Is time gendered? This international, interdisciplinary anthology studies the early modern era to analyse how material objects express, shape, complicate, and extend human concepts of time and how people commemorate time differently. It examines conceptual aspects of time, such as the categories women and men use to define it, and the somatic, lived experiences of time ranging between an instant and the course of family life. Drawing on a wide array of textual and material primary sources, this book assesses the ways that gender and other categories of difference affect understandings of time.

Rigorously inventive and revelatory in its adventurousness, 1650-1850 opens a forum for the discussion, investigation, and analysis of the full range of long-eighteenth-century writing, thinking, and artistry. Combining fresh considerations of prominent authors and artists with searches for overlooked or offbeat elements of the Enlightenment legacy, 1650-1850 delivers a comprehensive but richly detailed rendering of the first days, the first principles, and the first efforts of modern culture. Its pages open to the works of all nations and language traditions, providing a truly global picture of a period that routinely shattered boundaries. Volume 27 of this long-running journal is no exception to this tradition of focused inclusivity. Readers will travel through a blockbuster special feature on the topic of worldmaking and other worlds-on the Enlightenment zest for the discovery, charting, imagining, and evaluating of new worlds, envisioned worlds, utopian worlds, and worlds of the future. Essays in this enthusiastically extraterritorial offering escort readers through the science-fictional worlds of Lady Cavendish, around European gardens, over the high seas, across the American frontiers, into forests and exotic ecosystems, and, in sum, into the unlimited expanses of the Enlightenment mind. Further enlivening the volume is a cavalcade of full-length book reviews evaluating the latest in eighteenth-century scholarship.

A common literary language linked royal absolutism to radical religion and republicanism in seventeenth-century England. Authors from both sides of the Civil Wars, including Milton, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and the Quakers, adapted the analogy between family and state to support radically different visions of political community. They used family metaphors to debate the limits of political authority, rethink gender roles, and imagine community in a period of social and political upheaval. While critical attention has focused on how the common analogy linking father and king, family and state, bolstered royal and paternal claims to authority and obedience, its meaning was in fact intensely contested. In this wide-ranging study, Su Fang Ng analyses the language and metaphors used to describe the relationship between politics and the family in both literary and political writings and offers a fresh perspective on how seventeenth-century literature reflected as well as influenced political thought.

England's Asian Renaissance explores how Asian knowledges, narratives, and customs inflected early modern English literature. Just as Asian imports changed England's tastes and enriched the English language, Eastern themes, characters, and motifs helped shape the country's culture and contributed to its national identity. Questioning long-standing dichotomies between East and West and embracing a capacious understanding of translatio as geographic movement, linquistic transformation, and cultural grafting, the collection gives pride of place to convergence, approximation, and hybridity, thus underscoring the radical mobility of early modern culture. In so doing, England's Asian Renaissance also moves away from entrenched narratives of Western cultural sovereignty to think anew England's debts to Asia. Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

England's Asian Renaissance explores how Asian knowledges, narratives, and customs inflected early modern English literature. Just as Asian imports changed England's tastes and enriched the English language, Eastern themes, characters, and motifs helped shape the country's culture and contributed to its national identity. Questioning long-standing dichotomies between East and West and embracing a capacious understanding of translatio as geographic movement, linguistic transformation, and cultural grafting, the collection gives pride of place to convergence, approximation, and hybridity, thus underscoring the radical mobility of early modern culture. In so doing, England's Asian Renaissance also moves away from entrenched narratives of Western cultural sovereignty to think anew England's debts to Asia.

Portuguese explorations opened the sea-route to Asia, bringing armed trading to the Indian Ocean. This Element examines the impact of the 1511 Portuguese conquest of the port-kingdom of Melaka on early travel literature. Putting into dialogue accounts from Portuguese, mestico, and Malay perspectives, this study re-examines early modern 'discovery' as a cross-cultural trope. Trade and travel were intertwined while structured by religion. Rather than newness or wonder, Portuguese representations focus on recovering what is known and grafting Asian knowledges-including local histories-onto European epistemologies. Framing Portuguese rule as a continuation of the sultanate, they re-spatialize Melaka into a European city. However, this model is complicated by a second one of accidental discovery facilitated by native agents. For Malay texts too, travel traverses known routes and spaces. Malay travelers insert themselves into foreign spaces by forging new kinship alliances, even as indigenous networks were increasingly disrupted by European incursions.

A common literary language linked royal absolutism to radical religion and republicanism in seventeenth-century England. Authors from both sides of the Civil Wars, including Milton, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and the Quakers, adapted the analogy between family and state to support radically different visions of political community. They used family metaphors to debate the limits of political authority, rethink gender roles, and imagine community in a period of social and political upheaval. While critical attention has focused on how the common analogy linking father and king, family and state, bolstered royal and paternal claims to authority and obedience, its meaning was in fact intensely contested. In this wide-ranging study, Su Fang Ng analyses the language and metaphors used to describe the relationship between politics and the family in both literary and political writings and offers a fresh perspective on how seventeenth-century literature reflected as well as influenced political thought.