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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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), […]
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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. […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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