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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
