Global Milton and Visual Art
Global Milton and Visual Art showcases the aesthetic appropriation and reinterpretation of the works and legend of the early modern English poet and politician John Milton in diverse eras, regions, and media: book illustrations, cinema, digital reworkings, monuments, painting, sculpture, shieldry, and stained glass. It innovates an inclusive approach to Milton's literary art, especially his masterpiece Paradise Lost, in global contemporary aesthetics via intertextual and interdisciplinary relati...
Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Campos Ibericos: Bucknell Studies in Iberian Literatures and Cultures)
Seafaring activity for trade and travel was dominant throughout the Spanish Empire, and in the worldview and imagination of its inhabitants, the specter of shipwreck loomed large. Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World probes this preoccupation by examining portrayals of nautical disasters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture. The essays collected here showcase shipwreck’s symbolic deployment to question colonial expansion and transoceanic trade; to critique...
Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder
by Assistant Professor of English Sarah Tindal Kareem and Sarah Tindal Kareem
A footprint materializes mysteriously on a deserted shore; a giant helmet falls from the sky; a traveler awakens to find his horse dangling from a church steeple. Eighteenth-century fiction brims with moments such as these, in which the prosaic rubs up against the marvelous. While it is a truism that the period's literature is distinguished by its realism and air of probability, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder argues that wonder is integral to-rather than antithetical to...
Mr. Turbulent (Restoration Drama, #1)
Mr. Turbulent (1682) is an anonymous city comedy which starred popular comic actors and young actresses of great appeal. The play was produced in the immediate aftermath of the Exclusion Crisis. This first-ever critical edition offers a fully annotated modernized version of the text, together with an introduction that examines the contexts of the play. The editor also discusses at length such topics as the political dimension of the Moorfields setting and the green spaces of Restoration London....
@text: The Art of John Webster, first published in 1972, is a study of the three extant plays of Webster known to be solely his work. These plays are seen as attempts to achieve in literature the effects of the baroque, a term which related Webster to the larger developments of European art. Their content is analysed in terms of a consistent opposition between evil and the law. The book seeks to re-establish a base for the claims that must be made for Webster as a serious artist. This title will...
The Poetry of Marcia Belisarda: A Bilingual Edition (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, #545)
Sor Maria de Santa Isabel, writing under the pseudonym Marcia Belisarda, was one of the most prolific female poets of seventeenth-century Spain. The body of her known work is preserved in one manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional Espanola (Madrid), ms. 7469, prepared for publication but never published. Belisarda has received some critical attention; she is represented in a number of anthologies of women's writings from Iberia, and a recent edition of her poems appeared in Spanish (2015). The pr...
Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes unpacks the interpretive problems of colonial treaty-making and uses them to illuminate canonical works from the period. Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treaties—“a stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records.” A noted scholar of the “textual conditions” of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, includi...
Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)
by Naya Tsentourou
Miton and Early Modern Devotional Culture analyses the representation of public and private prayer in John Milton’s poetry and prose, paying particular attention to the ways seventeenth-century prayer is imagined as embodied in sounds, gestures, postures, and emotional responses. Naya Tsentourou demonstrates Milton’s profound engagement with prayer, and how this is driven by a consistent and ardent effort to experience one’s address to God as inclusive of body and spirit and as loaded with affec...
Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture)
by Tim William Machan
This book provocatively argues that much of what English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion and literature, they remembered by means of medieval and modern Scandinavia. These memories, in turn, figured in something even broader. Protestant and fundamentally monarchical, the Nordic countries constituted a politically kindred spirit in contrast with France, Italy and Spain. Along with the so-called Celtic f...
This book explores how human interaction in the frontier zones of the early modern Mediterranean was represented during the period, across genres and languages. The Muslim-Christian divide in the region produced an unusual kind of slavery, fostered a surge in conversion to Islam and offered an ideal habitat for Catholic martyrdom. The book argues that identities and alterities were multiple, that there was no war between Christianity and Islam and that commerce prevailed over ideology and dogma....
A Taste for the Foreign examines foreignness as a crucial aesthetic category for the development of prose fiction from Jacques Amyot's 1547 translation of The Ethiopian Story to Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century version of The Thousand and One Nights. Concentrating on the most successful examples of some of the most important sub-genres of prose fiction in the long seventeenth century-heroic romances, shorter urban novels, fictional memoirs, and extraordinary voyages-the book examines h...
Originally published in 1963. Moliere's plays rank among the great comic achievements in the history of the stage. Yet few attempts have been made to understand them as expressing the historical context of the author's time. Most frequently they have been interpreted from the point of view of purely literary history, while the characters have been seen as universal comic types. Lionel Gossman reappraises Moliere's comedy in the light of historical experience and interprets it in terms of the con...
Recent years have witnessed a surge in early modern ecostudies, many devoted to Shakespearean drama. Yet in this burgeoning discipline, travel writing appears moored in historicization, inorganic subjects are far less prevalent than organic ones, and freshwater sites are hardly visited. For All Waters explores these uncharted wetscapes. Lowell Duckert shows that when playwrights and travel writers such as Sir Walter Raleigh physically interacted with rivers, glaciers, monsoons, and swamps, the...
The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford Handbooks)
The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare presents a broad sampling of current historical scholarship on the period of Shakespeare's career that will assist and stimulate scholars of his poems and plays. Rather than merely attempting to summarize the historical 'background' to Shakespeare, individual chapters seek to exemplify a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies currently used in historical research on the early modern period that can inform close analysis of literature. Differe...
English Mythography in its European Context, 1500-1650 (Classical Presences)
by Anna-Maria Hartmann
Greco-Roman mythology and its reception are at the heart of the European Renaissance, and mythographies-texts that collected and explained ancient myths-were considered indispensable companions to any reader of literature. Despite the importance of this genre, English mythographies have not gained sustained critical attention, largely because they have been wrongly considered mere copies of their European counterparts. This volume focuses on the English mythographies written between 1577 and 164...
Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England
by Neil Rhodes
This volume explores the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and seeks to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is the 'common' in its double sense of something shared and something base, and it argues that making common the work of God is at the heart of the English Reformation just as making common the literature of antiquity and of early modern Europe is at the heart of the...
In this searching and wide-ranging book, Timothy J. Reiss seeks to explain how the concept of literature that we accept today first took shape between the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, a time of cultural transformation. Drawing on literary, political, and philosophical texts from Central and Western Europe, Reiss maintains that by the early eighteenth century divergent views concerning gender, politics, science, taste, and the role of the writer had consolidated, and literatur...
This volume presents a new approach to Spanish Baroque drama, inspired by Foucauldian discourse archeology, whose rare fusion of meticulous philology and ambitious theory will be exciting and fruitful both for specialists of Spanish literature and for anyone invested in the history of European thought. Detailed readings are dedicated to some of the most prominent plays by Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca, both autos sacramentales (El viaje del alma; El divino Orfeo; La lepra de Constantino)...