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 […]
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 […]
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), […]
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. […]
Lear's Other Shadow: A Cultural History of Queen Lear
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 appears to be a deliberate strategy of suppression, even erasure in Shakespeare’s King Lear later inspired dozens […]
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 […]
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 […]
Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century
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, gender nonconformity, and sex (as well as its absence) in the long eighteenth century. Drawing from recent and emerging […]
