This provocative new work explores the Puritan and Protestant roots of American sexual identity and culture.
Offering both historical and interdisciplinary breadth, it charts Protestant influence on the American character from Cotton Mather to Kenneth Starr. From witch trials to pickaxe murderers, from brothels to convents, and from slavery to Toni Morrison's Paradise, these essays provide fascinating insights into American sexual and religious conventions and beliefs.

This provocative new work explores the Puritan and Protestant roots of American sexual identity and culture.
Offering both historical and interdisciplinary breadth, it charts Protestant influence on the American character from Cotton Mather to Kenneth Starr. From witch trials to pickaxe murderers, from brothels to convents, and from slavery to Toni Morrison's Paradise, these essays provide fascinating insights into American sexual and religious conventions and beliefs.

This revised edition of King Richard II: Critical Tradition increases our the play was received and understood by critics, editors and general readers. Updated with a new introduction providing a survey of critical responses to Richard II since the 1990s to the present day, this volume offers, in separate sections, both critical opinions about the play across the centuries and an evaluation of their positions within and their impact on the reception of the play. The updated introduction offers an overview of recent criticism on the play in relation to feminist theory, queer theory, performance theory and ecocriticism. The chronological arrangement of the text-excerpts engages the readers in a direct and unbiased dialogue, whereas the introduction offers a critical evaluation from a current stance, including modern theories and methods. Featuring criticism by A.C. Swinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, this volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of the play and of the traditions of Shakespearean criticism surrounding it as they have developed from century to century.

Nicholas F. Radel's Understanding Edmund White, the first book-length critical study of White's work, examines America's best-known gay novelist within the changing social contexts of the past half-century, when gay and lesbian people moved from being seen as psychologically deviant to being increasingly accepted as productive members of society. Radel explores the ways White documents this cultural transition, in both his fiction and his nonfiction, and contributes to it by making gay writing a source for new knowledge of sexuality.
Taking into account recent scholarship on White, Radel provides insightful analysis of the author's autobiographical novels and short stories, from A Boy's Own Story through The Married Man and Chaos. Understanding Edmund White makes White's early experimental novels, Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and Caracole, as well as his later historical fiction, Fanny and Hotel de Dream, accessible by showing how their emphasis on sexuality and social change connects them to the autobiographical fictions. Radel also shows how White's most recent novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend, deftly combines historical and autobiographical narratives to become one of the author's most nuanced explorations of American sexuality. Understanding Edmund White additionally contains a new, previously unpublished interview with White that provides revealing information about the impact his work as a biographer has had on his later fiction.
Grounded in ongoing critical debates in social and literary theory central to understanding contemporary gay literature, Radel's introduction to White's complex literary vision portrays the writer's evolving perceptions of the issues confronting his gay characters and narrators, boys and men who struggle in the early autobiographical novels to achieve a sense of self-worth but assume in the later novels and nonfiction confident voices that speak for and about American culture and sexualities of all types.

An earlier comedy from the Bard, "The Taming of the Shrew" brings us the feisty Katherina (the 'Shrew' of the title) and her peers. Addressing issues of cruelty and gender relations, this 'modern' play has enjoyed many adaptations on both the stage and the screen. Part of the "Barnes & Noble Shakespeare" series, this title features newly edited texts prepared by leading scholars from Great Britain and America, in collaboration with one of the world's foremost Shakespeare authorities, David Scott Kastan of Columbia University. Together they have produced texts as faithful as possible to those that Shakespeare wrote.