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 […]
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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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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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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 […]
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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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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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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 […]
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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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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 […]
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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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