The Eighteenth Century by
The eighteenth century was a time of expansion, forming the hinge between the old world and the new for, by its end, change was not only detectable, it was also seen to be irreversible. These specially commissioned chapters, written by experts in the field, address all the major issues in Europe's political, economic, religious, cultural, and international history for both the undergraduate student and the general reader.
Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715-1789 by
Ribeiro surveys the clothing worn by the middle and upper classes throughout Europe in the 18th century, and discusses what this meant in terms of social definition and identity. This edition includes many new illustrations.
The Eighteenth-Century by
This is an impressive and lucid survey of eighteenth-century intellectual life, providing a real sense of the complexity of the age and of the cultural and intellectual climate in which imaginative literature flourished. It reflects on some of the dominant themes of the period, arguing against such labels as 'Augustan Age', 'Age of Enlightenment' and 'Age of Reason', which have been attached to the eighteenth-century by critics and historians.
The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel by
This multifaceted picture of the British novel in its formative decades provides an indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century novel, and its place within the culture of its time. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. Sentimental and Gothic fiction, and fiction by women, are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett and Burney.
The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry by
The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry analyzes major premises, preoccupations, and practices of English poets writing from 1700 to the 1790s. These specially-commissioned essays avoid familiar categories and single-author approaches to look at the century afresh. Chapters consider such large poetic themes as nature, the city, political passions, the relation of death to desire and dreams, appeals to an imagined future, and the meanings of 'sensibility'. Other chapters explore historical developments such as the connection between poetic couplets and conversation, the conditions of publication, changing theories of poetry and imagination, growing numbers of women poets and readers, the rise of a self-consciously national tradition, and the place of lyric poetry in thought and practice. The essays are well supported by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading. Altogether the volume provides an invaluable resource for scholars and students.
The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre by
This introduction offers an overview of early English theatre from the earliest recorded vernacular texts in the late medieval period to the closing of the theatres in 1642. Where most existing studies focus on one side or the other of an imaginary boundary between 'medieval' and 'early modern' or 'Renaissance' drama, this book examines the theatre of nearly three centuries in a way that highlights continuities as well as divisions. The study is organised into five subject-based chapters: Place and space; Actors and audiences; Writers, controllers and critics; Genre and tradition; Instruction and spectacle. It includes full chronologies, helpful text boxes and over twenty illustrations.
The Self in Early Modern Literature by
This study is a response to a continuing debate stimulated primarily by cultural materialist and new historicist claims that the early modern self was decentered and fragmented by forces in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The current study enters this debate by rejecting claims of such radical discontinuity characterizing a “contingent” and “provisional” self incapable of unified subjectivity. The counterargument in The Self in Early Modern Literary Studies: For the Common Good is that the intersection of Protestant vocation and Christian civic humanism, in support of the common good, was a stabilizing factor in early modern construction of self that resisted historical and cultural dislocations. The theoretical issues at stake are examined in an introductory chapter, followed by chapters discussing central aspects of five major early modern writers whose works variously incorporate elements in Protestant vocation and Christian civic humanism. These five writers have been chosen both for their importance in the English literary canon and for their respective roles in early modern culture: “Spenser: Persons Serving Gloriana”; “Shakespeare's Henriad: Calling the Heir Apparent”; “'Ego Videbo': Donne and the Vocational Self”; “Jonson and the Truth of Envy”; “Milton: Self-Defense and the Drama of Blame.” The study ends with a brief postscript on the Bacon family in whom the combined forces of Protestant vocation and Christian civic humanism were uniquely expressed.
The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance by
Scholarship on Middle English romance has done little to access the textual and bibliographical continuity of this remarkable literary tradition into the sixteenth century and its impact on Elizabethan works. And to an even greater extent Spenserian scholarship has failed to investigate the significant and complex debts which The Faerie Queene owes to medieval native verse romance and Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. This book accordingly offers the first comprehensive study of the impact of Middle English romance on The Faerie Queene. It employs the concept of memory, in which both Middle English romance writers and Spenser show specific interest, to build a sense of the thematic, generic, and cultural complexity of the native romance tradition. The memorial character of Middle English romance resides in its intertextuality and its frequent presentation of its narrative events as historical and consequently the basis for a favourable sense of local or even national identity. Spensers memories of native romance involve a more troubled engagement with that tradition of providential national history as well as an endeavour to see in pre-Reformation romance a prophetic and objective authority for Protestant belief.
The Age of Virtue by
In the eighteenth century "virtue" was a word to conjure with. It called to mind heroic predecessors from the Roman Republic such as Cato and Brutus and invoked qualities of personal integrity, selflessness, and a concern for the common good, which, though urgently needed, seemed desperately lacking, both in the ruthless party struggles of the age of Anne and subsequently in the all pervading political corruption of the Walpole administration. When the longed-for political savior failed to materialize it was increasingly felt that if virtue existed at all then it would have been sought for among the lower orders of society or else in provincial areas, where simpler and nobler values might still prevail. But with the coming of the French revolution and Romanticism, virtue began to lose its powerful resonances--it now seemed naive and simplistic, all too ready to deny both the complexities of human nature and the possibility of determination by external cultural forces.
Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration by
What specifically distinguishes Restoration culture and society from what went before and came after? And how did early modern British women and men accommodate themselves to the dramatic historical changes of the seventeenth century? This study, which brings together recent work by leading historians as well as literary and cultural critics of the period, shows how the Restoration produced the concept of a national literature crucial to a new nationalist cultural enterprise: questions of national identity and difference, of what it meant to be English or British or both, came to be framed in terms of international trade and imperial ambition; and religious and royal authority gave way before the advance of a secular literary culture geared to the demands of a developing commercial and imperial nation.
Cultural Constructions of Madness in Eighteenth-Century Writing by
Cultural Constructions of Madness in the Eighteenth Century deals with the (mis)representation of insanity through a substantial range of literary forms and figures from across the eighteenth century and beyond. Chapters cover the representation, distortion, sentimentalization and elevation of insanity, and such associated issues as gender, personal identity, and performance, in some of the best, as well as some of the least, known writers of the period. A selection of visual material, including works by Hogarth, Rowlandson, and Gillray, is also discussed. While primarily adopting a literary focus, the work is informed throughout by an alertness to significant issues of medical and psychiatric history.
Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 by
Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 examines early modern English actors' impersonations of black Africans. Those blackface performances established dynamic theatrical conventions that were repeated from play to play, plot to plot, congealing over time and contributing to English audiences' construction of racial difference. Vaughan discusses non-canonical plays, grouping of scenes, and characters that highlight the most important conventions - appearance, linguistic tropes, speech patterns, plot situations, the use of asides and soliloquies, and other dramatic techniques - that shaped the ways black characters were 'read' by white English audiences. In plays attended by thousands of English men and women from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, including Titus Andronicus, Othello and Oroonoko, blackface was a polyphonic signifier that disseminated distorted and contradictory, yet compelling, images of black Africans during the period in which England became increasingly involved in the African slave trade.
Britain's Bloodless Revolutions by
Britain's Bloodless Revolutions explores the relationship of the emerging category of Literature to the emerging threat of popular violence between the Bloodless Revolution and the Romantic turn from revolution to reform. The book argues that at a time when the political nature of the Bloodless Revolution became a subject of debate - in the period defined by France's famously bloody revolution - 'Literature' emerged as a kind of political institution and constituted a bloodless revolution in its own right.
A Social History of Truth by
How do we come to trust our knowledge of the world? What are the means by which we distinguish true from false accounts? Why do we credit one observational statement over another? In "A Social History of Truth," Shapin engages these universal questions through an elegant recreation of a crucial period in the history of early modern science: the social world of gentlemen-philosophers in seventeenth-century England. Steven Shapin paints a vivid picture of the relations between gentlemanly culture and scientific practice. He argues that problems of credibility in science were practically solved through the codes and conventions of genteel conduct: trust, civility, honor, and integrity. These codes formed, and arguably still form, an important basis for securing reliable knowledge about the natural world. Shapin uses detailed historical narrative to argue about the establishment of factual knowledge both in science and in everyday practice. Accounts of the mores and manners of gentlemen-philosophers are used to illustrate Shapin's broad claim that trust is imperative for constituting every kind of knowledge. Knowledge-making is always a collective enterprise: people have to know whom to trust in order to know something about the natural world.
Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England by
Stories of transgression-Gilgamesh, Prometheus, Oedipus, Eve-may be integral to every culture's narrative imaginings of its own origins, but such stories assumed different meanings with the burgeoning interest in modern histories of crime and punishment in the later decades of the seventeenth century. In Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England, Hal Gladfelder shows how the trial report, providence book, criminal biography, and gallows speech came into new commercial prominence and brought into focus what was most disturbing, and most exciting, about contemporary experience. These narratives of violence, theft, disruptive sexuality, and rebellion compelled their readers to sort through fragmentary or contested evidence, anticipating the openness to discordant meanings and discrepant points of view which characterizes the later fictions of Defoe and Fielding. Beginning with the various genres of crime narrative, Gladfelder maps a complex network of discourses that collectively embodied the range of responses to the transgressive at the turn of the eighteenth century. In the book's second and third parts, he demonstrates how the discourses of criminality became enmeshed with emerging novelistic conceptions of character and narrative form. With special attention to Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, Gladfelder argues that Defoe's narratives concentrate on the forces that shape identity, especially under conditions of outlawry, social dislocation, and urban poverty. He next considers Fielding's double career as author and magistrate, analyzing the interaction between his fiction and such texts as the aggressively polemical Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers and his eyewitness accounts of the sensational Canning and Penlez cases. Finally, Gladfelder turns to Godwin's Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft's Maria, and Inchbald's Nature and Art to reveal the degree to which criminal narrative, by the end of the eighteenth century, had become a necessary vehicle for articulating fundamental cultural anxieties and longings. Crime narratives, he argues, vividly embody the struggles of individuals to define their place in the suddenly unfamiliar world of modernity.
Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England by
Although the literary circle is widely recognized as a significant feature of Renaissance literary culture, it has received remarkably little examination. In this collection of essays, the authors attempt to explain literary circles and cultural communities in Renaissance England by exploring both actual and imaginary ways in which they were conceived and the various needs they fulfilled. The book also pays considerable attention to larger theoretical issues relating to literary circles. The essayists raise important questions about the extent to which literary circles were actual constructs or fictional creations. Whether illuminating or limiting, the circle metaphor itself can be extended or reformulated. Some of the authors discuss how particular circles actually operated, and some question the very concept of the literary circle. "Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England" will be an important addition to seventeenth-century studies.
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre by
The drama of the English Middle Ages is perennially popular with students and theatre audiences alike. This book provides an authoritative introduction and an up-to-date, illustrated guide to the mystery cycles, morality drama and saints' plays which flourished from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The book emphasises regional diversity in the period and engages with the literary, and particularly the theatrical values of the plays. After a general introduction there are chapters devoted to each of the major regional cycles, the less-well known East Anglian and Cornish traditions, the morality drama and saints' plays. Two illustrated chapters are devoted to the performance of medieval plays, in their own time and in recent modern revivals. A full reference section includes a guide to scholarship and criticism, an extensive classified bibliography and a chronological table.
The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre by
This introduction offers an overview of early English theatre from the earliest recorded vernacular texts in the late medieval period to the closing of the theatres in 1642. Where most existing studies focus on one side or the other of an imaginary boundary between 'medieval' and 'early modern' or 'Renaissance' drama, this book examines the theatre of nearly three centuries in a way that highlights continuities as well as divisions. The study is organised into five subject-based chapters: Place and space; Actors and audiences; Writers, controllers and critics; Genre and tradition; Instruction and spectacle. It includes full chronologies, helpful text boxes and over twenty illustrations.
The Fringes of Belief: English literature, ancient heresy, and the politics of freethinking, 1660-1760 by
The Fringes of Belief is the first literary study of freethinking and religious skepticism in the English Enlightenment. Ellenzweig aims to redress this scholarly lacuna, arguing that a literature of English freethinking has been overlooked because it unexpectedly supported aspects of institutional religion. Analyzing works by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, she foregrounds a strand of the English freethinking tradition that was suspicious of revealed religion yet often strongly opposed to the open denigration of Anglican Christianity and its laws. By exposing the contradictory and volatile status of categories like belief and doubt this book participates in the larger argument in Enlightenment studies--as well as in current scholarship on the condition of modernity more generally---that religion is not so simply left behind in the shift from the pre-modern to the modern world.
Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England by
Buildings tell stories. Castles, country homes, churches, and monasteries are "documents" of the people who built them, owned them, lived and died in them, inherited and saved or destroyed them, and recorded their histories. Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England examines the relationship between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural and literary works. By becoming more sensitive to the narrative functions of architecture, Anne M. Myers argues, we begin to understand how a range of writers viewed and made use of the material built environment that surrounded the production of early modern texts in England. Scholars have long found themselves in the position of excusing or explaining England’s failure to achieve the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance in the visual arts. Myers proposes that architecture inspired an unusual amount of historiographic and literary production, including poetry, drama, architectural treatises, and diaries. Works by William Camden, Henry Wotton, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Anne Clifford, and John Evelyn, when considered as a group, are texts that overturn the engrained critical notion that a Protestant fear of idolatry sentenced the visual arts and architecture in England to a state of suspicion and neglect.
Women on Stage in Stuart Drama by
Women on Stage in Stuart Drama provides a 'prehistory' of the actress, filling an important gap in established accounts of how women came to perform in the Restoration theatre. Sophie Tomlinson uncovers and analyzes a revolution in theatrical discourse in response to the cultural innovations of two Stuart queens consort, Anna of Denmark and the French Henrietta Maria. Their appearances on stage in masques and pastoral drama engendered a new poetics of female performance, which registered acting as a powerful means of self-determination for women. The pressure of cultural change is inscribed in a plethora of dramatic texts that explore the imaginative possibilities inspired by female acting. These include plays by the key royalist women writers Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and Katherine Philips. The material explored by Tomlinson illustrates a fresh vision of theatrical femininity and encompasses an unusually sympathetic interest in questions of female liberty and selfhood.
Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama, 1550-1700 by
Marta Straznicky offers a detailed historical analysis of the relationship between early modern women's closet plays and the culture of reading. Straznicky reveals that these works, by Elizabeth Cary and Margaret Cavendish, among others, were part of an alternative dramatic tradition, an elite and private literary culture that was intellectually superior to, and politically more radical than, commercial drama.
Dress, Distress and Desire by
Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety. It shows how dress dispelled the sentimental myth that the body acted as a moral index and enabled the women reader to resist some of sentimental literature's more prescriptive advice.
Eighteenth-Century Women Poets by
A unique anthology of verse by over 100 women poets describing with vigour and immedicacy their varied experience.
The Autobiographical Subject by
"Acutely analyzes the construction of gendered character in canonical British autobiographical texts and provides provocative explorations outside the canon, particularly among first-person narratives by women."Diacritics "[Nussbaum's] achievement . . .
