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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, Volume Two
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Performative Polemic: Anti-Absolutist Pamphlets and their Readers in Late Seventeenth-Century France

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 […]
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Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France, 2nd edition

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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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