100 Years of Innovation: A Legacy of Pedagogy & Research
In 1914, the University of Delaware established a course in chemical engineering. A century later, the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is one of the leading academic departments at the University of Delaware and one of top chemical engineering programs in the United States. In 100 Years of Innovation, historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk examines the […]
Abigail Field Mott’s The Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano: A Scholarly Edition
In 1829, Samuel Wood and Sons, a New York publisher of children’s literature, printed and sold the Quaker Abigail Field Mott’s Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano. Mott adapted Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, a bestselling autobiography first published in London in 1789, for Black children studying at New York African Free Schools, one of the first educational […]
Abstraction and the Classical Ideal, 1760-1920
This study traces an important but largely overlooked conception of abstraction in art form from its roots in eighteenth-century empirical epistemology to its application in the pursuit of ideal form from Joshua Reynolds to Piet Mondrian. Theorized by Enlightenment philosophy as a means of discovering ideal essence by purging natural form of its accidental and […]
Action and Reaction: Proceedings of a Symposium to Commemorate the Tercentenary of Newton’s Principia
This collection of essays reflects the depth of inquiry and diversity of research that have characterized the last generation of work on Sir Isaac Newton.
Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments
Acts of Reading examines how John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments shaped reading and interpretive practice in the early modern period and addresses the impact of recent electronic editions of Foxe’s text on current reading practice and scholarship. The collection draws on history-of-the-book scholarship to make a plea for the centrality of Foxe to any discussion of Renaissance literary […]
Admired and Understood: The Poetry of Aphra Behn
Admired and Understood analyzes Behn’s only pure verse collection, Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), and situates her in her literary milieu. Her book demonstrates her desire for acceptance in her literary culture, to be “admired and understood,” the antithesis of what many surmise from reading her other works—that she saw herself primarily as a guerilla critic of her […]
Advertising the Self in Renaissance France: Lemaire, Marot, and Rabelais
Advertising the Self in Renaissance France is a study of how authors and readers are represented in printed editions of three major literary figures of the French Renaissance: Jean Lemaire de Belges, Clément Marot, and François Rabelais. Print culture is marked by an anxiety of reception that became much more pronounced with increasingly anonymous and […]
African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States
Scholars of the African Americas are sometimes segregated from one another by region or period, by language, or by discipline. Bringing together essays on fashion, the visual arts, film, literature, and history, this volume shows how our understanding of the African diaspora in the Americas can be enriched by crossing disciplinary boundaries to recontextualize images, […]
Against Power: For an Overhaul of Critical Theory
In his latest book in the study of power, Giacomo Marramao focuses on the work of two great Central European writers, Elias Canetti and Herta Müller, each of whom, in different periods and contexts, offered a philosophical genealogy of forms of domination and a radical diagnosis of power, command and law. To grasp the meaning […]
The Age of Subtlety: Nature and Rhetorical Conceits in Early Modern Europe
A craze for intricate metaphors, referred to as conceits, permeated all forms of communication in seventeenth-century Italy and Spain. Conceits reshaped reality in highly creative ways, enabling orators, preachers, and poets to make a display of ingenuity. The Age of Subtlety situates itself at the crossroads of rhetoric, poetics, and the history of science. It […]
The Ambassador and the Courtesan: Political Bodies in Renaissance Italy
The Ambassador and the Courtesan: Political Bodies in Renaissance Italy examines the formation of cultural subjects at the intersection of political and literary discourse. Drawing on literary and legal texts as well as archival materials, Paola De Santo offers a comparative analysis of two emerging roles in the early modern period and in Renaissance Italian society: […]
Anatomy of Perjury: Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Via Rasella, and the GINNY Mission
Careful review of microfilmed German operational records led the author to solve a World War II mystery involving Field Marshall Albert Kesselring and the Italian campaign he directed. Facts about two events in March 1944—the Ardeatine Cave Massacre and the failed GINNY II mission—were manipulated, and Kesselring’s 1947 defense was accepted without challenge until 1997, […]
Andrew Marvell's Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between
Andrew Marvell’s Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between is an interdisciplinary study of the major lyric poems of 17th-century British metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell. The poet and his work have generally proven enigmatic to scholars because both refuse to fit into normal categories and expectations. This study invites Marvell readers to view the poet and some of […]
Apparition of Splendor: Marianne Moore Performing Democracy through Celebrity, 1952-1970
While the later work of the great Modernist poet Marianne Moore was hugely popular during her final two decades, since her death critics have condemned it as trivial. This book challenges that assessment: with fresh readings of many of the late poems and of the iconic, cross-dressing public persona Moore developed to deliver them, Apparition […]
Appointed
Appointed is a recently recovered novel written by William Anderson and Walter Stowers, two of the editors of the Detroit Plaindealer, a long-running and well-regarded African American newspaper of the late nineteenth century. Drawing heavily on nineteenth-century print culture, the authors tell the story of John Saunders, a college-educated black man living and working in Detroit. Through […]
Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama
Textiles have long provided metaphors for storytelling: a compelling novel “weaves a tapestry” and we enjoy hearing someone “spin” a tale. To what extent, however, should we take these metaphors seriously? Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama reveals that in the early modern period, when cloth-making was ubiquitous and high-quality tapestries called […]
Art and Artifact in Austen
Jane Austen distinguished herself with genius in literature, but she was immersed in all of the arts. Austen loved dancing, played the piano proficiently, meticulously transcribed piano scores, attended concerts and art exhibits, read broadly, wrote poems, sat for portraits by her sister Cassandra, and performed in theatricals. For her, art functioned as a social […]
Art and Culture in the Eighteenth Century: New Dimensions and Multiple Perspectives
This study joins the resurgent scholarship presently redressing the neglect of eighteenth-century visual culture since the beginning of the twentieth century. This volume offers nine contextual and cross-disciplinary essays that engage with a rich panoply of discourses ranging from art criticism to biography, to collecting and the art market, to art theory and practice and […]
The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare’s “Fine Frenzy” in Late Eighteenth-Century British Art
This book examines the first generation of artists in Britain to define themselves as history painters, attempting what then was considered to be art’s most exalted category. These ambitious artists, including John Hamilton Mortimer, Henry Fuseli, Alexander and John Runciman, James Barry, James Jefferys, George Romney, John Flaxman, and William Blake, most of whom were […]
Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essays on His Arts, Mind, Afterlife, and Politics
Howard D. Weinbrot’s Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essays on His Arts, Mind, Afterlife, and Politics collects earlier and new essays on Johnson’s varied achievements in lexicography, poetry, narrative, and prose style. It considers Johnson’s uses of the general and the particular as they relate to the reader’s role in the creative process, his complex approach to the […]
At Home and Abroad in the Empire: British Women Write the 1930s
This book builds upon critical reevaluations of modernism and British literature of the 1930s with a simultaneous focus on discourses of race, gender, and empire. The essays direct attention to the complications and ambivalence accumulating around the meanings of Englishness. They reject analyses of texts as chronicles of personal psychological development in favor of analyses […]
Attending to Early Modern Women: Conflict and Concord
This volume considers women’s roles in the conflicts and negotiations of the early modern world. Essays explore the ways gender shapes women’s agency in times of war, religious strife, and economic change. How were conflict and concord gendered in histories, literature, music, and political, legal, didactic, and religious treatises? Four interdisciplinary plenary topics ground this […]
Austen’s Oughts: Judgment after Locke and Shaftesbury
The word is all over Austen’s novels: what ought to be done, what one ought to say, how one ought to feel (versus how one does feel). When Austen’s characters employ an ought, the delicate oscillation between first- and third-person perspectives that marks her prose leads the reader to distinguish between what they say, and […]
Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century
This book deals with changing conditions and conceptions of authorship in the long eighteenth century, a period often said to have witnessed the birth of the modern author. It focuses not on authorial self-presentation or self-revelation but on an author’s interactions with booksellers, collaborators, rivals, correspondents, patrons, and audiences. Challenging older accounts of the development […]
Bad Books: Rétif de la Bretonne, Sexuality, and Pornography
Bad Books reconstructs how the eighteenth-century French author Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne and his writings were at the forefront of the development of modern conceptions of sexuality and pornography. Although certain details are well known (for example, that Rétif’s 1769 treatise on prostitution, Le Pornographe, is the work from which the term pornography is derived, or […]
Baudelaire in China: A Study in Literary Reception
Baudelaire’s work entered China in the twentieth century amidst political and social upheavals accompanied by a “literary revolution” that called for the overthrow of classical models and modes of expression to be replaced by vernacular language and contemporary content. Chinese writers welcomed their meeting with the West and openly embraced Western literature as providing models […]
Behind the Curtain: Selected Fiction of Fitz-James O'Brien, 1853–1860
In the decade that followed his emigration to the United States in 1851, Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-1862) produced a steady stream of contributions to American newspapers and magazines. As short story writer, essayist, poet, dramatist, reporter, reviewer, drama critic, and editor he won reputation as one of the ablest young writers in New York City, displaying […]
Between the Real and the Ideal: The Accademia degli Arcadi and Its Garden in Eighteenth-Century Rome
This book examines the Accademia degli Arcadi in its heyday, a little known phenomenon in Italian history in the first part of the eighteenth century. The Roman academy aimed for a peninsula-wide cultural renewal induced by literary reform. Operating within a papal court society, it eschewed extant patronage systems and social hierarchies and introduced enlightened […]
Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays
The hundreds of biblical references in Shakespeare’s plays give ample evidence that he was well acquainted with Scripture. Not only is the range of his biblical references impressive, but also the aptness with which he makes them. Hamlet and Othello each have more than fifty biblical references. No study of Shakespeare’s plays is complete that […]
The Biden School and the Engaged University of Delaware, 1961-2021
This book reviews the history of the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration from 1961 to 2021. The focus is on the school’s accomplishments over its first sixty years, how they were achieved, and why they are significant. The analysis describes the challenges and opportunities that shaped the school’s development and […]
Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists
Black Celebrity examines representations of postbellum black athletes and artist-entertainers by novelists Caryl Phillips and Jeffery Renard Allen and poets Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, Adrian Matejka, and Tyehimba Jess. Inhabiting the perspectives of boxer Jack Johnson and musicians “Blind Tom” Wiggins and Sissieretta Jones, along with several others, these writers retrain readers’ attention away […]
Black Powder, White Lace: The du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in Nineteenth-Century America
Twenty years ago, Margaret Mulrooney’s history of the community of Irish immigrant workers at the du Pont powder yards, Black Powder, White Lace, was published to wide acclaim. Now, as much of the materials Mulrooney used in her research are now electronically available to the public, and as debates about immigration continue to rage, a new […]
Boudica and Her Stories: Narrative Transformations of a Warrior Queen
This book begins with a study of the few ancient texts which provide the source material for all subsequent accounts of the seventh-century British queen Boudica and her ferocious yet ultimately unsuccessful rebellion against the Romans. It shows how their information was assembled over centuries to create the entity we know as Boudica as an […]
Buccaneers and Privateers: The Story of the English Sea Rover, 1675–1725
In the late seventeenth century, Spain dominated the Caribbean and Central and South America, establishing colonies, mining gold and silver, and gathering riches from Asia for transportation back to Europe. Seeking to disrupt Spain’s nearly unchecked empire-building and siphon off some of their wealth, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British adventurers, both legitimate and illegitimate, led numerous […]
Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints
This book is the first to examine the meaning encoded in the very form of caricature, a form of popular and polemical visual art that burst suddenly on the scene in late eighteenth-century England, and to explain its rise as a consequence of the emergence of modernity, especially the modern self. Caricature and the modern […]
Carnal Reading: Early Modern Language and Bodies
The question of an erotic readership has always vexed scholars. With little evidence of anyone’s actually reading erotic material, scholars have had to make do with variations of an “ideal reader” approach. Insofar as it presupposes authorial intention and a stable meaning, this theoretical model proves unsatisfactory. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Carnal Reading: Early Modern Language […]
Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800
The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and […]
Celebrity Across the Channel, 1750–1850
This edited volume is the first to study and compare the concept of celebrity in France and Britain from 1750 to 1850, as the two countries transformed into the states we recognize today. It offers a transnational perspective by placing French and British scholarship from the field of celebrity studies in dialogue, especially by engaging […]
The Celebrity Monarch: Empress Elisabeth and the Modern Female Portrait
Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898), wife of Habsburg Emperor Francis Joseph I, was celebrated as the most beautiful woman in Europe. Glamorous painted portraits by Franz Xaver Winterhalter and widely collected photographs spread news of her beauty, and the twentieth-century German-language film trilogy Sissi (1955-57) cemented this legacy. Despite the enduring fascination with the empress, art historians […]
Challenging Humanism: Essays in Honor of Dominic Baker-Smith
Dominic Baker-Smith has been a leading international authority on humanism for more than four decades, specializing in the works of Erasmus and Thomas More. The present collection of essays by colleagues throughout Europe, Canada, and the United States examines humanism in both its historic sixteenth-century meanings and applications and the humanist tradition in our own […]
Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama: Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy
Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama: Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy studies instantiations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside such fraught questions as the history of Renaissance subjectivity and individualism on the one hand and Shakespearean exceptionalism on the […]
The Circuit of Apollo: Eighteenth-Century Women’s Tributes to Women
The Circuit of Apollo is a book about early modern women’s networks traced through affirmations of respect, admiration, love, and sometimes competition. It emerges out of the desire to highlight what relationships among women in the long eighteenth century tell us about the emotional lives and the creative work of women. The essays collected here attest […]
Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France
Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother, Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for […]
Civil Idolatry: Desacralizing and Monarchy in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton
This work discusses important texts that scrutinize the cult of monarchy in light of the injunction against idolatry. When Milton deplored the “civil kind of idolatry,” he echoed a significant theme in earlier texts—Erasmus’s political writings, Spenser, and Shakespeare’s political plays. Milton redefines conquest and fatherhood in response to contemporary monarchists’ patriarchalism and conquest-theory.
Claiming Cambria: Invoking the Welsh in the Romantic Era
This book investigates the cultural impact of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portrayals of Wales and the Welsh. During the Romantic era Welsh history was invoked by both English and Welsh writers in order to define the role of Wales in British culture, but the nature of that role was a matter of active debate. […]
Clio: The Autobiography of Martha Fowke Sansom (1689-1736)
This annotated edition of Clio makes available in a well-documented and illustrated modern text the autobiography of Martha Fowke Sansom. This lively account of Fowke’s life is filled with illuminating material on her family background, education, and emotional and social experiences.
Coiffures: Hair in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture
Balzac claimed that toilettes were the expression of society. Coiffures describes the historical and cultural practices associated with women’s hairstyles, hair care, and hair art in nineteenth-century France. Hair also has profound symbolic significance. Lying on the border between life and death, it grows, but does not feel. It marks sexual identity; it can be wild and […]
Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell
This edition is the first to establish a reliable text of the poems of Thomas Parnell (1679-1718). Based on a study of all the available manuscripts, including an extensive collection in the poet’s family, and authoritative editions, it more than doubles the number of poems known to be Parnell’s and represents the first publication of […]
The Colonel’s Dream
Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932) was an African American writer, essayist, Civil Rights activist, legal-stenography businessman, and lawyer whose novels and short stories explore race, racism, and the problematic contours of African Americans’ social and cultural identities in post–Civil War South. He was the first African American to be published by a major American publishing house […]
Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert: Combined Lights
This book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors’ distinctive […]
The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, Volume 1
The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, Vol. 1 inaugurates a multivolume documentary edition that will, for the first time ever, provide the complete collection of everything Dickinson published on public affairs over the course of his life. The documents include essays, articles, broadsides, resolutions, petitions, declarations, constitutions, regulations, legislation, proclamations, songs and […]
The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, Volume 2
John Dickinson’s entry into public life in Delaware and Pennsylvania is a highlight of the ninety-eight documents written over four years printed in Volume Two of The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson. The volume opens with Dickinson’s legal notes as he established himself as one of the most prominent and learned lawyers […]
The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, Volume 3
During the years 1764 through 1766, John Dickinson became a leading figure in the Pennsylvania Assembly and in the growing American resistance to unjust British taxation. The documents in this volume show that, in both roles, he sought to protect the fundamental rights of ordinary Americans. In the 1764 Assembly, after working to punish those […]
The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, Volume 4
In 1767, John Dickinson began publishing his twelve Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which earned him international celebrity as the leader of the American resistance to Britain. They educated Americans about their rights and how to defend them without violence. Importantly, they also taught the colonists to unite and understand themselves first and foremost […]
The Correspondence of Sarah Helen Whitman and Julia Deane Freeman: Writer to Writer, Woman to Woman
The eighty-one manuscript letters, drafts, notes, and fragments comprising the correspondence between Sarah Helen Whitman (Poe’s onetime fiancée) and Julia Deane Freeman span a tumultuous time in American history, 1856–1863. A veritable Who’s Who in literature during the period, the women’s letters reference works and writers such as Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Walt Whitman, and scores of women […]
Crafting Womanhood: Needlework, Gender, and Politics in the United States, 1810-1920
Decorative needlework was a key medium through which American women constructed femininity and its relationship to public and political concerns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through samplers, needlecases, lace coats, silk sofas, cotton scraps, banners, and other textile things, scholars can see the ways in which women and girls related to education, property-holding, […]
Creativity and the Imagination: Case Studies from the Classical Age to the Twentieth Century
Detailed case studies of imaginative discourses in technical prose, geology, physics, and genetic engineering, as well as in poetics, contemporary painting, philosophy, and history. The thread uniting all of the essays is that metaphors, scenarios, and myths are fundamental to both the scientific and artistic imagination.
Crossing Borders: A Critical Introduction to the Works of Mary Rose Callaghan
The first full-length study of Mary Rose Callaghan’s life and works argues that Callaghan’s books examine the boundaries that constrict Irish society as well as Irish authors. Her novels explore limits of gender roles, strictures around mental health, margins that conceal social problems of alcoholism, sexual abuse in the clergy, domestic violence, and sexual repression. […]
Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary Adventures
Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary Adventures by Joseph Acquisto examines the many ways in which the castaway, particularly in the form of engagement with Robinson Crusoe, has been reinterpreted and appropriated in nineteenth through twenty-first century French literature. The book is not merely a literary history of the robinsonnade in France; rather, Acquisto demonstrates how […]
A Dangerous Liberty: Translating Gray’s Elegy
Often said to be “the most popular poem in English,” Thomas Gray’s An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard circulated on the continent in a wide variety of translations and engaged the attention of such major European writers as Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Baudelaire, Hölderlin, Foscolo, and Zhukovsky. By tracing the history and influence of these translations, A Dangerous Liberty demonstrates […]
The Dark Thread: From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales
In The Dark Thread, scholars examine a set of important and perennial narrative motifs centered on violence within the family as they have appeared in French, English, Spanish, and American literatures. Over fourteen essays, contributors highlight the connections between works from early modernity and subsequent texts from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, in which incidents […]
Decorative Games: Ornament, Rhetoric, and Noble Culture in the Work of Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672-1742)
This book features an extraordinary album of ornament designs by the French architect Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672-1742). In charge of the buildings and grounds of Philippe, duke of Orléans, regent of France during the minority of Louis XV, Oppenord was at the center of the architectural practice of his time. As made evident by this album, […]
The Deep End: A Memoir of Growing Up
One day, when Mary Rose Callaghan was 13, her mother jumped into the freezing Irish Sea. Knowing that her mother was an asthmatic, the shock of seeing her dive into “the deep end” began Mary Rose’s curiosity about her mother’s life. That curiosity spawned the writing of this memoir, a coming-of-age tale focused on Mary […]
Defiant Diplomat George Platt Waller: American Consul in Nazi-Occupied Luxembourg, 1939-1941
Drafted while events were fresh in his mind in 1942–1943, Alabama-born American diplomat George Platt Waller’s memoir chronicles his war-time experience in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. In vivid prose, he recalls the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the “Phony War,” the German invasion of May 10, 1940, and the Wehrmacht occupation. Intimately involved […]
Defoe and the Whig Novel: A Reading of the Major Fiction
This study places Defoe’s major fiction squarely in the emerging Whig culture of the early eighteenth century. It offers an alternative to the view that Defoe is essentially a writer of criminal or adventure fiction and to the Marxist judgment that he extols individualism or derives his greatest inspiration from popular print culture. This study […]
Defoe’s Major Fiction: Accounting for the Self
This book focuses on the pervasive concern with narrativity and self-construction that marks Defoe’s first-person fictional narratives. Defoe’s fictions focus obsessively and elaborately on the act of storytelling—not only in his creation of idiosyncratic voices preoccupied with the telling (and often the concealing) of their own life stories but also in his narrators’ repeated adversion […]
A Delaware Album, 1900–1930
A Delaware Album, 1900-1930 contains over 300 postcard photographs from the entire state taken during the period from 1900 to 1930. Arranged by subjects—City and Town Views; Delaware Beaches; Amusements; Industry and Agriculture; Signs of the Times; Trains, Trolleys, and Automobiles; Water Transportation; Schools; Religion; Businesses; Hotels and Motels—each photo has a caption ranging from a […]
The Delaware Naturalist Handbook
The Delaware Naturalist Handbook is the primary public face of a major university-led public educational outreach and community engagement initiative. This statewide master naturalist certification program is designed to train hundreds of citizen scientists, K–12 environmental educators, ecological restoration volunteers, and habitat managers each year. The initiative is conducted in collaboration with multiple disciplines at […]
Design and Historic Preservation: The Challenge of Compatability
Design and Historic Preservation: The Challenge of Compatability addresses two questions central to design and historic preservation: what are the parameters of “compatability” in the design of additions to historic buildings and of new infill buildings in historic districts and landscapes. These papers, presented at the “Third National Forum on Historic Preservation Practice: A Critical Look […]
Design and Thermal Performance: Below-Ground Dwellings in China
The Chinese constitute the third major community in the world to have lived continuously below ground for many millennia. With case studies representing different geographical and cultural environments, this work shows how Chinese below-ground dwellings provide a comfortable ambient environment with low construction costs. Illustrated.
The Discontented Cavalier: The Work of Sir John Suckling in Its Social, Religious, Political, and Literary Contexts
This comprehensive study of the literary output of Sir John Suckling reconstructs the various contexts in which the poems, plays, letters, and prose tracts were produced and, by means of close textual analysis, reveals the nature of one writer’s engagement—both creative and subversive—with the social, religious, political, and cultural dimensions of Caroline England. It challenges […]
The Dismembered Community: Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, and the Remains of Laure
This book examines the intersecting communitarian endeavors of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Colette Peignot, known posthumously as Laure. Through detailed analysis of a series of interlocking texts that the four authors write on, for, and to one another on such topics as love, friendship, and fraternity, it explores these authors’ theoretical elaborations […]
Doctors of Another Calling: Physicians Who Are Known Best in Fields Other than Medicine
The medical profession is rich in those who have made names for themselves outside of medicine. The fields of literature, exploration, business, sport, entertainment, and beyond abound with doctors whose interests lie outside medicine. This book, largely written by members of the medical profession, examines the efforts of doctors in non-medical fields. The doctors discussed […]
Dooble Tongue: Scots, Burns, Contradiction
Dooble Tongue is an imaginative meditation on Robert Burns and Scottish poetry, as well as a book that engages and contests the customary assumptions and practices of literary criticism. Beginning with an examination of two contemporary Scottish poets, W. N. Herbert and Robert Crawford, and moving back in time to the Scottish Modernist master Hugh MacDiarmid, […]
Dr. John Moore, 1729–1802: A Life in Medicine, Travel, and Revolution
This book is the first biography of Scottish-born physician John Moore. Here, Henry L. Fulton recounts Moore’s childhood, education, and medical training in Glasgow and abroad; discusses his marriage, family, and friendships (particularly with Tobias Smollett); and depicts his professional practice in the north. The narrative uncovers Moore’s transformative experience accompanying a young nobleman on […]
The Drama of Storytelling in T. E. Brown's Manx Yarns
This study deals with the Manx poet T. E. Brown and his rustic persona in perhaps the most sustained dramatization of the trails and triumphs of storytelling in British poetry, Fo’c’s’le Yarns.
Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama
Dramatic Difference argues that early modern women writers manipulated the class-based exclusivity of closet drama to justify their own contributions to this highly political genre. The book situates women writers’ work in the context of their male peers’ use of the genre and looks at how the genre’s social and political orientation changed from the late […]
Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays
Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts (selections from plays and masques) into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays is the first to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and […]
Early Modern Drama in Performance: Essays in Honor of Lois Potter
Early Modern Drama in Performance is a collection of essays in honor of Lois Potter, the distinguished author of five monographs, including most recently The Life of William Shakespeare (2012), and numerous articles, edited collections, and editions. This collection’s emphasis on Shakespearean and early modern drama reflects the area for which Potter is most widely known, as a […]
Edgar Allan Poe: Beyond Gothicism
Most frequently regarded as a writer of the supernatural, Poe was actually among the most versatile of American authors, writing social satire, comic hoaxes, mystery stories, science fiction, prose poems, literary criticism and theory, and even a play. As a journalist and editor, Poe was closely in touch with the social, political, and cultural trends […]
Edmund Burke of Beaconsfield
This study details the domestic life and private friendships of Edmund Burke from 1750, when he left Dublin to study law at Middle Temple, London, until his wife Jane’s death in 1812, fifteen years after Burke’s. While the events of Burke’s public life and his political theories are familiar to many, the private and domestic […]
Elizabeth Carter, 1717-1806: An Edition of Some Unpublished Letters
This edition includes 111 letters and a brief note. Written by Miss Carter, they date from October 1737 to May 1804, less than two years before her death. they have not been published before and are a very small portion of the thousands of letters that she sent and received. Part of their value lies […]
Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist
Eliza Fenwick is the previously untold story of the life of an extraordinary woman who paved her own unique path throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as she made her way from country to country, from working as a writer to becoming a teacher and school owner. Author Lissa Paul brings to light Fenwick’s letters for the […]
Elusive Archives: Material Culture Studies in Formation
Taking cues from a wide variety of objects and their unusual circumstances, the essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed, or subjective, and as ethereal as distant memories? Such things would resist descriptive conventions and definitive value, scholarly or […]
Emerson for the Twenty-first Century: Global Perspectives on an American Icon
While previous collections of Emerson essays have tended to be a sort of “stock-taking” or “retrospective” look at Emerson scholarship, the present collection, divided into four sections, follows a more “prospective” trajectory for Emerson studies based on the recent increase in global perspectives in nearly all fields of humanistic studies. The first section of essays […]
The Enduring Work of Biography: James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1791-2020
The Enduring Work of Biography seeks to revitalize appreciation of Boswell’s great biography for a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers. Engaging accessibly and informatively with biographical, historical, critical, and textual matters, and drawing on the Yale Edition of the Private Papers of James Boswell, Enduring Work discusses Boswell’s collaboration with others (both alive and dead) […]
The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso
In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic, Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance to reveal that all forms of hostility consistently arise from within political or religious entities. In Dante’s Divina Commedia, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, all forms of enmity are internal, taking the form […]
England's Asian Renaissance
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 […]
English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800
The essays in English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explore the theatrical anecdote’s role in the construction of stage fame in England’s emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing such anecdotes in theatre scholarship today. This collection showcases scholarship that complicates the theatrical anecdote and shows its many sides and […]
English Versions of Roman Satire in the Earlier Eighteenth Century
The Imitation was a popular verse form in the first half of the eighteenth century. A work of classical poetry would be adapted to contemporary circumstances, so that a satirist such as Alexander Pope would satirize contemporary England as if he were Horace writing of ancient Rome. This book discusses not only well-known examples such […]
Enter the Press-Gang: Naval Impressment in Eighteenth-Century British Literature
This book considers the eighteenth-century practice of violent naval recruitment known as impressment in the light of literary representations of its impact on British society. The author examines scenes that feature press-gangs in novels, plays, ballads, and personal narratives and shows how impressment reveals the ways genre is related to ideology.
Entre Hommes: French and Francophone Masculinities in Culture and Theory
Despite its debt to French thought for theoretical constructs, masculinity studies have been dominated by work on English-language texts and contexts. Entre Hommes lays the foundation for French and Francophone masculinity studies in both a cultural and theoretical sense. This ground-breaking volume considers what is meant by “French” or “Francophone” masculinities per se and how these identities […]
Envisioning The Worst: Representations of “Hottentots” in Early-Modern England
This book examines early modern English constructions of “Hottentots” as humanity’s most base and beastly people. The book presents the entire course of pre-colonial literary and visual representations of “Hottentots” written from the end of the sixteenth century until the opening decades of the nineteenth century.
Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor
Epic Landscapes is the first study devoted to architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s substantial artistic oeuvre from 1795, when he set sail from Britain to Virginia, to late 1798, when he relocated to Pennsylvania. Thus, this book offers the only extended consideration of Latrobe’s Virginian watercolors, including a series of complex trompe l’oeil studies and three significant […]
Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny
The voluminous contemporary critical work on English Renaissance androgyny/ transvestism has not fully uncovered the ancient Greek and Roman roots of the gender controversy. This work argues that the variant Renaissance views on the androgyne’s symbolism are, in fact, best understood with reference to classical representations of the double-sexed or gender-baffled figures, and with the […]
Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations
This book brings together new essays by leading cultural critics who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The original essays penned for this anthology evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson’s work in major critical debates including national identity, literary careerism, and studies of form. Analyzing not only early modern but also […]
Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth-Century Women Transforming Public and Private
Women’s everyday choices can engender revolutionary acts. The essays collected here embrace this premise and go beyond the Habermasian public/private paradigm to look at the ways in which eighteenth-century women defied the restrictions their culture sought to enforce. But while recent studies have linked women to public activity by analyzing revolutionary moments, such work often […]
The Experimental Plays of Harold Pinter
The Experimental Plays of Harold Pinter offers a fresh approach to the plays of Nobel Prize laureate Harold Pinter. He is highlighted as an experimental playwright who attempted to free the theatre from the legacy of realism, causality and motivation. His plays are read in relation to the avant-garde movements in the visual arts and music […]
Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style
Exquisite Materials explores the connections between gay subjects, material objects, and the social and aesthetic landscapes in which they circulated. Each of the book’s four chapters takes up as a case study a figure or set of figures whose life and work dramatize different aspects of the unique queer relationship to materiality and style. These diverse […]
Extravagance and Three Other Plays
The collection includes four theatrical works of acclaimed Italian author, Dacia Maraini, in a dual-language format (Italian/English). The works have been chosen around the themes of distress, exclusion, and various manifestations of tragedy with particular reference to women. The works were chosen within a modern and a historical reference in order to give breadth to […]
Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection
This is a lavishly illustrated volume that offers a new interpretation of the significance of the portrait image during the final decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, using materials drawn from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware. This study highlights the connections between the images of writers’ and artists’ faces […]
Factions' Fictions: Ideological Closure in Swift's Satire
An understanding of the linguistic, political, and moral ramifications of “Private Spirit” (the parochialism and partiality typical of clubs, parties, and cabals) provides insights into the logic behind Swiftian polemic and satire. Swiftian satire, an essentially private joke offering exclusive satisfaction to an elite fraternity of insiders, is shown to be a creative rhetorical adaption […]
Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Familial Forms is the first full-length study to examine how literary writers engaged the politics of genealogy that helped define the “century of revolution.” By demonstrating how conflicts over the family-state analogy intersected with the period’s battles over succession, including: the ascent of James I, the execution of Charles I, disputes over the terms of the […]
The Female Homer: An Exploration of Women’s Epic Poetry
The Female Homer opens with simple questions: Are there any women’s epic poems? If so, what are the central characteristics of these epics, and how do they relate to the traditional vision of epic poetry as male-authored and masculinist, as powerful and patriarchal? The book explores relations among women’s epic poems over a great span—from the […]
Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights of London
Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights of London identifies the eighteenth-century comedic stage as a key site of feminist critique, practice, and experimentation. While the history of feminism and comedy is undeniably vexed, by focusing on five women playwrights of the latter half of the eighteenth century–Catherine Clive, Frances Brooke, Frances Burney, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald–this […]
The Fenwick Letters: A Transnational Feminist Life Reconstructed, Volume I: 1797-1821
The Fenwick Letters: A Transnational Feminist Life Reconstructed, Volume I: 1797-1821 serves as a companion volume to Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist (2019). The first of this two-volume edition covers the initial phase—1797-1821—of Eliza Fenwick’s transformative, transnational odyssey as she moved from promising radical author (supporting emerging democratic, liberatory philosophies) to conservative schoolmistress and businesswoman; from […]
The Fenwick Letters: A Transnational Feminist Life Reconstructed, Volume II: 1822-1840
The second of this two-volume edition of The Fenwick Letters covers the North American phase of Eliza Fenwick’s transformative, transnational odyssey, from 1822 to 1840. Although no longer the radical author she was in the 1790s, advocating for the rights of women to be educated, or the innovative author of children’s books that she was […]
Fiction of the New Statesman, 1913-1939
Fiction of the New Statesman is the first study of the short stories published in the renowned British journal the New Statesman. This book argues that New Statesman fiction advances a strong realist preoccupation with ordinary, everyday life, and shows how British domestic concerns have a strong hold on the working-class and lower-middle-class imaginative output of this period. About […]
Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France
Out of the libertine literary tradition of eighteenth-century France emerged a dozen memoir novels unlike any others. The fictional narrators of these stories are female libertines who eagerly take up sex work as a means of escape from the patriarchal control of fathers and husbands to pursue pleasure, wealth, and personal independence outside the private, […]
Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550–1650)
In Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550-1650), Marcus Keller explores the often indirect and subtle ways in which key texts of early modern French literature, from Joachim Du Bellay’s Défense et illustration de la langue française to Corneille’s Le Cid, contribute to the fiction of France as a nation. Through his fresh take on these […]
A First Amendment Profile of the Supreme Court
A First Amendment Profile of the Supreme Court focuses on the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court and determines their frames for assessing First Amendment cases. In each of the chapters, a justice is profiled in terms of his or her claims during the nomination hearings and the positions they have taken in significant […]
Five Lectures on the American Civil War (1861-1865)
The product of over thirty years of research on the American Civil War by Italy’s most renowned authority on the subject, this study synthetically analyzes the great drama that from 1861 to 1865 that devastated the United States and gave life to the modern American nation. The book also highlights how the Civil War was […]
Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert
In Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert, Kathryn Oliver Mills argues that despite the enduring celebrity of Baudelaire and Flaubert, their significance to modern art has been miscast and misunderstood. To date, literary criticism has paid insufficient attention to these authors’ literary form and their socio-cultural context. In addition, critical literature has not […]
Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe
Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe offers a wide range of essays that capture the unprecedented current boom in the study of “Shakespeare in Europe.” The various contributions cover three basic areas in the history of Shakespearean reception on the European continent and in Britain: translations, productions, and appropriations in more general terms. The essays […]
Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology
Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney’s Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney’s four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. It describes Burney’s eluding the major modern–isms through which critics have tried to read her: […]
Frankenstein and STEAM: Essays for Charles E. Robinson
Charles E. Robinson, Professor Emeritus of English at The University of Delaware, definitively transformed study of the novel Frankenstein with his foundational volume The Frankenstein Notebooks and, in nineteenth century studies more broadly, brought heightened attention to the nuances of writing and editing. Frankenstein and STEAM consolidates the generative legacy of his later work on the novel’s broad […]
Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World
Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World argues that our most cherished ideas about freedom—being left alone to do as we please, or uncovering the truth—have failed us. They promote the polarized thinking that blights our world. Rooted in literature, political theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of language, this book introduces a new concept: dialogic freedom. […]
Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner
In a series of columns published in the African American newspaper the Christian Recorder, the young, charismatic preacher Henry McNeal Turner described his experience of the Civil War, first from the perspective of a civilian observer in Washington, DC, and later, as one of the Union army’s first black chaplains. In the halls of Congress, […]
French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century
French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century brings together current scholarship on a diverse range of topics—from French postcards and Third Republic menus to Haitian literary magazines and representation of race in vaudeville theater—in order to provide methodological insight into the current practice of French cultural studies. The essays in the volume show how scholars of […]
French Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: “What would France with us?”
The nineteen essays presented in this volume reflect the development of English Renaissance studies in France over the past fifteen years. Interests run from textual history to drama and theater poetics, myth, and iconography.
French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory
The fifteen articles in this volume highlight the richness, diversity, and experimental nature of French and Francophone drama before the advent of what would become known as neoclassical French theater of the seventeenth century. In essays ranging from conventional stage plays (tragedies, comedies, pastoral, and mystery plays) to court ballets, royal entrances, and meta- and […]
French Women Authors: The Significance of the Spiritual, 1400–2000
French Women Authors examines the importance afforded the spiritual in the lives and works of French women authors over the centuries, thereby highlighting both the significance of spiritually informed writings in French literature in general, as well as the specific contribution made by women writers. Eleven different authors have been selected for this collection, representing major […]
Friedrich Schiller: Crime, Aesthetics, and the Poetics of Punishment
Schiller’s fascination with crime and criminals is well-documented, but little work has been done on his engagement with punishment as retributive or restorative gesture. This study examines the affinity between the pursuit of symmetry in social penal discourse and the symmetry that pleases the aesthetic spectator in Schiller’s drama, fiction, and theoretical essays. Beginning with […]
From Sacred to Secular: Visual Images in Early American Publications
This examination of illustrations in early American books, pamphlets, magazines, almanacs, and broadsides provides a new perspective on the social, cultural, and political environment of the late colonial period and the early republic. American printers and engravers drew upon a rich tradition of Christian visual imagery. Used first to inculcate Protestant doctrines, regional symbolism later […]
From Savage to Citizen: The Invention of the Peasant in the French Enlightenment
From Savage to Citizen examines the invention of the peasant in the literature, theater, and painting of the French Enlightenment. It contends that, much like the noble savage, the peasant is one of the major constructions of the Enlightenment, and that its articulation and development are consonant with changes in the social order and the development […]
From Sensation to Society: Representations of Marriage in the Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 1862-1866
From Sensation to Society tracks the evolution of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s critique of Victorian marriage in the early phase of her long and prolific novel-writing career. The study begins with Braddon’s two famous sensational novels, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863); it ends with her first novel of “society,” The Lady’s Mile (1865). In the novels of this period, Braddon […]
Félicité de Genlis: Motherhood in the Margins
This book examines the way in which French writer/educator Félicité de Genlis theorized the maternal role in her works, as well as the manner in which she lived out her own maternity. Illuminating her construction of a politics of motherhood that contributed to her marginalization, the book studies her controversial self-referentiality and investigates the relationships […]
Gender, Interpretation, and Political Rule in Sidney's Arcadia
Gender, Interpretation, and Political Rule in Sidney’s Arcadia studies cultural ideologies regarding gender and monarchy in early modern England by examining transformations of a single text, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, in their historical contexts. It reveals changing tensions in the ideological struggles over queenship, especially with respect to cultural debates focused on anxieties about gendered reception and […]
Gender and Genre: German Women Write the French Revolution
In the wake of the French Revolution, history was no longer imagined as a cyclical process in which the succession of ruling dynasties was as predictable as the change in the seasons. Contemporaries wrestled with the meaning of this historical rupture, which represented both the progress of the Enlightenment and the darkness of the Terreur. French […]
Gender and the Sacred Self in John Donne
This first book-length feminist study of Donne argues that his sacred subject position is ambivalently and illustratively invested in cultural archetypes of mothers, daughters, and brides. The chapters focus on baptism, marriage, and death as key moments in Donne’s and his culture’s construction of the gendered soul.
Gendering the Renaissance: Text and Context in Early Modern Italy
The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry. Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have often been elided […]
A Genealogy of the Gentleman: Women Writers and Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century
A Genealogy of the Gentleman: Women Writers and Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century poses a direct challenge to Virginia Woolf’s claim, that “Women do not write books about men.” On the contrary, not only were women writers in the eighteenth century able and capable of writing about and for men (though of course not exclusively), […]
General Henry Lockwood of Delaware: Shipmate of Melville, Co-builder of the Naval Academy, Civil War Commander
General Henry Lockwood of Delaware: Shipmate of Melville, Co-builder of the Naval Academy, Civil War Commander depicts the fascinating and accomplished life of a nineteenth-century Delaware favorite son, Brig. Gen. Henry Lockwood, who sailed aboard the U.S. Navy frigate United States, participating in Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones’s seizure of Monterey from Mexico and figuring importantly in […]
The Genius of the English Nation: Travel Writing and National Identity in Early Modern England
Travel literature was one of the most popular literary genres of the early modern era. This book examines how emerging concepts of national identity, imperialism, colonialism, and orientalism were worked out and represented for English readers in early travel and ethnographic writings. Using insights from a variety of scholarly fields such as history, anthropology, and […]
George Herbert's Pastoral: New Essays on the Poet and Priest of Bemerton
As poet and as country parson, George Herbert engaged the pastoral in all of its varied senses. In October of 2007, many of the world’s leading Herbert scholars met at Sarum College in Salisbury, England to locate Herbert’s pastoral life and writings more particularly in early Stuart Wiltshire. They explored the relations between the pastoral […]
George Herbert's Travels: International Print and Cultural Legacies
The essays in this collection feature many of the world’s leading Herbert scholars and are drawn from the more than fifty papers and plenary presentations delivered at the “George Herbert’s Travels” conference held at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in October 2008. They track Herbert’s “heart in pilgrimage”: through four centuries of time, […]
George Moore: Influence and Collaboration
“Nearly every major figure of his era,” writes his biographer Adrian Frazier, “worked with Moore, tangled with Moore, took his impression from, or left it on, George Moore.” The Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore (1852–1933) espoused multiple identities. An agent provocateur whether as an art critic, novelist, short fiction writer or memoirist, always probing and provocative, often deliberately […]
George Moore on Parnassus: Letters (1900-1933) to Secretaries, Publishers, Printers, Agents, Literati, Friends, and Acquaintances
Through the letters and commentary in this volume, the Irish writer George Moore is revealed as a man and artist far more complex and important than most works on him suggest, one who played a significant role in the Irish Literary Renaissance.
George Washington and the Jews
This volume explores the background and circumstances that brought about a milestone relationship between George Washington and the Jews. President George Washington was the first head of a modern nation to openly acknowledge the Jews as full-fledged citizens of the land in which they had chosen to settle. His personal philosophy of religious tolerance can […]
German Shakespeare Studies at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
This collection of fifteen essays offers a sample of German Shakespeare studies at the turn of the century. The articles are written by scholars in the old “Bundesländer” and deal with topics such as culture, memory and natural sciences in Shakespeare’s work, Shakespearean spin-offs, and the reception of Venice and Shylock in Germany. The section […]
The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities
The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities is a collection of essays aimed at expanding the concepts of “ghost” and “haunting” beyond literary tools used to add supernatural flavor to include questions of identity, visibility, memory and trauma, and history. Using a wide scope of texts from varying time periods and cultures, […]
Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour
Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour serves as the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name, organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon and curated by Professors Harper and Tice. On view in Eugene, OR, from September 25 through January 2, 2010, the […]
Gleaning Modernity: Earlier Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Modernizing Process
Gleaning Modernity shows how earlier eighteenth-century literary texts might have eased the way for Britain’s increasing Modernity. They allowed Modern scenarios to be played out imaginatively, as simulations for experimental, predictive ends. The process spoke to the needs and desires of readers in a world of rapid, managed change. It worked unobtrusively first because of the […]
Global Economics: A History of the Theater Business, the Chamberlain's/King's Men, and Their Plays, 1599-1642
This book is a study of the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men as a business. It investigates the economic workings of the company: the conditions under which they operated, their expenses and income, and the ways in which they adopted to fit changing circumstances. Each chapter focuses on a different moment in the company’s history, and consists of […]
Grant Wood’s Secrets
Incorporating copious archival research and original close readings of American artist Grant Wood’s iconic as well as lesser-known works, Grant Wood’s Secrets reveals how his sometimes anguished psychology was shaped by his close relationship with his mother and how he channeled his lifelong oedipal guilt into his art. Presenting Wood’s abortive autobiography “Return from Bohemia” for the […]
The Grotesque Depiction of War and the Military in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction
A discussion of the tradition of grotesque portrayals of war and the military, especially their proliferation in Restoration and eighteenth-century English literature. Swift’s the Travels is examined in particular, as well as the novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Stern. Illustrations of graphic satire by Hogarth and others.
The Grove Diaries: The Rise and Fall of an English Family, 1809-1925
The publication of the diaries of successive generations of the Grove family is of considerable importance. Spanning more than a century from 1809 to 1925, they chart the rise of an English family from country gentry to aristocratic Victorian grandees before finally tracing the much steeper trajectory of the family’s decline.
Growing Business in Delaware: The Politics of Job Creation in a Small State
In this fourth book in the authors’ series about public affairs in Delaware, the state’s strategies to maintain a business-friendly environment are examined, especially by awarding grants and loans to grow businesses and jobs. The book addresses the nation’s 2008-2014 Great Recession that was very severe in Delaware. Among the large Delaware employers that disappeared […]
H. C. Westermann at War: Art and Manhood in Cold War America
This book examines the antiwar work of one American artist in relation to the cultural history of the Cold War. The study provides new and detailed information on this important artist, while also contributing to the study of masculinity, dissent, art, violence, and war in the last half of the twentieth century. The study clearly […]
Hagiography in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron: Saints and Debates in Renaissance France
Marguerite de Navarre was one of the most educated and powerful women of Renaissance Europe. Along with her active engagement in politics and religion, she was a patron of the arts and a prolific writer. The Heptaméron, her celebrated collection of tales and debates, offers readers invaluable insights into diverse aspects of sixteenth-century French society. […]
Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709-1900
This book examines the manner in which Shakespeare’s Hamlet was perceived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and represented in the available visual media. The more than 2,000 visual images of Hamlet that the author has identified both reflected the critical reception of the play and simultaneously influenced the history of the ever-changing constructed cultural phenomenon that we refer […]
Hearts of Gold
J. McHenry Jones’s Hearts of Gold is a gripping tale of post–Civil War battles against racism and systemic injustice. Originally published in 1896, this novel reveals an African American community of individuals dedicated to education, journalism, fraternal organizations, and tireless work serving the needs of those abandoned by the political process of the white world. Jones […]
Hey Presto! Swift and the Quacks
In this book the author reveals how medicine shows, both ancient and modern, galvanized Jonathan Swift’s imagination and inspired his wittiest satiric voices. Swift dubbed these multifaceted traveling entertainments his Stage-itinerant or “Mountebank’s Stage.” In the course of arguing that the stage-itinerant formed an irresistible model for A Tale of a Tub, Ormsby-Lennon also surmises that the mountebank’s […]
The Hindered Hand
Between 1899 and 1908, five long works of fiction by the Nashville-based black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs appeared in print, making him the most prolific African American novelist at the turn of the twentieth century. Brought out by Griggs’s own Orion Publishing Company in three distinct printings in 1905 and 1906, The Hindered Hand; or, […]
History of Delaware, Fifth Edition
Originally undertaken by the author as a Bicentennial project in 1975, and now the standard history of the state, this volume chronicles the history of Delaware from the early 1600s to the present. About the Author John A. Munroe was H. Rodney Sharp Professor of History at the University of Delaware.
Honest John Williams: U.S. Senator from Delaware
John Williams was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946, defeating incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator James M. Tunnell. Honest John Williams: U.S. Senator from Delaware examines the political career of Williams, a political novice who established himself as an staunch advocate for fiscal probity and integrity in government during four successive terms in the U.S. […]
Hostile Humor in Renaissance France
This book is also available online as an Open Access digital edition here. The Open Access edition is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In sixteenth-century France, the level of jokes, irony, and ridicule found in pamphlets and plays became aggressively hostile. In Hostile Humor in Renaissance France, Bruce Hayes investigates this period leading […]
Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse: Studies in Carnivalesque Subversion
This book studies the interaction in late medieval and Renaissance English literature of Augustinian theology and the modes of subversive humor Bakhtin calls carnival. This interaction produces a sustained interrogation of public identity which limits medieval culture and its major texts to those of the Renaissance.
Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from The Korshak Collection
Please click here to view Michael Saler’s complete review of Icons of the Fantastic in The Wall Street Journal. Icons of the Fantastic was recently listed on Locus Magazine’s 2025 Recommended Reading List! Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from The Korshak Collection features artwork by pioneering artists from over a century of published works […]
The Idea of the Sciences in the French Enlightenment: A Reinterpretation
This book traces the development of the idea that the sciences were morally enlightening through an intellectual history of the secrétaires perpétuels of the French Royal Academy of Sciences and their associates from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. Academy secretaries such as Fontenelle and Condorcet were critical to the emergence of a […]
Imagery and Ideology: Fiction and Painting in Nineteenth-Century France
Literature is ostensibly a sequential and thus temporal medium, and painting a static and spatial one; yet writers like George Sand and Emile Zola have attempted repeatedly to represent visual and spatial phenomena in literary texts, just as painters like Eugène Delacroix and Claude Monet have sought consistently to capture effects of time and movement […]
Imagining Architects: Creativity in the Religious Monuments of India
Imagining Architects analyzes a series of unusual formal experiments in a group of eleventh-century stone temples built in the Karnataka region of southern India, demonstrating a self-conscious modernity of architects who searched for a new architectural principle in their design. Reinforced by contemporary inscriptions, the eight chapters of this book interweave analytical text and vivid illustrations, […]
Imagining Fascism: The Cultural Politics of the French Young Right, 1930-1945
Led by Robert Brasillach and Thierry Maulnier, the ‘Young Right’ emerged as a generational insurgency within Charles Mauarras’s Action française in the early 1930s. Inspired by the mobilizing energies of foreign fascisms, the men of the Young Right became vocal advocates for a French ‘national revolution.’ Combining native strains of French nationalism with selected ‘lessons’ […]
Imperium in Imperio
Sutton E. Griggs’s first novel, originally published in 1899, paints a searing picture of the violent enforcement of disfranchisement and Jim Crow racial segregation. Based on events of the time, including US imperial policies, revolutionary movements, and racial protests, Imperium in Imperio introduces the fictional Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave as “future leaders of their race” and […]
Implication, Readers' Resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes
Implication, Readers’ Resources, and Thomas Gray’s Pindaric Odes presents an account of “the Poets’ Secret,” the quite belated, historically recent, discovery by scholars and critics of something many poets have recognized and employed for ages: the sense expressed by allusively parallel parts within a text–sense thus expressed intratextually rather than only intertextually. Inferential perception of the […]
Inglorious Artists: Art World Satire and the Emergence of a Capitalist Art Market in Paris, 1750-1850
This book is also freely available online as an Open Access digital edition on the Mainfold platform, here. Inglorious Artists traces the origins of the image of the starving artist to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France, where practicing and aspiring visual artists mobilized the emerging genre of graphic satire to publish hundreds of satirical […]
In Iberia and Beyond: Hispanic Jews between Cultures: Proceedings of a Symposium to Mark the 500th Anniversary of the Expulsion of Spanish Jewry
Topics discussed in this book include government policy toward Jews and conversos, the image and self-image of Jews and conversos in relation to the surrounding society, the dynamics of Jewish poetics and philosophy on the Iberian Peninsula, and the role of women in the transmission of converso identity from generation to generation.
Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation
The enduring “black legend” of the Italian Counter-Reformation, which has held sway in both scholarly and popular culture, maintains that the Council of Trent ushered in a cultural dark age in Italy, snuffing out the spectacular creative production of the Renaissance. As a result, the decades following Trent have been mostly overlooked in Italian literary […]
Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment
Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment reconsiders theories of apostrophe and poetic authority to argue that the Augustan age created a new form of inspiration, one that not only changed the relationship of literary production to authority in the modern period but also crucially contributes to defining the movement of secularization in literature from the Renaissance […]
Integrating Delaware: The Reddings of Wilmington
Integrating Delaware: The Reddings of Wilmington tells the story of Delaware’s most nationally influential African-American family and reflects the story of the American black middle class in the twentieth century. Patriarch Lewis Redding arrived in Wilmington in 1900. He earned a hard-won place among the city’s small black middle class after overcoming numerous hurdles presented by […]
Interiority in German Women's Writing
Interiority in German Women’s Writing for the first time systematically gathers and engages with contributions of German women authors to the discourse on interiority (Innerlichkeit) from 1750 to 1850. This volume shifts the recent focus on abstract theoretical and medical discourses on inwardness to the origins of interiority in literature and philosophy as written and experienced […]
Into Print: The Production of Female Authorship in Early Modern France
This book examines the role that book production played in shaping notions of female authorship in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France. Through close analysis of volumes attributed to Helisenne de Crenne, Louise Labé, the Dame des Roches, and Marie de Gournay against the historical backdrop of the early French book market, Chang shows how the […]
Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England
The turn of the seventeenth century was an important moment in the history of English criticism. In a series of pioneering works of rhetoric and poetics, writers such as Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and Ben Jonson laid the foundations of critical discourse in English, and the English word “critic” began, for the first time, to […]
InVerse 2008-2009: Italian Poets in Translation
InVerse has filled a need in Rome for a forum in which to hear and discuss poetry, and the brilliant idea of offering Italian poetry in translation made the project an instant success and a must date on the calendar of Italian poets. In hosting InVerse, John Cabot University is true to its deepest mission and commitment: […]
InVerse 2014–2015: Italian Poets in Translation
Poetry by: Antonella Anedda Gian Maria Annovi Nadia Agustoni Mario Benedetti Antonio Bux Biagio Cepollaro Vladimir D’Amora Roberto Deidier Stelvio Di Spigno Anna Maria Farabbi Paolo Febbraro Silvia Fiorentino Mariangela Guatteri Andrea Inglese Bianca Madeccia Giampiero Neri Giulia Niccolai Sandro Olimpi Umberto Piersanti Elena Buia Rutt Francesco Serrao Giacomo Trinci Ida Travi
Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France
Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France was inspired by the observation that small slips of the flesh (involuntary confessions of the flesh) are omnipresent in early modern texts of many kinds. These slips (which bear similarities to what we would today call the Freudian slip) disrupt and destabilize readings of body, self, and […]
Ireland and Transatlantic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Denis Donoghue
“Transatlantic poetics” is the principal theme and the constructive burden of these essays. The motive toward its articulation lies in the demand for cross-national, international, and post-nationalist comprehension of cultural relations and critical practices across modern Anglophone British, Irish, and North American literary developments, literary filiations, and literary history. Anglophone literary study needs to articulate […]
The Irish Fairy Tale: A Narrative Tradition from the Middle Ages to Yeats and Stephens
Beginning with a critical reappraisal of the notion of “fairy tale” and extending it to include categories and genres which are in common usage in folklore and in literary studies, this book throws light on the general processes involved in storytelling. It illuminates the fundamental ways in which a culture is formed, while highlighting important […]
John Sloan’s Women: A Psychoanalysis of Vision
John Sloan (1871-1951), a member of the revolutionary group of painters called “The Eight,” was best known for his pictures of early twentieth-century New York City. Using psychoanalysis (object relations theory) and social history, Janice M. Coco explores the individual and social identities that inform Sloan’s many representations of women. She examines the ways that […]
John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity: Cosmopolitan American Art, 1880-1915
Moore positions the work of American artist John White Alexander at the intersection of the shifting discourse of nationalism in American art at the turn of the twentieth century. The book addresses the dynamic search for and definition of national identity through a careful examination of the institutional complexes in which Alexander worked and exhibited. […]
Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-In
Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-In covers the arc of the first half of Jonathan Swift’s life, offering fresh details of the contentment and exuberance of his childhood, of the support he received from his grandmother, of his striking affection for Esther Johnson from the time she was ten years old (his pet name for her in her […]
Jonathan Swift: Our Dean
Jonathan Swift: Our Dean details the political climax of his remarkable career—his writing and publication of The Drapier’s Letters (1724), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729)—stressing the relentless political opposition he faced and the numerous ways, including through his sermons, that he worked from his political base as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, psychologically as well as physically just outside […]
Jonathan Swift and the Arts
This is the first comprehensive account of Swift’s engagement with the arts in Ireland and England. It both documents and reflects upon his attitudes toward music, gardening, theatre, architecture, and painting, and suggests that, despite his often sceptical attitude towards the non-literary arts, he saw them as a rich source of inspiration and entertainment for […]
Jonathan Swift’s Word-Book: A Vocabulary Compiled for Esther Johnson and Copied in Her Own Hand
This Word-Book is presumably the only work of Jonathan Swift’s not in print, until now. Since the 1690s, Swift had been formulating a list of words and definitions for his protégé Esther Johnson, beginning with terms from the Book of Common Prayer. His was apparently an ongoing list, kept rather haphazardly, with open spaces for adding new words. About […]
Junk Drawer: What We Leave Behind
Junk Drawer: What We Leave Behind explores the personal objects that were once treasured by their owners yet were ultimately consigned to online “junk drawer” sales. Photographer and coeditor Barbara Von Eckardt acquired these random assortments from estate remnants on eBay and has documented their contents through evocative, sepia-toned images. In doing so, she has […]
Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture Essays in Honor of James M. Dean
The essays in this volume consider the ways in which material and intellectual culture both shaped and were shaped by the literature of late medieval England. The first section, “Textual Material,” reflects on cultural and social issues generally referred to as the History of Ideas, and how those ideas manifest in later medieval English texts, […]
The Latest Early American Literature
The Latest Early American Literature, according to readers for the University of Delaware Press, is “a collection of polemics and manifestoes.” In it R. C. De Prospo bids to follow in the footsteps of the two, rare, early Americanist dissenters whom Philip F. Gura once distinguished as “prophets without honor in the field”: William Spengemann […]
Lear's Other Shadow: A Cultural History of Queen Lear
Please click here to view Giles Hoover’s complete University Press Week 2025: Special Coverage in Spine magazine. Lear’s Other Shadow: A Cultural History of Queen Lear offers a deep cultural analysis of the figure of Queen Lear, who shadows and eventually sometimes overshadows her royal husband across the nearly 1000-year life of this archetypal tale. What […]
Learning from Scant Beginnings: English Professor Expertise
Although teaching is perhaps the central public activity of most university English professors, there is surprisingly little research in the specifics of expert professorial practice. Many previous studies describe, recipe-like, the end products of successful teaching, while others conflate expertise in this subject matter with pedagogical expertise. This study focuses on the moves the expert […]
The Leslie A. Marchand Memorial Lectures, 2000–2015: A Legacy in Byron Studies
This unique collection of lectures honors the pioneering work in Byron studies of Leslie Alexis Marchand, who has had an enduring influence on the appreciation and study of Lord Byron for sixty years. Generations of readers and writers have come to Byron through Marchand’s biographies and his edition of the poet’s letters and journals. All admirers of […]
The Letters of Ruth Pitter: Silent Music
Although Ruth Pitter (1897–1992) is not well known, her credentials as a poet are extensive, and in England from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s she maintained a modest yet loyal readership. In total she produced eighteen volumes of new and collected verse. Her A Trophy of Arms (1936) won the Hawthornden Prize for Poetry in 1937, and […]
Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature: Ethics and the Reconstitution of Subjectivity
In thirteen essays on writers ranging from Virginia Woolf and A. A. Milne to J. M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy, Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature puts the thought of the twentieth-century’s most innovative ethical philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, in dialogue with established twentieth-century masterpieces, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author, As I Lay Dying, One Hundred Years of Solitude, […]
The Life of Robert Loraine: The Stage, the Sky, and George Bernard Shaw
Robert Loraine was born in a niche of time when technology exploded into a world whose keyword was Progress. Both he and his life-long friend Bernard Shaw believed they were in an evolutionary period of humanity. Born into a theatrical family, he understood its clashes of temperament and competition for the attention of the audience. […]
The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of India
The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of India challenges the recent postcolonial readings of European, predominantly English, representations of India in the seventeenth century. Following Edward Said’s discourse of “Orientalism,” most postcolonial analyses of the seventeenth-century representations of India argue that the natives are represented as barbaric or exotic “others,” imagining these representations as products of […]
Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850–1914
This study examines literary celebrity in Britain from 1850 to 1914. Through lively analysis of rare cultural materials, Easley demonstrates the crucial role of the celebrity author in the formation of British national identity. As Victorians toured the homes and haunts of famous writers, they developed a sense of shared national heritage. At the same […]
Literary Sociability in Early Modern England: The Epistolary Record
This study represents a significant reinterpretation of literary networks during what is often called the transition from manuscript to print during the early modern period. It is based on a survey of 28,000 letters and over 850 mainly English correspondents, ranging from consumers to authors, significant patrons to state regulators, printers to publishers, from 1615 […]
Literature, Religion, and East/West Comparison: Essays in Honor of Anthony C. Yu
This book pays critical homage to the eminent comparatist of Chinese and Western literature and religion, Anthony C. Yu of The University of Chicago. Broadly comparative, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary in scope, the volume consists of an introductory essay on Yu’s scholarly career, and thirteen additional essays on topics such as literary texts and traditions of […]
Literature and the Arts: Interdisciplinary Essays in Memory of James Anderson Winn
The ten essays in Literature and the Arts explore the intermedial plenitude of eighteenth-century English culture, honoring the memory of James Anderson Winn, whose work demonstrated how seeing that interplay of the arts and literature was essential to a full understanding of Restoration and eighteenth-century English culture. Scenery, machinery, music, dance, and texts transformed one […]
Literature and the Touch of the Real
Literature and the Touch of the Real offers a critique of neo-Saussurean theories of the constitution of the world through language or the essential divorce of language from the real. It does this by, first, offering a critical account of the contradictions and omissions of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. Secondly, in a revisionist reading of Jacques […]
Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century
This volume considers how ideas were made visible through the making of art and visual experience occasioned by reception during the long eighteenth century. The event that gave rise to the collection was the 15th David Nochol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, which launched a new Australian and New Zealand Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Two […]
Making Stars: Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
In bringing biography and celebrity together, the essays in Making Stars interrogate contemporary and current understandings of each. Although biography was not invented in the eighteenth century, the period saw the emergence of works that focus on individuals who are interesting as much, if not more, for their everyday, lived experience than for their status […]
Mandeville’s Travails: Merging Travel, Theory, and Commentary
This book offers a critical methodology for analyzing travel literature. The subject of travel literature, as well as travel literatures, have not always been regarded with respect or given much critical attention. In order to amend this lack of positive reception, I analyze the late medieval text Mandeville’s Travels, specifically the Cotton MS. This text, though […]
The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England
The Manufacturers of Literature explores the effect of the development of the publishing industry upon print culture generally, and literature specifically, during the eighteenth century. The book is structured around case studies of important writers and publishers, including Addison and Steele, Pope, Johnson, Robert Dodsley, and Frances Burney.
Marble Halls: Civic and Urban Architecture in the Gilded Age
Marble Halls is about the great civic buildings that were designed in the style of Beaux-Arts classicism during the Gilded Age (1865–1918) and about the City Beautiful movement that was intended to improve the setting for the buildings and the urban environment for the people. The Industrial Revolution, which arrived belatedly in the United States, […]
Marguerite, Countess of Blessington: The Turbulent Life of a Salonnière and Author
This new biography of Lady Blessington, the first in more than eighty years, illuminates the private and public life of this important but neglected salonnière and author. This study enriches our knowledge of the social, political, and literary history of the post-Romantic and early Victorian era. It examines Lady Blessington’s close friendships with politicians and […]
A Martyr for Sin: Rochester's Critique of Polity, Sexuality, and Society
Rochester’s hitherto underappreciated political thinking is reassessed in this study via a combination of postmodern critical approaches, particularly the theories of Foucault with close contextual readings of his works. Substantially new and politicized readings are offered for Rochester’s satires, lyrics, prose, and drama-texts both rarely and much studied.
Masculinities, Childhood, Violence: Attending to Early Modern Women—and Men: Proceedings of the 2006 Symposium
This interdisciplinary volume includes essays and workshop summaries for the 2006 Attending to Early Modern Women—and Men symposium. Essays and workshop summaries are divided into four sections, “Masculinities,” “Violence,” “Childhood,” and “Pedagogies.” Taken together, they considers women’s works, lives, and culture across geographical regions, primarily in England, France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries, the Caribbean, and the […]
The Masks of Hamlet
In this work, Rosenberg insists again and again that only the individual reader or actor can determine Shakespeare’s design of Hamlet’s characterand of the play. To interpret Hamlet’s words and actions at the many crises, the reader needs to double in the role of actor, imagining the character from the inside and observing from the […]
The Masks of King Lear
This book seeks Shakespeare’s intentions in King Lear in new ways. It explores major interpretations of distinguished actors and directors as well as of critics from England, the United States, France, Norway, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere; and it confronts issues of staging and visualization.
The Mechanics of Solids, History and Evolution: A Festschrift in Honor of Arnold D. Kerr
This book is an outgrowth of a 2004 symposium held at the University of Delaware in honor of Dr. Kerr’s retirement after a thirty-year career at the university. It includes a biography and publications list of Arnold D. Kerr, as well as twelve papers on various topics including contact mechanics, nondestructive evaluation of structures, ice […]
Medical Misinformation in Early Modern Germany
Medical Misinformation in Early Modern Germany examines how doctors, writers, and printers in sixteenth-century Germany responded to the rapid expansion of print and its implications for medical knowledge. The spread of printed texts generated widespread suspicion about print’s reliability as a conduit of information and led writers to reflect on questions of audience, vernacularity, and medical […]
Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge
Elleanor Eldridge, born of African and US indigenous descent in 1794, operated a lucrative domestic services business in nineteenth century Providence, Rhode Island. In defiance of her gender and racial background, she purchased land and built rental property from the wealth she gained as a business owner. In the 1830s, Eldridge was defrauded of her […]
Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels, and Labours of Mrs. Elaw
As a young Black orphan indentured to a Quaker family in Bristol, Pennsylvania, Zilpha Elaw (c. 1793–1873) decided to join the upstart Methodists in 1808. She preached her first sermon a decade later, ignoring her husband and the many church leaders, clergy, and laity who tried to silence her. Elaw’s memoir chronicles the first twenty […]
Milton Among Spaniards
Firmly grounded in literary studies but drawing on religious studies, translation studies, drama, and visual art, Milton Among Spaniards is the first book-length exploration of the afterlife of John Milton in Spanish culture, illuminating underexamined Anglo-Hispanic cultural relations. This study calls attention to a series of powerful engagements by Spaniards with Milton’s works and legend, […]
The Mind's Landscape: William Bronk and Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the poet William Bronk (1918-1999) was a significant voice in the American literary landscape. Even though he spent nearly all of his life in Hudson Falls, NY, Bronk was a vital presence in American poetry as evidenced by his connections to Robert Frost, Charles Olson, George Oppen, […]
The Mirror of Divinity: The World and Creation in J.-K. Huysmans
Using a multidisciplinary approach, this book argues that the operation of art-as-mirror is the key to the hidden unity of Huysmans’ fiction. Beginning with an examination of Huysmans’ naturalist reflections of a fallen world, this study moves to an analysis of Huysmans’ Decadent works, in which he images the distorted or idealized selves of aesthetes […]
Modern Art on Display: The Legacies of Six Collectors
Modern Art on Display: The Legacies of Six Collectors is structured as a sequence of case studies that pair collectors of modern art with artists they particularly favored: Duncan Phillips and Augustus Vincent Tack; Albert Barnes and Chaim Soutine; Albert Eugene Gallatin and Juan Gris; Lillie Bliss and Paul Cézanne; Etta Cone and Henri Matisse; G. […]
The Modest Ambition of Andrew Marvell: A Study of Marvell and His Relation to Lovelace, Fairfax, Cromwell, and Milton
A quasi-biographical, historical, and critical study of Andrew Marvell, this book deals with the specific historical presences and pressures that led Marvell to devise his defenses of “worthy men.” Marvell’s perception of his role as poet emerges through his reformation of conventional figures and structures.
Money, Power, and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Financial Revolution in the British Isles
This collection gathers together the expertise of scholars in several disciplines in order to examine the manner in which financial and economic arguments were expressed in pamphlets, broadsides, and longer works of literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to assess to what extent the political realities of the day were informed by these […]
Money and Materiality in the Golden Age of Graphic Satire
This book examines the entwined and simultaneous rise of graphic satire and cultures of paper money in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Asking how Britons learned to value both graphic art and money, the book makes surprising connections between two types of engraved images that grew in popularity and influence during this time. Graphic […]
Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Novel
Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Novel investigates the connection between realist fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the psychoanalytic approach of John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory. Attachment Theory arises from the guiding principles of realism and the veratist’s devotion to long-term, direct observation of subject matter. Additionally, […]
Montaigne and the Lives of the Philosophers: Life Writing and Transversality in the Essais
In his Essais, Montaigne stresses that his theoretical interest in philosophy goes hand in hand with its practicality. In fact, he makes it clear that there is little reason to live our lives according to doctrine without proof that others have successfully done so. Understanding Montaigne’s philosophical thought, therefore, means not only studying the philosophies of […]
Mortality’s Muse: The Fine Art of Dying
The inevitability of death—that of others and our own—is surely among our greatest anxieties. Mortality’s Muse: The Fine Art of Dying explores how art, mainly literary art, addresses that troubling reality. While religion and philosophy offer important consolations for life’s end, art responds in ways that are perhaps more complete and certainly more deeply human. Among subjects […]
Napoleon’s Sorcerers: The Sophisians
During Napoleon’s rule, Freemasonic circles in France invented rituals that allegedly first took place in the temple structures of ancient Egypt. This book looks at the cultural environment and intellectual background of the one such pseudo-Egyptian secret society, the Sacred Order of the Sophisians. Founded in Paris in 1801, the Sophisian Order initially catered to […]
Narrative Faith: Dostoevsky, Camus, and Singer
Narrative Faith engages with the dynamics of doubt and faith to consider how literary works with complex structures explore different moral visions. The study describes a literary petite histoire that problematizes faith in two ways—both in the themes presented in the story, and the strategies used to tell that story—leading readers to doubt the narrators and their narratives. […]
National Responses to the Holocaust: National Identity and Public Memory
The Holocaust is an international event, but the brutal crimes happened in specific places and are remembered, to a large degree, in various national discourses. The essays in this book examine the complex and often ambiguous relationship between national identity and the legacy of the Holocaust in countries including Lithuania, Poland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, […]
The National Road and the Difficult Path to Sustainable National Investment
The National Road is a comprehensive history of the first federally financed interstate highway, an approximately 600-mile span that joined Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the nineteenth century. This book covers the road’s contribution to the cultural, economic, and administrative history of the United States, its decline during the second half of […]
Nature, Politics, and the Arts: Essays on Romantic Culture for Carl Woodring
This interdisciplinary book honors Columbia professor and New York intellectual Carl Woodring. Chapters on Romantic and Victorian literary culture written by leading scholars in the field join in conversation with Woodring’s teachings on literature and visual art and his commentaries on American culture. A multiple-authored chapter of postscripts on the aesthetic range of Woodring’s intellectual […]
Neoclassical Tragedy in Elizabethan England
This book examines the development of neoclassical tragedy during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). The first chapter investigates the Elizabethan views of tragedy expressed by critics of the theater, including Gosson, Stubbes, and Rainolds, and defenders of poetry and drama such as Lodge, Philip Sidney, and Gager. The next chapter focuses on the English […]
Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate, and Local Loyalties in Provincial Russia
This study establishes the deep loyalty of a segment of the Russian gentry to life in the provinces during the period 1820-1860, centering on the family but extending to estates, peasants, and neighborhood society. The book examines the cultural identity of the provincial nobility, focusing on the province of Tver’. It begins with those relationships […]
Neural Computation in Hopfield Networks and Boltzmann Machines
This book deals with the existing mathematical models of neurons and their interactions. Beginning with the research of John Hopfield, the authors go on to study problems involving Hopfield’s network, the modifications introduced by Ackley, Hinton, and Sejnowski, and the rise of the Boltzmann machine.
New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction: “Hearts Resolved and Hands Prepared”: Essays in Honor of Jerry C. Beasley
New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction is a collection of thirteen essays honoring Professor Jerry C. Beasley, who retired from the University of Delaware in 2005. The essays, written by friends, collaborators and former students, reflect the scholarly interests that defined Professor Beasley’s career and point to new directions of critical inquiry. The initial essays, which […]
New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation
New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation is a collection of essays by various hands that examines its point of focus, the inexhaustible English author Samuel Johnson, from a variety of different critical perspectives. The book simultaneously interrogates particular texts (such as the Dictionary, the Lives of the Poets) alongside general themes (such as Johnson and […]
A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-Century Discourse on the Novel
This work offers new prominence to the first century of theoretical and critical commentary on the English novel. Moving ostensibly marginal texts (such as prefaces and reviews) to the foreground, the author demonstrates the role critical discourse played in establishing the genre within literary and popular culture, and the extent to which it anticipated many […]
New Testaments: Cognition, Closure, and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660–1740
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, popular works of literature attracted—as they attract today—sequels, prequels, franchises, continuations, and parodies. Sequels of all kinds demonstrate the economic realities of the literary marketplace. This represents something fundamental about the way human beings process narrative information. We crave narrative closure, but we also resist its finality, making […]
A Nickel and a Prayer
Virtually unknown outside of her adopted hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, Jane Edna Hunter was one of the most influential African American social activists of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. In her autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer, Hunter presents an enlightening two-part narrative that recollects her formative years in the post–Civil War South and her activist years in […]
Notorious Facts: Publicity in Romantic England, 1780-1830
Notorious Facts examines the sensationalistic confounding of persons and principles in the public life of Romantic England (1780–1830). Its purview is limited to five decades straddling the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but its trajectory, moving from a politics rendered in personal terms to a politics of personality, describes a shift still in process today. […]
Objects of Liberty: British Women Writers and Revolutionary Souvenirs
While souvenir collecting was a standard practice of privileged men on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, women began to partake in this endeavor as political events in France heightened interest in travel to the Continent. Objects of Liberty: British Women Writers and Revolutionary Souvenirs explores the prevalence of souvenirs in British women’s writing during the French […]
Octave Mirbeau’s Fictions of the Transcendental
Political firebrand, tireless reformer, champion of the avant-garde, Octave Mirbeau embraced his role as disturber of the peace. Inspired by Kropotkine and Dostoyevsky, Mirbeau became the social conscience of the era, speaking in a clear voice to impugn capitalist ideology, to defend the cause of the worker, the child, the pauper, the prostitute, and the […]
Odyssey of a Bombardier: The POW Log of Richard M. Mason
Odyssey of a Bombardier is the illustrated Prisoner of War “log” that depicts the experiences of bombardier Richard M. Mason in German prison camps after his B-17 “Flying Fortress” was shot down by the Germans in France in 1944, the final year of World War II. The log follows Mason from the day his plane crashed […]
Of Memory and Literary Form: Making the Early Modern English Nation
This book opens with a crisis of recollection. In the early modern period, real political traumas like civil war and regicide exacerbated what were already perceived ruptures in myths of English descent. William Camden and other scholars had revealed that the facts of history could not justify the Arthurian myths, nor could history itself guarantee […]
Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice
Ordering Customs explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make sense of human difference in a period characterized by increasing global contact and a rapid acceleration of the circulation of information. Venice was at the center of both these developments. The book traces the emergence of a distinctive tradition of ethnographic writing that served as the basis […]
The Other Rise of the Novel in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction
The rise of the novel paradigm—and the underlying homology between the rise of a bourgeois middle class and the coming of age of a new literary genre—continues to influence the way we analyze economic discourse in the eighteenth-century French novel. Characters are often seen as portraying bourgeois values, even when historiographical evidence points to the […]
Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies
This collection presents early modern writers who were either virtually unknown, or whose works were overshadowed by those of their great contemporaries Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and Donne. It is a series of historically specific readings of social relationships, understood from the point of view of marginalized or neglected sources. The intention of this volume is […]
Painting the Prehistoric Body in Late Nineteenth-Century France
In late nineteenth-century France, when Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution had finally begun to permeate French culture and society, several academic artists turned to a relatively new sub-genre of history painting, the prehistoric-themed subject. This artistic interest in Darwin’s theories was manifested as paintings and sculptures of prehistoric humanity engaged in physical conflict with each […]
The Papist Represented: Literature and the English Catholic Community, 1688–1791
Most eighteenth-century literary scholarship associates the major developments in English literature and culture during the rise of modernity with a triumphant and increasingly tolerant Protestantism while assuming that the English Catholic community was culturally moribund and disengaged from Protestant society and culture. However, recent work by historians has shown that the English Catholic community was […]
Pastiche, Fashion, and Galanterie in Chardin’s Genre Subjects: Looking Smart
Pastiche, Fashion and Galanterie in Chardin’s Genre Subjects seeks to understand how Chardin’s genre subjects were composed and constructed to communicate certain things to the elites of Paris in the 1730s and 1740s. The book argues against the conventional view of Chardin as the transparent imitator of bourgeois life and values so ingrained in art history […]
Patrons of Enlightenment: The Free Economic Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia
Patrons of Enlightenment is the first English language study of the St. Petersburg Free Economic Study, one of the most prestigious and influential public associations in Imperial Russian history. Established in 1765 under the personal protection of Catherine the Great, its mission was to enlighten the villages and country estates of the Russian Empire by spreading […]
Penitent Brothellers: Grace, Sexuality, and Genre in Thomas Middleton's City Comedies
Penitent Brothellers examines the religious perspectives of Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton, focusing on scenes of repentance and conversion in his city comedies. Using Middleton’s rarely studied pamphlet The Two Gates of Salvation, Heller establishes the Calvinist theological background for the repentances. The study also examines Middleton’s portrayal of sodomy in his satires.
Performative Polemic: Anti-Absolutist Pamphlets and their Readers in Late Seventeenth-Century France
Performative Polemic is the first literary historical study to analyze the “war of words” unleashed in the pamphlets denouncing Louis XIV’s absolute monarchy between 1667 and 1715. As conflict erupted between the French ruler and his political enemies, pamphlet writers across Europe penned scathing assaults on the Sun King’s bellicose impulses and expansionist policies. This […]
The Philadelawareans and Other Essays Relating to Delaware
This volume presents a varied sampling of the author’s writings from the past sixty years, along with some previously unpublished materials. It begins with a long prologue that the author calls a literary autobiography, and this story is continued and amplified in introductory notes that accompany each of the following items. The first essay provides […]
Picturing Religious Experience: George Herbert, Calvin, and the Scriptures
Little has been said about the relationship of Herbert’s writings to those of John Calvin, yet the latter were abundant and influential in Herbert’s Church of England. Accordingly Picturing Religious Experience studies Herbert’s poetry in relation to those writings, particularly regarding “spiritual conflicts,” which the poet himself said would be found depicted in his book of poems. […]
Pivotal Policies in Delaware: From Desegregation to Deregulation
This book identifies ten pivotal policies in Delaware that still impact public life in this small state. Much that has happened since the mid-twentieth century in Delaware public policy evolved from particular events. These events consisted of court decisions, laws passed, or happenings of particular persons. They prompted public policies, the effects of which were […]
Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Rome: A Political Study of the Roman Works
This pioneering study argues the influence of Plato’s political thought on Shakespeare’s Roman works: The Rape of Lucrece, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus. It contends that Plato’s theory of constitutional decline provides the philosophical core of these works; that Lucrece, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra form a “Platonic” tetralogy collectively spanning the stages of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny; […]
Playing Robin Hood: The Legend as Performance in Five Centuries
The essays in this collection explore the performance aspects of the Robin Hood legend from three perspectives: its Tudor social and theatrical context; its adaptations and analogues in other cultures; and its later history in theater and film.
Political Anti-Slavery Discourse and American Literature of the 1850s
Appalled and paralyzed. Abandoned and betrayed. Cowed and bowed. Thus did Frederick Douglass describe the North in the wake of the compromise measures of 1850 that seemed to enshrine concessions to slavery permanently into the American political system. This study discovers in that feature of political anti-slavery discourse—the condemnation of an enfeebled North—the key to […]
The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage
The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage is the first full-length study to examine representations of sexual violence on the Restoration stage. By reading theatrical depictions of sexual violence alongside political tracts, propaganda pamphlets, and circulating broadsides, this study argues that authors used dramatic representations of rape to respond to and […]
Pompadour's Medium: Luxury and Reproduction in Eighteenth-Century France
Pompadour’s Medium reveals the depth of patron, amateur artist, and royal mistress Madame de Pompadour’s contributions to the visual arts, long dismissed as superficial and trivial. Her artistic activities centered on an innovative exploration of the relationships between painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts at a moment when advances in reproductive printmaking threatened to flatten […]
Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France
Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France examines how new and often contradictory ideas about friendship were enacted in the lives of artists in the eighteenth century. It demonstrates that portraits resulted from and generated new ideas about friendship by analyzing the creation, exchange, and display of portraits alongside discussions of friendship in philosophical and academic […]
Print, Chaos, and Complexity: Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Media Culture
This book describes how eighteenth-century awareness of the interplay between fixity and instability in printed texts demonstrates the role print played in developing Samuel Johnson’s awareness of print culture’s impact on human beings ethically, politically, and aesthetically. The study traces the evolution and continuity of Johnson’s ideas in these areas by describing the importance of […]
Private Fire: Robert Francis’s Ecopoetry and Prose
Matthew J. Babcock’s Private Fire: Robert Francis’s Ecopoetry and Prose is an examination of the life and work of one of America’s most intriguing but tragically obscure writers. Babcock uses his own personal relationship with Robert Francis’s work, which emphasizes conservation and connectedness to our natural surroundings, to illuminate both overtones and nuances that are undoubtedly useful […]
Producing the Eighteenth-Century Book: Writers and Publishers in England, 1650-1800
This volume includes twelve essays on the history of the book in the long eighteenth century that collectively argue for the importance of integrating literary scholarship and the various practices of book history. Themes include: a rectification of the tendency in literary studies to be blind to the materiality of the book; a focus on […]
The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment
In The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment, John C. O’Neal draws largely on the etymological meaning of the word confusion as the action of mixing or blending in order to trace the development of this project which, he claims, aimed to reject dogmatic thinking in all of its forms and recognized the need […]
Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater: Gender and Comedy, Performance and Print
Often perceived as merely formulaic or historical documents, dramatic prologues and epilogues – players’ comic, poetic bids for the audience’s good opinion – became essential parts of Restoration theater, appearing in over 90 percent of performed and printed plays between 1660 and 1714. Their popularity coincided with the rise of the English actress, and Prologues and […]
Prospero’s “True Preservers”: Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, and Giorgio Strehler—Twentieth-Century Directors Approach Shakespeare’s The Tempest
This work explores how three great modern, international directors have adapted and applied African story-telling techniques, textual deconstruction, traditional Japanese art and theatrical forms, and Italian stage tradition to their productions of William Shakespeare’s great play,The Tempest. It is an analysis of how these directors’ approaches to this same canonical work have contributed to the […]
Publishing, Editing, and Reception: Essays in Honor of Donald H. Reiman
Publishing, Editing, and Reception is a collection of twelve essays honoring Professor Donald H. Reiman, who moved to the University of Delaware in 1992. The essays, written by friends, students, and collaborators, reflect the scholarly interests that defined Reiman’s long career. Mirroring the focus of Reiman’s work during his years at Carl H. Pforzheimer Library in […]
The Pulse of Praise: Form as a Second Self in the Poetry of George Herbert
This book focuses on the meaning and function of George Herbert’s poetic form from a psychohistorical perspective, demonstrating what close attention to prosody can contribute to critical discussions about the devices of self-representation, the dynamics of the self-other relation, and the depths of self-transformation in The Temple.
Puritan London: A Study of Religion and Society in the City Parishes
Contributes to an understanding of the internal political and religious structure of the City of London during the period of the English Revolution. This monograph reconstructs the social structure and composition of each of the City parishes, surveys the successes and failures of Presbyterianism among the parishes, explores the new relationship between the Puritan ministers […]
Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide
Thomas Pynchon’s longest novel to date, Against the Day (2006), excited diverse and energetic opinions when it appeared on bookstore shelves nine years after the critically acclaimed Mason & Dixon. Its wide-ranging plot covers nearly three decades—from the 1893 World’s Fair to the years just after World War I—and follows hundreds of characters within its 1085 pages. Pynchon’s Against […]
Questioning the Master: Gender and Sexuality in Henry James's Writing
This is the first collection to bring together new essays exploring James’s depiction of gender and his use of sexual imagery—both now the focus of current debate. The essays, including those by eminent James scholars Leland Person and John Carlos Rowe, examine his fiction, films made from his work, his own literary criticism, letters, and […]
Quixotic Authority: The Female Quixote and the Woman Writer, Lennox to Austen
Quixotic Authority re-writes the story of what it has meant to be an impassioned womanreader by exploring the female quixote trope within novels and in the professional lives of mid-to late eighteenth-century British women novelists. The female quixote is often a self-centered, deluded, ill-educated homewrecker who must be reformed or punished; yet women writers such […]
Reading Apollinaire’s Alcools
Reviewing the previous scholarship for seventeen of the most important poems in Alcools, this book provides a detailed analysis of each work and includes a state-of-the-art survey of current Apollinaire criticism. Besides acquainting readers with the existing scholarship, the book considers all the interpretations that have been proposed and indicates profitable directions to pursue. Each poem […]
Reading Texts, Reading Lives: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz
Our culture attempts to separate competing ideological factions by denying relationships between multiple perspectives and influences outside of one’s own narrow interpretive community. The distinguished essayists in this volume find Daniel R. Schwarz’s pluralistic, self-questioning approach to what he calls “reading texts and reading lives” quite relevant to the current historical moment and political situation. […]
Reading What’s There: Essays on Shakespeare in Honor of Stephen Booth
The twelve essays were written not simply to honor Stephen Booth, but to further the study of Shakespeare. Booth has, for over forty years, proposed a distinct understanding of how Shakespeare’s plays and poems work upon us and a unique and rigorous way of reading them. The essays here reflect his insights and method and […]
Realism and Role-Play: The Human Figure in French Art from Callot to the Brothers Le Nain
After the heroic nudes of the Renaissance and depictions of the tortured bodies of Christian saints, early seventeenth-century French artists turned their attention to their fellow humans, to nobles and beggars seen on the streets of Paris, to courtesans standing at their windows, to vendors advertising their wares, to peasants standing before their landlords. Fascinated […]
Rebel with a Conscience
This is an account of Russell W. Peterson’s life and the battles he has fought, despite tremendous opposition, to further social justice and environmental integrity. In addition to working in private industry, Peterson was governor of Delaware, chairman of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, director of the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. […]
Redreaming the Renaissance: Essays on History and Literature in Honor of Guido Ruggiero
History and literature have often been considered different fields and only seldom have “talked” to one another. This collection of essays remedies that situation by building on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero. The rich textual world of the Italian Renaissance offers an excellent proving ground to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines. Literature […]
The Reemergence of World Literature: A Study of Asia and the West
Argues that the discipline of comparative literature should be expanded to include all of the world, not only a favored segment, and that translation represents a legitimate and indispensable tool for readers.
Reflections on Sentiment: Essays in Honor of George Starr
Reflections on Sentiment not only addresses current scholarly interest in feeling and affect but also provides an occasion to celebrate the career of George Starr, who, in more than fifty years of incisive scholarship and committed teaching, has elucidated the work of Daniel Defoe and the role of sentimentalism in what was once reductively termed an […]
Reforming the “Bad” Quartos: Performance and Provenance of Six Shakespearean First Editions
This work explores both the performance features and the provenance of the six early Shakespearean playtexts known as “bad” quartos—the first printed editions of Hamlet, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI. First examining the performance features of these playtexts, the book goes on to explore the three […]
Regulating Readers: Gender and Literary Criticism in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
An important contribution to the study of authorship and criticism, Regulating Readers adds to a growing body of scholarship by women that shows eighteenth-century women writers envisioning for themselves authoritative critical positions and roles in the public sphere.
Renaissance Historicisms: Essays in Honor of Arthur F. Kinney
This collection of various approaches to early modern England offers readers such pleasures as the most complete bibliography to date of King James’s poetry, a unique edition of a memoir by the son of Sir Martin Barnham, as well as new arguments about Skelton, More, Elyot, Marguerite de Navarre, Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Shakespeare (The Comedy […]
Renaissance Shakespeare/Shakespeare Renaissances: Proceedings of the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress
Selected contributions to the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, which took place in July 2011 in Prague, represent the contemporary state of Shakespeare studies in thirty-eight countries worldwide. Apart from readings of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, more than forty chapters map Renaissance contexts of his art in politics, theater, law, or material culture and discuss numerous […]
Representation, Heterodoxy, and Aesthetics: Essays in Honor of Ronald Paulson
The chapters constituting this book are different in subject and method, striking testimony to the range of Paulson’s interests and the versatility of his critical powers. In his prolific career he has produced extensive analysis of art, poetry, fiction, and aesthetics produced in England between 1650 and 1830. Paulson’s unique contribution has to do with […]
The Representation of the Struggling Artist in America, 1800–1865
The Representation of the Struggling Artist in America, 1800–1865 analyzes how American painters, sculptors, and writers, active between 1800 and 1865, depicted their response to a democratic society that failed to adequately support them financially and intellectually. Without the traditional European forms of patronage from the church or the crown, American artists faced unsympathetic countrymen who […]
Representations of Swift
This collection offers not only the “representations of Swift” to which its title refers but also a representation of Swift scholarship at the close of the twentieth century and a return to fundamental questions about the life, writing, and views of Swift, issues raised in part by literary scholarship’s return to historicism but also powerfully […]
Representing France and the French in Early Modern English Drama
This wide-ranging collection of essays, written by leading specialists, furnishes previously unpublished evidence of France’s role and importance in the early modern English literary and dramatic fields. Its chapter-length introduction offers an up-to-date critical presentation of the issues involved: representation, cultural identity, the construction of otherness, Frenchness, and the social and cultural dynamics of theater. […]
Representing the Professions: Administration, Law, and Theater in Early Modern England
Representing the Professions unites literary criticism, social and legal history, and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture. It offers a detailed exploration of the professionalization of selected early modern disciplines in an effort to characterize those disciplines in their social, economic, and historical contexts. Unlike recent work on individual responses to social change, Representing the Professions discusses how […]
Resentment and the Right: French Intellectual Identity Reimagined, 1898-2000
Resentment and the Right: French Intellectual Identity Reimagined, 1898-2000 examines a century-long struggle between cultural spokesmen on the extreme right and left to dominate and define the concept of “the intellectual.” This struggle began with the introduction of the “intellectual” during the Dreyfus Affair of 1898 and continues even today among the intellectuals of the Nouvelle […]
The Restoration Mind
This book offers a culture-based, interdisciplinary study that formulates a general theory as to the essence of the Restoration mentality, that is, ways in which the period viewed itself, its artistic creations, and the world. Contributors include Restoration scholars from around the world.
Retelling the Siege of Jerusalem in Early Modern England
Retelling the Siege of Jerusalem in Early Modern England traces sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English retellings of the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the way they informed and were informed by religious and political developments. The siege featured prominently in many early modern English sermons, ballads, plays, histories, and pamphlets, functioning as a touchstone for writers who […]
Reversing Babel: Translation among the English during an Age of Conquests, c. 800 to c. 1200
Reversing Babel: Translation among the English during an Age of Conquests, c. 800 to c. 1200, starts with a small puzzle: Why did the Normans translate English law, the law of the people they had conquered, from Old English into Latin? Solving this puzzle meant asking questions about what medieval writers thought about language and […]
A Revolution Almost beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion
To praise Jane Austen’s novels only as stylistic masterpieces is to strip them of the contexts and intertexts that would otherwise illuminate them. By focusing primarily on the political, historical, satiric, actively intertextual, and deeply sexualized text Persuasion, Jocelyn Harris seeks to reconcile the apparent insignificance of her content with her high canonical status. This book […]
The Rhetoric of Numbers in Gibbon’s History
Gibbon aspired to combine the critical analysis of the eighteenth-century philosophe with the older traditions of the humanist and scholarly historian. His different uses of numbers, to inform and to persuade, illustrate his remarkable fusion of these characters. This book, the first to be devoted to a historian’s use of numbers, shows how carefully Gibbon interrogated and […]
Rhetorics of Order/Ordering Rhetorics in English Neoclassical Literature
This collection of essays on the rhetorics of order in English neoclassical literature includes Rose A. Zimbardo’s investigation of generic slippage between drama and novel in works by Dryden and Behn; Maynard Mack’s analysis of Pope’s enduring rhetorics of presentation; and Patricia Meyer Spack’s examination of the heroines of Clarissa and The Italian.
A Richard Selzer Reader: Blood and Ink
A Richard Selzer Reader: Blood and Ink is a career-spanning collection, including major short stories and essays by the renowned doctor-author. In the 1960s, while practicing as a general surgeon and teaching surgery at the Yale School of Medicine, Richard Selzer began publishing unique creative work in magazines such as Harper’s and Esquire. By 1985, when he retired as a […]
The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660–1800: Toward Posthumanism in British Literature Between Descartes and Darwin
The Rise of Animals and the Descent of Man illuminates compelling historical connections between a current fascination with animal life and the promotion of the moral status of non-human animals as ethical subjects deserving our attention and respect, and a deep interest in the animal as agent in eighteenth-century literate culture. It explores how writers, including […]
Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Fiction
This study explores the vestiges of primitive sacrificial rituals that emerge in a group of canonical modernist novels, including The Turn of the Screw, Heart of Darkness, The Good Soldier, The Great Gatsby, and To the Lighthouse. It argues that these novels reenact a process that achieved its seminal expression in the Genesis story of “The Binding of Isaac,” in […]
Rivers in Russian Literature
Rivers in Russian Literature focuses on the Russian literary and folkloric treatment of five rivers—the Dnieper, Volga, Neva, Don, and Angara. Each chapter traces, within a geographical and historical context, the evolution of the literary representation of one river. Imagination may endow a river with aesthetic or spiritual qualities; ethnic, national, or racial associations; or […]
Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465-1560 Texts, Contexts, and Ideology
Previous scholarship on the early Robin Hood poems has tended to treat the three major works— Robin Hood and the Monk, Robin Hood and the Potter, and A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode —as a homogeneous group with a common audience and ideology. In this new study, Thomas H. Ohlgren demonstrates that each work must be evaluated according to […]
Romance and Reformation The Erasmian Spirit of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure
This book argues that Measure for Measure is not a cynical problem play but a comic romance through which Shakespeare examines Tudor humanism’s desire to reform social ills through art.
The Romance of the Lyric in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry: Experiments in Form
The Romance of the Lyric in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry: Experiments in Form offers a new account of the nature of the lyric as nineteenth-century women poets developed the form. It offers fresh assessments of the imaginative and aesthetic complexity of women’s poetry. The monograph seeks to redefine the range and cultural significance of women’s writing using […]
Roman Invasions: The British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530-1660
This book describes how the Renaissance understanding of ancient Britain remained affected by medieval conceptions. The reason for this remaining medievalism was that the tradition based on Geoffrey of Monmouth became so relevant to Protestant patriotism that a great many Protestant English writers clung to it or were influenced by it despite its evident historical […]
Romeo and Juliet: Parallel Texts of Quarto I (1597) and Quarto 2 (1599)
Using this edition, the reader may see at once how Shakespeare’s manuscript of the play, upon which the second quarto (Q2) is based, was adapted for the Elizabethan stage by the author and/or his colleagues. Q1 is considerably shorter than Q2. While many long speeches are cut, abbreviated, or revised, the structure of the play […]
Rough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929-1937
Rough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929-1937 is an edited selection, published here for the first time, of the diaries kept by American poet and novelist Coleman during her years as an expatriate in the modernist hubs of France and England. During her time abroad, Coleman developed as a surrealist writer, publishing a […]
The Royal Financial Administration and the Prosecution of Crime in France, 1670-1789
The Royal Financial Administration and the Prosecution of Crime in France, 1670–1789 explores the French monarchy’s role in financing criminal prosecutions in the royal courts of the realm—the payment of criminal frais de justice in the vocabulary of the ancien régime —between 1670 and 1789 (that is, from the codification of criminal judicial procedure in the early period […]
Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France, 2nd edition
The original edition of Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies, published in 2005, was a pathbreaking work of early modern literary history, exploring women’s role in the rise of the fairy tale and their use of this new genre to carve out roles as major contributors to the literature of their time. This new edition, with a […]
Samuel Johnson’s “General Nature”: Tradition and Transition in Eighteenth-Century Discourse
This study illuminates the importance and meaning of the term “author” in eighteenth-century discourse from the perspective of its prominent usage by Samuel Johnson. It explains Johnson’s employment of “nature” in his periodical essays, his qualified endorsement of the new science, and his commendation of Shakespeare’s drama and other literary works on the basis of […]
Satire, History, Novel: Narrative Forms, 1665-1815
Displacing the novel from the central position it has held in studies concerned with the origin or rise of the English novel, Satire, History, Novel considers novelistic forms as part of a network of complementary and competing genres, including conjectural histories and narrative satires, and regards relations among these forms as most significant and revealing. This is […]
Savage Indignation: Colonial Discourse from Milton to Swift
Savage Indignation is about a flexible and indiscriminate discourse during the window of license occurring between the end of an English divine polity (1649) and the emergence of science as arbiter of “true discourse” (ca. 1734). Rather than tracing the development of the expedient language of empire and ideological success, the book analyzes the resistance and […]
The School for Widows
Clara Reeve’s 1791 epistolary novel The School For Widows tells the stories of childhood friends Frances Darnford and Rachel Strictland, both of whom have lived hard lives as the virtuous wives of improvident and immoral husbands. Frances, left penniless after the death of her gambler-spendthrift husband (who in an attempt to escape debtor’s prison tries to sell […]
Science, Politics, and Friendship in the Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes
This study revaluates the work of the scientist and radical, poet and dramatist and English exile in Germany Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849). While his writing has elicited high praise from poets ranging from Robert Browning through Ezra Pound to John Ashbery, scholars have frequently neglected it on grounds of its purportedly morbid and opaque eccentricity. […]
Screening Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V
This book applies the videocassette to the study of Shakespeare on television and film. The result is that the films become texts, and Shakespeare in performance can be examined with the scholarly care that has been reserved for printed books.
Searching for God in the Sixties
This paradigm-breaking book dares to rethink the whole of the ’60s experience, not from a political or sociological but from an historical/theological perspective. Camille Paglia wrote that “the spiritual history of the sixties has yet to be written.” This is that book. The book’s chapters each correspond to a line in Emily Dickinson’s poem “Finding […]
Sexuality at the Fin de Siècle: The Making of a “Central Problem”
It has come to be widely accepted that “sexuality” as we know it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, around the time that Havelock Ellis declared it the “central problem of life.” Yet however self-evident Ellis’s claim about sexuality might seem, the act of placing something at the center is the consequence […]
Shakespeare's Lyricized Drama
We are so used to calling the plays written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries “poetic drama” that we hardly ever stop to think about the generic meaning of the term. This book is an attempt to explore Shakespeare’s artistic achievement as an intricate blend of the dramatic and lyrical modes. In a series of minute […]
Shakespeare's Sweet Thunder: Essays on the Early Comedies
This collection of essays examines such topics as the influence of New Comedy on The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew; explores the implications for performance of the two versions of The Shrew, as well as examining the woman’s part; studies the relationship of Love’s Labor’s Lost to The Convent of Pleasure, and so forth.
Shakespeare's Tragic Form: Spirit in the Wheel
Since about 1960, when five-act division in Shakespeare’s plays was strongly disputed, most critics have focused on individual scenes rather than holistic form. This book argues for Shakespeare’s use of five acts, arranged in three cycles to form a 2-1-2 pattern. It also examines the role of multiple plots and centers of consciousness, especially in […]
Shakespeare, Man of the Theater: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1981
This volume presents a sampling of the more than 250 papers presented at the Congress of the ISA held at Stratford-upon-Avon in August 1981. Most of the papers are concerned with Shakespeare as a writer for the theater. Other essays deal with Shakespeare as a literary, rather than theatrical, writer. Several of the offerings cover […]
Shakespeare: A Wayward Journey
The essays contained in this volume represent studies in Shakespeare over three decades. Apart from their abiding intrinsic interest and merit, they help trace the course of Shakespeare criticism during the latter half of the twentieth century, as emphasis on critical interpretation experienced a number of significant shifts. Genre studies, textual analyses, and feminist approaches […]
Shakespeare: Text and Theater Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio
Among the topics discussed in this collection are the significance of the First Folio, Stoppard’s film of Rosencrantz and Guidenstern Are Dead, and suggestions for an alchemical interpretation of the Tempest and a religious interpretation of A Comedy of Errors.
Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction: Theorizing Foundling and Lyric Plots
In the first book to use fiction as theory, Barbara L. Estrin reverses chronological direction, beginning with contemporary novels to arrive at a re-visioned Shakespeare, uncovering a telling difference in the stories that script us and that influence our political unconscious in ways that have never been explored in literary-critical interpretations. Describing the animus against […]
Shakespeare and Dramatic Tradition: Essays in Honor of S. F. Johnson
Eighteen new essays by respected critics on Shakespeare and his dramatic antecedents, contemporaries, and successors, offering an up-to-date survey-history of Renaissance theater and examples of scholarly and critical methodology.
Shakespeare and European Politics
This collection offers a selection of papers presented at a conference held in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It reflects a new trend in Shakespeare studies: a tendency to study Shakespeare not just in his own historical or national contexts, but also as a cultural phenomenon with an international afterlife, transmitted in a variety of languages, first […]
Shakespeare and Interpretation, or What You Will
Brayton Polka takes both a textual and theoretical approach to seven plays of Shakespeare: Macbeth, Othello, Twelfth Night, All’s Well That Ends Well, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. He calls upon the Bible and the ideas of major European thinkers, above all, Kierkegaard and Spinoza, to argue that the concept of interpretation that underlies both Shakespeare’s plays and our own […]
Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Valencia, 2001
Shakespeare’s career-long fascination with the Mediterranean made the association a natural one for this first World Shakespeare Congress of the Third Millennium. The plenary lectures and selected papers in this volume represent some of the best contemporary thought and writing on Shakespeare, in the ranging plenary lectures Jonathan Bate on Shakespeare’s islands and the Muslim […]
Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic: Medical Narratives on the Early Modern English Stage
By Shakespeare’s time, the debate over legitimate medical practice had become vociferous and public. The powerful College of Physicians fought hard to discredit some and reign in others, but many resisted, denied, or ignored its authority. Dramatists did not fail to notice the turmoil, nor did they fail to comment on it—and no one commented […]
Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Los Angeles, 1996
This volume assembles a selection from the many papers delivered at the Sixth World Shakespeare Congress. Four plenary lectures are printed, including that of Jane Smiley on the creation of A Thousand Acres, her award-winning novel derived with King Lear. Twenty-two papers by well-known scholars also offer a wide range of responses to Shakespeare’s art and international […]
Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance
Shakespearean Educations examines how and why Shakespeare’s works shaped the development of American education from the colonial period through the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair, taking the reader up to the years before the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (popularly known as the GI Bill), coeducation, and a nascent civil rights movement would alter the educational landscape […]
Shakespearean Illuminations: Essays in Honor of Marvin Rosenberg
Topics in this collection include discussions of acting the “Big Four,” as well as studies on politics, language, and history.
Shakespeare in China: A Comparative Study of Two Traditions and Cultures
Shakespeare in China is an attempt to explore systematically and deeply the nature and significance of the interaction between Shakespeare and traditional Chinese drama and between the dramatist and Chinese culture. Ever since Shakespeare was introduced into China at the beginning of this century, his works have exerted a pervasive influence upon Chinese theater and culture. […]
Shakespeare in Performance: A Collection of Essays
The essays in this book deal with the nature of performance criticism, performance history, state and screen productions of Shakespeare and the physical playhouse. These essays, by John Russell Brown, James Bulman, Ralph Berry, Herbert Coursen, Jay Halio, James Lusardi, June Schlueter, Harry Keyishian, Alan Dessen, Pauline Kiernan, and Marvin Rosenberg, represent some of the […]
Shakespeare in Shorthand: The Textual Mystery of King Lear
The year 2008 marked the four hundredth anniversary of the first publication of King Lear, and for four centuries the play has remained a consummate bibliographical mystery. The earliest quarto (1608) prints apparent nonsense and seemingly insoluble cruxes. Shakespeare in Shorthand solves the textual puzzle and shows that many textual anomalies derive from the play’s transcription in Elizabethan […]
Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance
Shakespeare Matters is a collection of original essays which addresses three significant areas in contemporary Shakespeare studies: interpretations of the plays in their historical and social contexts; the varying roles of Shakespeare’s work in educational practices and traditions; and performance conventions and textual issues from the sixteenth century to the present.
Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes
Many of the contributors to this collection, including E. A. J. Honigmann, M. M. Mahood, Jonathan Bate, and Stanley Wells (among others), have been centrally involved in examining, promoting, and sometimes questioning the critical dominance of the stable Shakespeare text, particularly as a result of performance. The essays range from the traditional poetical and theater […]
Shakespeare without Boundaries: Essays in Honor of Dieter Mehl
Shakespeare without Boundaries: Essays in Honor of Dieter Mehl offers a wide-ranging collection of essays written by an international team of distinguished scholars who attempt to define, to challenge, and to erode boundaries that currently inhibit understanding of Shakespeare, and to exemplify how approaches that defy traditional bounds of study and criticism may enhance understanding and […]
Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources
Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources argues that seven plays—The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline—derive one or more of their plots directly from folktales. In most cases, scholars have accepted one literary version of the folktale as a source. Recognizing that the same story has […]
Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeares: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Brisbane, 2006
This collection offers twenty-nine essays by many of the world’s major scholars of the extraordinary diversity and richness of Shakespeare studies today. It ranges from examinations of the society William Shakespeare himself lived in, to recent films, plays, novels, and operatic adaptations for adults and children in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East. […]
Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France
Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France constructs the first cultural history of porcelain making in France. It takes its title from two types of “bodies” treated in this study: the craft of porcelain making shaped clods of earth into a clay body to produce high-end commodities and the French elite shaped human bodies […]
She Said No: The Gender of Consent from Fairy Tales to #MeToo
She Said NO investigates the gender inequality in the authority to speak—and therefore to refuse—that prevailed in the establishment and interpretation of the French classics. By selecting authors deemed essential to French cultural heritage and erasing the works of women writers, this biased canon has systematically undervalued female agency—even in well-known works by both men […]
Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography
There are many different ways to say “I.” This book examines the ways in which four contemporary women writers (Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, Gisèle Halimi, and Julia Kristeva) have written their autobiographical “I” as a plural concept. These women refuse the individual “I” of traditional autobiography by developing narrative strategies that multiply the voices in […]
Shifting the Scene: Shakespeare in European Culture
Shifting the Scene adapts words from one of the Choruses in Henry V. Its essays try, without denying authority to the text and the theater, to widen the scene of inquiry to include other institutions, such as education, politics, language, and the arts, and to juxtapose the constructions of Shakespeare and his works that have been produced […]
Shopping: Material Culture Perspectives
The degree to which shopping, or, more broadly, consumerism, is both critiqued and defended in American society confirms the role that commercial goods play in our daily lives. This collection of essays provides case studies depicting selected aspects of this engaging activity. The authors include several historians with diverging specialties: an art historian, an anthropologist, […]
Sidney and Junius on Poetry and Painting: From the Margins to the Center
Franciscus Junius the Younger (1591-1677) is famous as virtually the founder of Germanic philology. But he also composed, at the request of the Earl of Arundel, whom he served as librarian, an influential treatise on the art of painting as it is viewed in ancient literature. We are fortunate to have his recently discovered marginalia […]
Sidney Godolphin: Servant of the State
This work is the first scholarly biography of Sidney Godolphin in over one hundred years, and thus fills a gaping hole in the history of late Stuart England. How Godolphin used his position to mold English diplomacy and military strategy is examined.
Sketches of Slave Life and From Slave Cabin to Pulpit
This book is the first anthology of the autobiographical writings of Peter Randolph, a prominent nineteenth-century former slave who became a black abolitionist, pastor, and community leader. Randolph’s story is unique because he was freed and relocated from Virginia to Boston, along with his entire plantation cohort. A lawsuit launched by Randolph against his former […]
Sociable Criticism in England, 1625-1725
Sociable Criticism in England, 1625-1725 explores how for the period 1625 to 1725 cultural practices and discourses of sociability (rules for small-group discussion, friendship discourse, and patron-client relationships) determined the venues within which critical judgments were rendered, disseminated, and received. Previous histories of criticism for this period have treated either the theoretical context along with the […]
Social Structure and Disaster
In a format of presentation, critique, and commentary, disaster researchers and sociological theorists address basic theoretical issues underlying studies of social structure and disaster. The editor’s program of archival research on natural disasters, social movement organizations, and other types of social structure provides a basis for discussion.
Soviet Heroic Poetry in Context: Folklore or Fakelore
Soviet Heroic Poetry in Context discusses key issues surrounding the composition and recording of folklore as well as its often intensely political aspect and its preoccupation with chimerical cultural authority. These issues are dramatically displayed in Soviet epic compositions of the 1930s and 1940s, the so-called noviny (“new songs”), which took their formal inspiration largely from […]
The Spectator: Emerging Discourses
This book offers the latest scholarship on this influential series of essays. Taking advantage of the insights provided by such critical perspectives as new historicism, feminism, postcolonialism, psychology, postmodernism, and cultural studies, the scholars represented here take a fresh look at The Spectator and its relation to the changing culture that influenced it-and was influenced by it. […]
Spenser's Ovidian Poetics
No history of the longstanding critical tradition of exploring the Spenser-Ovid relationship has been written. In this book Professor Stapleton constructs such a critical history: the annotations of E. K. in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), the Enlightenment editions of The Faerie Queene, the philological mode of the Spenser Variorum (1932–57), and the recent, innovative work of Harry Berger and Colin […]
Spenser, Milton, and the Redemption of the Epic Hero
This book studies the interplay of theology and poetics in the three great epics of early-modern England: the Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained. Bond examines the relationship between the poems’ primary heroes, Arthur and the Son, who are godlike, virtuous, and powerful, and the secondary heroes, Redcrosse and Adam, who are human, fallible, and weak. He […]
Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance
This is the first book-length study of the crucial relationship between sport and the political and imaginative literature of Renaissance England. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, educators, medical practitioners, and military scientists were among the many contemporaries who praised sport as necessary and functional—physiologically beneficial to the individual practitioner, vital to the preparedness of […]
Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama
With a focus on visual representations of beheading, dismemberment, and mutilation in medieval and early modern drama, this study traces the impact of the Reformation on the semiotics of the body. What emerges from this exploration of violent spectacle is a sense of the complex and powerful ways in which the legacy of the pre-Reformation […]
Stages of Play: Shakespeare’s Theatrical Energies in Elizabethan Performance
Stages of Play assumes that Shakespeare wrote scripts for actors and audiences, not texts for readers; and second, that we can best appreciate how Shakespeare’s scripts create dramatic meaning by attempting to visualize their performances in the theatrical settings for which they were originally created—the Theatre and the Globe. The argument is presented that with spectators […]
The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church
Using original rubrics from some 1,200 manuscripts, this book documents performance of the liturgical drama from the tenth through the sixteenth centuries. It lays out the staging space and traces the movements of the performers on architectural ground plans. The rubrics reveal a wealth of information about the creating of character through ecclesiastical vestments and […]
The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare: Text and Theatrical Technique
This book examines Shakespeare’s response in his late plays to the challenge of making romance stories believable through theatrical representation and the kind of experience the late plays in performance seek to create for their spectators. Taking The Winter’s Tale as a case study, the book’s central chapters demonstrate how Shakespeare tests and transforms the techniques to […]
Staging Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Alan C. Dessen
The twelve essays in this volume explore the relationships between Shakespearean pedagogy, performance, and scholarship. The volume consists of four sections: “Acts of Recovery,” which includes essays that take an historicist approach to performance concerns; “Performing the Moment,” in which the authors describe their experiences staging a particular Shakespearean scene in an actual production; “Recordings,” […]
Staring into the Void: Spinoza, Master of Nihilism
Drawing extensively on the whole range of Spinoza’s philosophical writing, Staring into the Void devotes twelve chapters to showing in detail how the architecture of reality as Spinoza saw it rises in stages from a theory of being (the existence of only One Real Thing) to prophetically modern theories of the physical world (actual or possible), of […]
State, Stage, Language: The Production of the Subject
Juan Carlos Rodríguez’s State, Stage, Language: The Production of the Subject, now in its third Spanish edition (2001), first appeared in 1984, and has become, alongside his Theory and History of Ideological Production (1974, 1990), one of the classic texts to emerge from the Althusserian tradition. Rodríguez’s project is to analyze the ideological unconscious that always exists, without […]
Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne
Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne derives from the Laurence Sterne Tercentenary Conference held at Royal Holloway, University of London, on July 8–11, 2013. It was attended by some eighty scholars from fourteen countries; the conference heard more than sixty papers. The organizers invited participants to submit revised versions of their contributions for this […]
The Stonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth-Century Paris
This book connects the story of a group of migrant workers to the question of why Paris became the nineteenth century’s “capital of revolution,” and why this stage of the city ended. The stonemasons were well known for their skills, and their seasonal migration from central France, but especially for their role in rebellions. They […]
Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century France: Negotiating Shifting Forms
Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century France is an innovative, interdisciplinary examination of parallels between the early modern era and the world in which we live today. Readers are invited to look to the past to see how then, as now, people turned to storytelling to integrate and adapt to rapid social change, to reinforce or restructure community, to […]
Strange Communion: Motherland and Masculinity in Tudor Plays, Pamphlets, and Politics
Strange Communion concerns the development in Tudor culture of a tendency to identify the common good with the health of the “motherland.” Playwrights, polemicists, and politicians such as John Bale, Richard Morison, and William Shakespeare, among others, relied on maternal representations of England to evoke a sense of common purpose. Vanhoutte examines how such motherland tropes […]
Structures and Subjectivities: Attending to Early Modern Women
“Structures and Subjectivities” refers to what we can and probably cannot know about women in the early modern period. Scholars study the societal structures their disciplines call attention to; they are left to infer the subjectivities, the lived experience, of women whose lives they attempt to reconstruct. The authors of the essays in the volume, […]
Subjects on the World's Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
This collection of essays on British literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance focuses on the point of contact between an artist and society that prompts the literary imagination to respond either with the creation of a new character or with the demonstration of change in an old one.
The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections
While the first essay in this collection analyzes the factors that caused Bulwer to be so highly regarded in his own day, the others deal with one of more of Bulwer’s novels, which are related to the contemporary cultural context in Britain and Europe as well as to more recent critical theories. They consider Bulwer’s […]
Sustainability & Historic Preservation: Toward a Holistic View
Sustainability & Historic Preservation: Towards a Holistic View broadens the horizons of the mushrooming drive to correlate the objectives of these two spheres. To date, discussions of the relationship between historic preservation and sustainability have generally focused on the energy consumption of buildings. The nine chapters in this book show how that agenda can and should […]
Swift as Priest and Satirist
One of the most tendentious and enduring questions of Swift scholarship concerns his faith. What did Swift believe? Was his career in the Church primarily a means of political and social advancement? Did Swift subscribe to a coherent theology, or were his beliefs simply expedient? How did the turbulent streams of eighteenth-century Anglican and Protestant […]
Swiftly Sterneward: Essays on Laurence Sterne and His Times in Honor of Melvyn New
These thirteen essays have been collected to honor Melvyn New, professor emeritus, University of Florida, and are prefaced by a description of his scholarly career of more than forty years. Suggesting the wide-range of that career, the first eight essays offer various critical perspectives on a diverse group of eighteenth-century authors. Laurence Sterne, the primary […]
The Symbolic Design of Windsor-Forest: Iconography, Pageant, and Prophecy in Pope’s Early Work
This is the first detailed exploration of one of the earliest major poems by Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest (1713). The book reveals how Pope used the artistic conventions of the Stuart court, such as masque, architecture, allegorical painting, and heraldry to create the last great Renaissance poem in English. A coherent symbolic design is constructed around the […]
The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars
The Tactics of Toleration examines the preconditions and limits of toleration during an age in which Europe was sharply divided along religious lines. During the Age of Religious Wars, refugee communities in borderland towns like the Rhineland city of Wesel were remarkably religiously diverse and culturally heterogeneous places. Examining religious life from the perspective of Calvinists, […]
A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French Fiction
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. While fantastic storylines and elements of magic were increasingly shunned by a neo-classicist literary culture that valued verisimilitude above all […]
Teaching with Shakespeare: Critics in the Classroom
In this work, six Shakespeare scholars and critics (Helen Vendler, R. A. Foakes, Leah Marcus, John Wilders, Patricia Parker, and Annabel Patterson), in a series of lectures delivered to undergraduates, explain distinctive critical strategies that they and other contemporary critics use for interpreting Shakespeare’s poems and plays. Workshops illustrating the practice of these strategies follow […]
Technologies of Empire: Writing, Imagination, and the Making of Imperial Networks, 1750–1820
Technologies of Empire looks at the ways in which writers of the long eighteenth century treat writing and imagination as technologies that can produce rather than merely portray empire. Authors ranging from Adam Smith to William Wordsworth consider writing not as part of a larger logic of orientalism that represents non-European subjects and spaces in fixed […]
Terræ-Filius, Or, The Secret History of the University of Oxford (1721; 1726)
In his Terræ-Filius essays of 1721, Nicholas Amhurst describes and satirizes Oxford life as he saw it during the 1710s and early 1720s. Although academic and intellectual issues receive abundant attention, Amhurst devoted even more space to the political, religious, social, and moral issues that often worked to undercut the university’s academic goals. Written in an energetic, […]
The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour
This book is the first full-length analysis of one of the key books of the eighteenth century—Daniel Defoe’s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. The creation of Defoe’s Tour, its sources and models, and its relationship to earlier topographic literature are discussed. The Text of Great Britain argues that Defoe evolved a rhetorical design that would express […]
The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne
This book concerns the life and theatrical career of the great native-born English composer and musician of the eighteenth century, Thomas Augustine Arne (1710-1778). Its purpose is three-fold. First, it provides a comprehensive biography and account of the performance and publication of Arne’s works during his lifetime. Although Arne’s childhood years get some attention, the […]
The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing
Who were the first celebrity couples? How was their success forged? Which forces influenced their self-fashioning and marketing strategies? These questions are at the core of this study, which looks at the birth of a phenomenon, that of the couple in the show business, with a focus on the promotional strategies devised by two professional […]
The Theatre of Death: Rituals of Justice from the English Civil Wars to the Restoration
This book discusses some rituals of justice—such as public executions, printed responses to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s execution speech, and King Charles I’s treason trial—in early modern England. Focusing on the ways in which genres shape these events’ multiple voices, I analyze the rituals’ genres and the diverse perspectives from which we must understand them. […]
The Theatre of Praise: The Panegyric Tradition in Seventeenth-Century English Drama
A critical examination of panegyrical theatre from its beginnings in the masque, city pageant, and history plays to its varied culmination on the Restoration musical stage.
Theodore Dreiser’s Uncollected Magazine Articles, 1897-1902
This edition of Dreiser’s work consists of thirty-four uncollected magazine articles published between 1897 and 1902. In this period, before writing Sister Carrie, Dreiser contributed 111 freelance articles to various popular magazines, such as Success, Truth, Metropolitan, Cosmopolitan, Ainslee’s, Demorest’s, Munsey’s, Puritan, New Voice, Great Round World, Harper’s Weekly, and New York Times Illustrated Magazine. A great majority of these magazine articles have been collected in two previous […]
Theodore von Neuhoff, King of Corsica: The Man Behind the Legend
“A visionary and a madman” was how one British statesman, Lord Carteret, described Theodore von Neuhoff. This exciting biography, Theodore von Neuhoff, King of Corsica: The Man behind the Legend by Julia Gasper, traces the unlikely career of the German baron who in 1736 had himself proclaimed and crowned King of Corsica. Theodore von Neuhoff’s career spanned […]
Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism
Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism contains seventeen essays exploring the complex relationships between literary intentions and theological concerns of authors writing in the second half of the eighteenth century. The diversity of literary forms and subjects, from Fielding and Richardson to Burke and Wollstonecraft, is matched by a diversity of approaches […]
Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance: The German-French Connection
This book is about the intersection of two evolving dance-historical realms—theory and practice—during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. France was the source of works on notation, choreography, and repertoire that dominated European dance practice until the 1780s. While these French inventions were welcomed and used in Germany, German dance writers responded by […]
Thirteen Stories by Fitz-James O’Brien: The Realm of the Mind
This volume forms part of a continuing initiative by Wayne R. Kime to make available the writings of Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-1862), an Irish-American literary man who during his lifetime won reputation as one of the most talented young authors in the United States, but who has been all but forgotten since. It follows Fitz-James O’Brien: Selected […]
Thomas Hardy and the Law: Legal Presences in Hardy’s Life and Fiction
Thomas Hardy and the Law argues that Hardy’s extensive legal research and experience drove his writing of fiction throughout his career. The book studies Hardy’s legal research and friendships, his work as a Dorchester magistrate, actual Victorian law cases from which he drew novel material, nineteenth-century legal reform, the legal “machinery” of the novels, and Hardy’s […]
Thomas Paine's American Ideology
This book analyzes the entire spectrum of Paine’s intellectual career between 1775 and 1787, not merely his attitude toward American independence. The author summarizes Paine’s writings as an apprentice magazine editor, sketches the publishing history of Common Sense, explains its major philosophical doctrines and contemporary issues, and indicates the relations of these ideas to earlier manifestations.
Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity
Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity is a study of the challenge intersubjective experience poses to doctrinal formulations of difference. Focusing on Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes and using feminist and relational psychoanalytic theory, the project examines representations of looking, working, eating, conversing, and touching, to argue that encounters between selves in “threshold space” dismantle the binary oppositions that support categorical […]
The Time is Out of Joint: Skepticism in Shakespeare’s England
The final decades of the sixteenth century brought tumultuous change in England. Bitter disputes concerning religious reformation divided Catholics and Protestants, radical reformers and religious conservatives. The Church of England won the loyalty of many, but religious and political dissent continued. Social and economic change also created anxiety as social mobility, unemployment, riots, and rebellions […]
Tobias Smollett, Scotland's First Novelist: New Essays in Memory of Paul-Gabriel Boucé
This collection takes a fresh look at issues raised not only in Smollett’s novels, for which he is usually remembered, but also in other works of this prolific Scottish author. Essays include a demonstration beyond reasonable doubt, after more than two centuries of debate, that it was indeed Smollett who authored “The Memoires of a […]
Tocqueville & Beyond: Essays on the Old Regime in Honor of David D. Bien
This collection of essays by French and American historians testifies to the enduring importance of Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution, first published in 1856. Highly original in its day and now recognized as a classic, The Old Regime has since the 1970s stimulated considerable research and improved our understanding of the French Old […]
To Kill a Text: The Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens, and Zola
To Kill a Text analyzes the intertextual conflicts between four monuments of nineteenth-century fiction: Notre-Dame de Paris, Bleak House, Le Ventre de Paris and Germinal. The fundamental hypothesis of the book is that Dickens and Zola exemplify Hugo’s conception of the novel as a “graft” of one work upon another, producing hybrid mixtures of genres and styles of representation.
To Provide for the General Welfare: A History of the Federal Spending Power
To Provide for the General Welfare traces the course of the constitutional controversy over the spending power and the role of that power in driving an expansion in federal activity and authority from 1787 forward. Since the founding of the Republic, American statesmen have seen the federal government as a fitting source of tax dollars to […]
To the Wilderness: A Memoir
To the Wilderness is the memoir of an outdoorswoman’s life in search of the wild. Improvising a canoe route through deep Maine woods, she discovered—a century after Thoreau—not “the forest primeval” but a commercial forest, B.C. (Before Chainsaw). Later, in the Minnesota-Ontario border waters she found “wilderness” being loved to death, making the ironic case for […]
Trains and Technology: The American Railroad in the Nineteenth Century. Volume 1, Locomotives
This series of four lavishly illustrated volumes provides a thorough grounding in the maturation of the American railroad through an exposition of railroad technology in an age of unprecedented technological expansion. Volume 1: Locomotives details locomotive design and application from 1830 to 1900. Illustrations. About the Author Anthony J. Bianculli is a mechanical engineer with extensive and […]
Trains and Technology: The American Railroad in the Nineteenth Century. Volume 2: Cars
This series of four lavishly illustrated volumes provides a thorough grounding in the maturation of the American railroad through an exposition of railroad technology in an age of unprecedented technological expansion. Volume 2: Cars is devoted to passenger, freight, and non-revenue cars of nineteenth-century America. Illustrations. About the Author Anthony J. Bianculli is a mechanical engineer with […]
Trains and Technology: The American Railroad in the Nineteenth Century. Volume 3: Track and Structures
This series of four lavishly illustrated volumes provides a thorough grounding in the maturation of the American railroad through an exposition of railroad technology in an age of unprecedented technological expansion. Volume 3: Track and Structures covers the technologies involved in locating and building the railroad and all its aspects of rail development. The structures portion of […]
Trains and Technology: The American Railroad in the Nineteenth Century. Volume 4: Bridges and Tunnels, Signals
This series of four lavishly illustrated volumes provides a thorough grounding in the maturation of the American railroad through an exposition of railroad technology in an age of unprecedented technological expansion. Volume 4: Bridges and Tunnels, Signals is an exposition of the various types of bridges, their foundations, and the materials of which they were made. Tunnels, […]
Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South
The impulses that fired the Southern Literary Renaissance echoed the impetus behind the Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century, when Ireland sought to demonstrate its cultural equality with any European nation and disentangle itself from English-imposed stereotypes. Seeking to prove that the South was indeed the cultural equal of greater America, […]
Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself”
This book explores significant problems in the fiction of Daniel Defoe. Maximillian E. Novak investigates a number of elements in Defoe’s work by probing his interest in rendering of reality (what Defoe called “the Thing itself”). Novak examines Defoe’s interest in the relationship between prose fiction and painting, as well as the various ways in […]
Transformations of Memory and Forgetting in Sixteenth-Century France: Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de Ronsard, Michel de Montaigne
This book proposes that in a number of French Renaissance texts, produced in varying contexts and genres, we observe a shift in thinking about memory and forgetting. Focusing on a corpus of texts by Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de Ronsard, and Michel de Montaigne, it explores several parallel transformations of and challenges to traditional discourses […]
Transforming Campus Culture: Frank Aydelotte’s Honors Experiment at Swarthmore College
At a time in American history when football ruled the American campus and fraternities dominated student life, Frank Aydelotte, through his determination to specialize exclusively in initiating an Honors program of study, accomplished a feat virtually unknown in American higher education. That is, he succeeded in shaping one regional, run of the mill, Quaker school-Swarthmore […]
Transforming the Word: Prophecy, Poetry, and Politics in England, 1650-1742
The radical prophets of the English civil wars were fascinating figures, combining a devout belief in the power of divine inspiration with a passionate desire for social change and a distinctly eccentric rhetorical style. Tracing the prophets who rant, rage, and wreak havoc through the works of Butler, Dryden, Mandeville, Pope, and other less familiar […]
Tuned and Under Tension: The Recent Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass
The essays in this book constitute a close reading of the later poetry of W. D. Snodgrass. Each writer has taken a work or theme that has led to the complexities of Snodgrass’s dense layerings of content and technique. These essays also begin to define his relationship to the modern tradition.
A Twice-Told Tale: Reinventing the Encounter in Iberian/Iberian American Literature and Film
A Twice-Told Tale analyzes contemporary reconstructions of the age of “discovery,” exploration, and conquest vis-à-vis fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sources. It explores the cultural construction of colonial alterity, sexual difference and textual politics, the myths of mestizaje, the re-invention of the past through apocryphal chronicles, the (re-)presentation of the Old World-New World encounter, and the carnivalization of history […]
Two Different Worlds: Christian Absolutes and the Relativism of Social Science
Challenging the assumption that the biblical text is absolutist, this study renders the wall of division between Christian absolutism and cultural relativism indefensible. Its encouraging argument draws upon sociology, anthropology, and analysis of the biblical text.
An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts
In recent years, Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) has been the subject of increasing interest. A woman, a member of the landholding elite, an educator, and a daughter who lived under the historical shadow of her father, Edgeworth’s life is difficult to categorize. Ironically, the very aspects of Edgeworth’s identity that once excluded her from literary and […]
The Uncovered Head: Jewish Culture: New Perspectives
What is it that has turned Jewish identity, the product of such a long history, into a problem that has been troubling the minds of Jewish thinkers and Hebrew authors for over two hundred years now? Is it true that the core and substance of Judaism is the Jewish religion? Is a religious Jew ‘more […]
Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age
How did workers experience cut glass during its cultural heyday? Rather than privilege the stories of factory owners or wealthy consumers, Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age refracts the medium’s history through the labors required to make and maintain these dazzling artifacts as well as popular representations of this work, […]
UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's Underworld
Don DeLillo’s 1997 masterwork Underworld, one of the most acclaimed and long-awaited novels of the last twenty years, was immediately recognized as a landmark novel, not only in the long career of one of America’s most distinguished novelists but also in the ongoing evolution of the postmodern novel. This collection of thirteen essays brings together new […]
Uneasy Possessions: The Mother-Daughter Dilemma in French Women's Writings, 1671-1928
In Uneasy Possessions: The Mother-Daughter Dilemma in French Women’s Writings, 1671-1928, Katharine Ann Jensen analyzes the work of five major French women writers, discovering a four-century pattern of mother-daughter relationships marked by domination, submission, and conflict. This groundbreaking study explores work of Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, Marie de Sévigné, Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, George Sand, and Colette, providing […]
Unlikely Exemplars: Reading and Imitating beyond the Italian Canon in French Renaissance Poetry
This book explores questions of reading and writing practices in the French Renaissance. While the imitation of great masters of the past, such as Petrarch, was a staple of Renaissance poetics, French poets of the mid-1500s, including Saint-Gelais, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Baïf, and Magny, often turned to a set of unlikely exemplars: the second-rate poets […]
Unscathed by Fire: A Young Girl and the Italian Armistice of September 8, 1943
Told through the astonished eyes of a young girl, this book narrates the vicissitudes that Fiorenza Di Franco and her family lived through against the backdrop of a Hungary devastated by the tragic events of World War II. The book’s title refers to a critical moment during the war when Italy signed an armistice with […]
Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century
Unsettling Sexuality was recently listed as one of The Guild of Queer Early Modernists’ Top Ten Books of 2025! This book is also freely available online as an Open Access digital edition on the Mainfold platform, here. Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century challenges the traditional ways that scholarship has approached sexuality, […]
The Unspeakable
On March 6, 1998, a disgruntled employee went on a rampage at the Connecticut Lottery Corporation, killing four executives before turning the gun on himself. The tragedy made headlines across the country for weeks. In The Unspeakable, Denise Brown, who lost her husband in the shootings, gives voice to the story left untold by the media. […]
Upstart Talents: Rhetoric and the Career of Reason in England Romantic Discourse, 1790-1820
This book examines the use and abuse of rhetoric in English public life from 1790 to the end of the Regency. With chapters focusing on the rhetorical conditioning of rational argument in the public life of Romantic England, it begins with the premise that the rhetoric of this period employs reasoned arguments while also exhibiting […]
Urban Underground Space Design in China: Vernacular and Modern Practice
The first book of its kind in English, this work examines and illustrates below-ground, nonresidential facilities in China, including traditional uses of subterranean space and modern uses, such as hotels, hospitals, theaters, and shopping centers. Includes five case studies and ninety-six line drawings, photographs, and tables. Illustrated.
Varieties of Antisemitism: History, Ideology, Discourse
The essays in this volume articulate the historical ground on which this artistic exploration of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism depends. They also elaborate on the spectrum that connects them, in terms of their historical location and ideological emphases, and thus suggest the ways in which they are connected in terms of rhetorical discourse. The essays […]
Victorian Yankees at Queen Victoria's Court: American Encounters with Victoria and Albert
Little seems to have changed since Queen Victoria’s day in the instant magnetism of British royalty across the Atlantic Ocean; yet for the first generations liberated by revolution, the British Isles and its sovereigns seemed as remote as the moon. In the young nation, Americans who were little interested in the sons and daughters of […]
Victorine du Pont: The Force Behind The Family
Victorine Elizabeth du Pont, the first child of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont and his wife Sophie, was seven years old when her family emigrated to America, where her father established the humble beginnings of what would become a corporate giant. Through correspondence with friends and relatives from the ages of eight to sixty-eight, Victorine unwittingly […]
Violet Oakley: An Artist’s Life
Violet Oakley: An Artist’s Life is the first full-length biography of Violet Oakley (1874–1961), the only major female artist of the beaux-arts mural movement in the United States. While not a “sensational page turner,” there is much of human interest here — a pampered and spoiled young woman who suddenly finds herself in greatly reduced circumstances, […]
The Visionary Queen: Justice, Reform, and the Labyrinth in Marguerite de Navarre
The Visionary Queen: Justice, Reform, and the Labyrinth in Marguerite de Navarre affirms Navarre’s status not only as a political figure, author, or proponent of non-schismatic reform, but also as a visionary. In her life and writings, the queen of Navarre dissected the injustices that her society and its institutions perpetuated against women. We also […]
Visualizing the Text: From Manuscript Culture to the Age of Caricature
This volume presents in-depth and contextualized analyses of a wealth of visual materials. These documents provide viewers with a mesmerizing and informative glimpse into how the early modern world was interpreted by image-makers and presented to viewers during a period that spans from manuscript culture to the age of caricature. The premise of this collection […]
The Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions: The Evolution of a Theatrical Code
This book highlights the form and voice of stage directions as an important aspect of dramatic discourse generally and Elizabethan drama specifically. It traces the development of Elizabethan directions from their medieval forebears and contrasts the directions associated with the professional theaters with the neoclassical conventions of other venues.
Votes for Delaware Women
Votes for Delaware Women is the first book-length study of the woman suffrage struggle in Delaware, placing it within the rich historical scholarship on the national story. It looks especially at why, despite decades of suffrage organizing and an epic struggle in Dover, in the spring of 1920, the legislature refused to make Delaware the […]
W. H. Auden: Contexts for Poetry
This volume is an attempt to consolidate the critical findings of the last quarter century, and then take them a further step in the direction of seeing how some of Auden’s most important poems can be better understood against the background of his own intellectual development and the often troubled history of his time. The […]
Washed by the Gulf Stream: The Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature
This is an historically comparative postcolonial study asserting the dialogic relation between Irish and Caribbean narrative form, relating Irish Big House and Caribbean Plantation novels, the “errantry” of Joyce’s and Walcott’s epic geographies, and the transition from traditional bildungsroman modes of exile to contemporary memoirs of “diseased” emigration. The book focuses on the demise of empire and […]
The Waxing of the Middle Ages: Revisiting Late Medieval France
Johan Huizinga’s much-loved and much-contested Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. Many studies, particularly literary studies, have challenged Huizinga’s perceptions of individual works or genres. Still, the vision of the Late French and Burgundian […]
The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia
Zdenek Stríbrný, an internationally respected Shakespeare scholar, was Professor of English and American Studies at Charles University, Prague, until the Russian occupation of 1968. He was reinstated after the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989. This volume, prefaced by a new autobiographical introduction, collects papers on Shakespeare, most of which were written originally in English, from various […]
Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in the Italian Renaissance
Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in the Italian Renaissance investigates the evolving role of the widow from allegorical subject to author in medieval and early modern Italian literature, from canonical authors such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, who constructed a rich poetic vocabulary around widowhood, to the numerous widowed writers who rose to prominence in the sixteenth […]
William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion
The essays in this collection make a case for regarding William T. Vollmann as the most ambitious, productive, and important living author in the US. His oeuvre not only includes outstanding work in numerous literary genres, but also global reportage, ethical treatises, paintings, photographs, and many other productions. His reputation as a daring traveler and […]
William Wycherley and the Comedy of Fear
This is a study of four plays of William Wycherley. It argues that Wycherley was not so much an attacking playwright but rather a thinking one, fascinated by the workings and motivations of fallible and insecure men and women. This book’s assessments of male relationships, of women’s sexuality, of the numerous and various sexual entendres, […]
Winter’s Tales: Reflections on the Novelistic Stage
Winter’s Tales tackles the question of whether narrative and drama are as different from each other as some scholars have assumed. By examining everything from voice and tense to “scene and summary,” George, a theater professor and novelist, analyzes the many choices a writer has when framing a story. She addresses narrative theoretical ground before focusing […]
Wit's Voices: Intonation in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry
This work shows how seventeenth-century English lyric poets were able to control the way that their poetry sounds when read aloud, and thus to influence emotional force and meaning. It begins by addressing the criticizing contemporary treatments of meter. It then gives a theoretical and descriptive account, based on Dwight Bolinger’s analysis of English intonation, […]
With Shakespeare’s Eyes: Pushkin’s Creative Appropriation of Shakespeare
With Shakespeare’s Eyes is the first monograph to focus exclusively on the relationship between the Russian poet Alexander Puskin and Shakespeare. Taking into account contemporary perceptions of Shakespeare in print and on the Russian stage, O’Neil examines all levels of poetic influence of Shakespeare on Pushkin. In addition to untangling the central presence of Shakespeare in […]
Woman to Woman: Female Negotiations During the Long Eighteenth Century
Woman to Woman: Female Negotiations During the Long Eighteenth Century is a cross-disciplinary collection of essays drawing on hitherto unexplored archival material, showing how collaboration enabled eighteenth-century women to intervene in military and political affairs, achieve literary success, experience religious fulfilment, and engage in philanthropic projects. Communal female activity might be founded on kinship, shared religious […]
Women's Wit on the Early Modern Stage
Women’s Wit on the Early Modern Stage explores the overlooked, gendered challenge posed by heroines and villainesses in comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies through who displayed their wit through repartee, plotting, and disguise, combining verbal skill with physical action to produce a feminized perspective. The chapters showcase the portrayal of women’s wit in the works of Frances Boothby, Aphra Behn, […]
Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism
Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism argues that early nineteenth-century women poets contributed some of the most daring work in modernizing the epic genre. The book examines several long poems to provide perspective on women poets working with and against men in related efforts, contributing together to a Romantic movement of large-scale genre revision. Women […]
Women and Communal Worship: Women Performing, Shaping, and Writing the Christian Liturgy, 1500–1750
Women and Communal Worship advances our understanding of early modern women by uncovering and analyzing Christian women’s engagement with liturgical and communal worship between 1500 and 1750. The Protestant attack on the medieval liturgy was at the heart of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but women’s contributions to those momentous changes have been largely overlooked as […]
Women and Literary History: “For There She Was”
These essays by internationally renowned feminist scholars rethink the methods and content of contemporary feminist history. The vibrant work of feminist literary historians in the last three decades has produced a new archive of knowledge on women’s writing and new narratives of the cultural past. But, these essays ask, where has this revisioning taken us? […]
Women and the Politics of Self-Representation in Seventeenth-Century France
This book is an exploration of six neglected and undervalued self-narratives composed in the period stretching from the reign of Henri IV through Louis XIV. Beginning with the autobiographical text of Henri IV’s divorced queen, Marguerite de Valois, it goes on to study the life writings of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, of the Mancini sisters Hortense […]
Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-Century France: Vanishing Acts
Over the past years, studies have begun not only to identify the factors that impeded the full participation of women artists in French cultural life, such as women’s limited access to professional art education, but also to bring to light the considerable artistic accomplishments of women occluded by historians for over a century. A similar […]
Women as Translators in Early Modern England
Women as Translators in Early Modern England offers a feminist theory of translation that considers both the practice and representation of translation in works penned by early modern women. It argues for the importance of such a theory in changing how we value women’s work. Because of England’s formal split from the Catholic Church and the […]
Women Teachers and Popular Education in Nineteenth-Century France: Social Values and Corporate Identity at the Normal School Institution
This work is a social and political study of the network of women’s teacher training schools that were gradually established in France during the nineteenth century. The study investigates the academic and social environment found at the women’s normal schools and concludes with an assessment of how the secular women teachers adjusted to their professional […]
Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain: A Tribute to Bárbara Mujica
Although scholars often depict early modern Spanish women as victims, history and fiction of the period are filled with examples of women who defended their God-given right to make their own decisions and to define their own identities. The essays in Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain examine many such examples, demonstrating how women battled the status […]
Women Warriors in Romantic Drama
Women Warriors in Romantic Drama examines a recurring figure that appears in French, British, and German drama between 1789 and 1830: the woman warrior. The term itself, “woman warrior,” refers to quasi-historical female soldiers or assassins. Women have long contributed to military campaigns as canteen women. Camp followers ranged from local citizenry to spouses and prostitutes, […]
The Women Writers in Schiller's Horen: Patrons, Petticoats, and the Promotion of Weimer Classicism
This work examines the integral role that six female authors played in Schiller’s ambitious literary journal, Die Horen (1795-97). Louise Brachmann, Friederike Brun, Amalie von Imhoff, Sophie Mereau, Elisa von der Recke, and Caroline von Wolzogen helped put the journal back on track when it floundered fiscally and programmatically and their literary contributions were among the most […]
Words That Count: Early Modern Authorship: Essays in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson
These essays by leading scholars of early modern attribution, editing, theater, and versification (including Andrew Gurr, Gary Taylor, and Brian Vickers) focus on questions of authorship, authority, and ownership in Marlowe, Peele, Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and others. Some essays take MacDonald P. Jackson’s pioneering work in these fields a stage further, by looking at the […]
Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn: Community, Virtue, and Vision in the 1790s
This book engages a controversy over the relationship between Wordsworth’s poetry and his politics, dating back to the early reviews of the Lyrical Ballads. Rieder argues that Wordsworth’s poetry achieves its power by projecting a fantasy of community that finds its material counterpart far more in the literature itself than in the rural occupations or natural […]
The World of Elizabeth Inchbald: Essays on Literature, Culture, and Theatre in the Long Eighteenth Century
This collection centers on the remarkable life and career of the writer and actor Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821), active in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Inspired by the example of Inchbald’s biographer, Annibel Jenkins (1918–2013), the contributors explore the broad historical and cultural context around Inchbald’s life and work, with essays ranging from the […]
A Writer's Voice: Collected Work of the Twentieth-Century Biologist and Conservationist, Joseph P. Linduska
A Writer’s Voice is a collection of more than one hundred of the popular essays on environmental conservation that Joseph P. Linduska wrote from 1986 to 1993 for the Kent County News of Chestertown, Maryland. He applies his fifty years of experience and reflection as a wildlife scientist to interpret the effects of human activities on the Delmarva […]
Writers Reading Writers: Intertextual Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Literature in Honor of Robert Hollander
This volume is a collection of intertextual studies on medieval and early modern literature in honor of Robert Hollander by some of his former students. Robert Hollander taught how writers are always also readers, responding to texts that have provoked their thought. The contributors to this volume have all been working within its overarching theme: […]
Writing British Infanticide: Child-Murder, Gender, and Print, 1722-1859
Writing British Infanticide tracks the ways that the circulation of narratives of child-murder in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain shaped perceptions and punishments of the crime and, more elusively, hierarchies of class and gender. The essays brought together in this volume pose the question: How are we to understand the proliferation of writing about child-murder in eighteenth- […]
Writing Places: Sixteenth-Century City Culture and the Des Roches Salon
This book examines the literary and cultural production of the provincial capital of Poitiers from the late 1560s through the early 1580s. During that time the city withstood a Protestant siege, hosted the French court, welcomed Parisian jurists for special court sessions, and fostered the writers of one of the first humanist salons. This study […]
Writings of Warner Mifflin: Forgotten Quaker Abolitionist of the Revolutionary Era
In The Writings of Warner Mifflin, Gary Nash and Michael McDowell present the correspondence, petitions, and memorials to state and federal legislative bodies, semi-autobiographical essays, and other materials of the key figure in the U.S. abolitionist movement between the end of the American Revolution and the Jefferson presidency. Mifflin was a conscience-bound pacifist Quaker who […]
Writing through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century: Age, Gender, and Work
Writing through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century explores how boyhood was constructed in different creative spaces that reflected the lived experience of young boys through the long eighteenth century—not simply in children’s literature but in novels, poetry, medical advice, criminal broadsides, and automaton exhibitions. The chapters encompass such rituals as breeching, learning to read […]
Yorick's Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne
This volume examines the religious culture in which Sterne wrote his novels and sermons. Using passages from Sterne’s work as starting points, the book demonstrates that the experience of life in country parishes forms an important context for the novels. The book draws on modern church history and eighteenth-century sources to show that the eighteenth-century […]
“Arms, and the Man, I sing…”: A Preface to Dryden's Aeneid
This study—referred to as a “preface”—is given this designation because its aim is not to offer an up-to-date overall assessment of Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, but rather to provide a valid basis for such an assessment. In this it seeks to provide a comprehensive analysis of relevant areas—i.e. the “conditions of expression”—forming the very basis […]
“Cultures of Whiggism”: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century
The essays collected in this volume explore the Whiggish literary culture that arose in England in the late seventeenth century and continued throughout the following century. From the pre-history of Whiggism in the court of Charles II to the fractures opened up within it by the pressures created by the French Revolution in the 1790s, […]
“Deep Play”: John Gay and the Invention of Modernity
“Deep Play” examines the emergence of modern self- and social-consciousness in eighteenth-century Britain as an awareness of class and culture. It examines popular ballads and songs, country dances, catches, mumming plays, beliefs and sayings, fables, stories, and legends as these plebeian cultural materials are brought by Gay to comment on “polite” opera, drama, and literature. Illustrated.
“The Pale Cast of Thought”: Hesitation and Decision in the Renaissance Epic
This book focuses on specific moments of deliberated decision in the epic poems of Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and Milton. By exploring the difference between Aristotle’s notion of proairesis and structuralist literary critics’ use of the term, the author argues that decision making provides a link between ethical structures and narrative forms.
“The Stage’s Glory”: John Rich (1692–1761)
John Rich (1692-1761) was a profoundly influential figure of the eighteenth-century London stage. As producer, manager, and performer, he transformed the urban entertainment market, creating genres and promotional methods still with us today. This volume gives the first comprehensive overview of Rich’s multifaceted career, appreciation of which has suffered from his performing identity as Lun, […]