 pages 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 25 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-1794-0 Paper $29.95s 19.50 World Rights Literature, History, Library Science and Publishing

The mass production and dissemination of printed materials were unparalleled in England during the 1640s and 50s. While theatrical performance traditionally defined literary culture, print steadily gained ground, becoming more prevalent and enabling the formation of various networks of writers, readers, and consumers of books. In conjunction with an evolving print culture, seventeenth-century England experienced a rise of political instability and religious dissent, the closing of the theatres, and the emergence of a middle class. Elizabeth Sauer examines how this played out in the nation's book and print industry with an emphasis on performative writings, their materiality, reception, and their extra-judicial function. 'Paper-contestations' and Textual Communities in England challenges traditional readings of literary history, offers new insights into drama and its transgression of boundaries, and proposes a fresh approach to the politics of consensus and contestation that animated seventeenth-century culture and that distinguishes current scholarly debates about this period.

The New Milton Criticism seeks to emphasize ambivalence and discontinuity in Milton's work and interrogate the assumptions and certainties in previous Milton scholarship. Contributors to the volume move Milton's open-ended poetics to the centre of Milton studies by showing how analysing irresolvable questions - religious, philosophical and literary critical - transforms interpretation and enriches appreciation of his work. The New Milton Criticism encourages scholars to embrace uncertainties in his writings rather than attempt to explain them away. Twelve critics from a range of countries, approaches and methodologies explore these questions in these new readings of Paradise Lost and other works. Sure to become a focus of debate and controversy in the field, this volume is a truly original contribution to early modern studies.

The years 1660 to 1714 represent a fraught transitional period, one caught between two now dominant periodization rubrics: early modern and the long eighteenth century. Containing narratives of disruption, restoration, and reconfiguration, Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660-1714 explores the conjunctions and disjunctions between historical and literary developments in this period, when the sociable, rivalrous textual world of letters registered and accelerated changes. Each of the volume's four parts highlights the relationship of various literary forms to a different kind of transformation - generic, ideological, cultural, or local. The five chapters in each section rigorously probe the conditions that affected the period's literary transformations, and interrogate the traditions that canonical and less established writers inherited, adapted, and often challenged. In making a case for an early mimetically produced English nation, this book, through its concentration on literary evidence and transitions also makes innovative contributions to an understanding of nationalism in the period.

Women in 16th- and 17th-century Britain read, annotated, circulated, inventoried, cherished, criticized, prescribed, and proscribed books in various historically distinctive ways. Yet, unlike that of their male counterparts, the study of women's reading practices and book ownership has been an elusive and largely overlooked field. In thirteen probing essays, Women's Bookscapes brings together the work of internationally renowned scholars investigating key questions about early modern British women's figurative, material, and cultural relationships with books. What constitutes evidence of women's readerly engagement? How did women use books to achieve personal, political, religious, literary, economic, social, familial, or communal goals? How does new evidence of women's libraries and book usage challenge received ideas about gender in relation to knowledge, education, confessional affiliations, family ties, and sociability? How do digital tools offer new possibilities for the recovery of information on early modern women readers? The volume's three-part structure highlights case studies of individual readers and their libraries; analyses of readers and readership in the context of their interpretive communities; and new types of scholarly evidence-lists of confiscated books and convent rules, for example-as well as new methodologies and technologies for ongoing research in the field. These essays dismantle binaries of private and public; reading and writing; female and male literary engagement and production; and ownership and authorship. Women's Bookscapes is interdisciplinary, timely, cohesive, and concise. Its fresh and revisionary approaches cultivate this burgeoning field and diversify research and analytical methods for current and future scholars. The volume makes substantial contributions to scholarship on early modern material culture; book history and print culture; women's literary and cultural history; library studies; and reading and collecting practices more generally.

The mass production and dissemination of printed materials were unparalleled in England during the 1640s and 50s. While theatrical performance traditionally defined literary culture, print steadily gained ground, becoming more prevalent and enabling the formation of various networks of writers, readers, and consumers of books.In conjunction with an evolving print culture, seventeenth-century England experienced a rise of political instability and religious dissent, the closing of the theatres, and the emergence of a middle class. Elizabeth Sauer examines how this played out in the nation's book and print industry with an emphasis on performative writings, their materiality, reception, and their extra-judicial function.'Paper-contestations' and Textual Communities in England challenges traditional readings of literary history, offers new insights into drama and its transgression of boundaries, and proposes a fresh approach to the politics of consensus and contestation that animated seventeenth-century culture and that distinguishes current scholarly debates about this period.

Scholarly criticism of John Milton's writings has in recent decades been distinguished by a methodological prudence that separates it from other forms of literary scholarship. One critic, however, stands apart from his colleagues and has consistently offered a corrective to this prudence: Balachandra Rajan. In "Milton and the Climates of Reading," Elizabeth Sauer undertakes the daunting work of bringing together a selection of Rajan's essays on Milton, some hitherto unpublished, in order to chart trends and changes in Milton scholarship over the last sixty years and to consider future directions in this vital field of inquiry.

This collection, which is framed by Sauer's insightful introduction and an eloquent afterword by Joseph Wittreich, demonstrates Rajan's critical range and his ability to adapt to 'new' ideas, always reformulating them in his own characteristic and individual manner. "Milton and the Climates of Reading" offers timely statements about the ways in which Milton's writings not only addressed their own time, but also speak profoundly and powerfully to ours.