"... a nuanced, carefully argued work that reveals how women writers of the Renaissance, whether upper-class aristocrats close to court, daughters of successful merchants, Protestants, or Cat
The Victorians were obsessed with death, bereavement, and funeral rituals, and speculated vigorously on the nature of heaven, hell, and divine judgment. This popular abridgement of Michael Wheeler's award-winning Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology looks at the literary implications of Victorian views of death and the life beyond, and recreates vividly the fear and hope embodied in the theological positions of the novelists and poets of the age. Now accessible to a wide readership, Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians offers a wide-ranging and attractively illustrated cultural history of nineteenth-century religious experience, belief, and language in the face of death.
In the most comprehensive study yet of homosexuality in the English Renaissance, Bruce R. Smith examines and rejects the assessments of homosexual acts in moral philosophy, laws, and medical books in
This engaging and insightful book explores the fate of eloquence in a period during which it both denoted a living oratorical art and served as a major factor in political thought. Seeing Hume's philo
Pleasure has not ruled all aspects of Richard Costa's world, but books and their writers have brought innumerable hours of it to his thought-filled years. In this insightful journey through a life suf
Written by a leading Shakespeare scholar, this book is the first comprehensive account of the relationship between Shakespeare and his favorite poet, Ovid. Bate examines the full range of Shakespeare'
The three plays in this volume, composed between 1672 or 1673 and 1675, demonstrate Dryden's versatility and inventiveness as a dramatist.Amboyna, a tragedy written to stir the English to prosecute th
Provides maps of major roads and city streets, describes walking tours, locates houses and inns of literary significance, and sprinkles it all with anecdotes about the likes of Boswell, Lord Byron, th
Looking at travel writing by British women from the seventeenth century on, Lawrence explores not only the significance of gender for travel writing, but also the value of travel itself in testing the
The Myth of Aunt Jemima is a bold and exciting look at the way three centuries of white women writers have tackled the subject of race in both Britain and America. Diane Roberts challenges the widely-
Soldier Heroes explores the imagining of masculinities within adventure stories. Drawing on literary theory, cultural materialism and Kleinian psychoanalysis, it analyses modern British adventure hero
Voller reveals in Part 1 the way in which the psychological and narrative structures of the sublime, as elaborated by Edmund Burke and his contemporaries, gave Gothic fictions much of their characteri
E. P. Thompson's long-awaited book on William Blake was published shortly after the historian's death in August 1993. Acclaimed as one of his best and most deeply felt works, it appears now for the fi
Writer, rake, wit, traveler, and man-about-town, James Boswell kept a diary for thirty-three years, beginning just before his first trip to London and extending over his eventful life till shortly bef
How do writers and their readers imagine the future in a turbulent time of sex war and sex change? And how have transformations of gender and genre affected literary representations of "woman," "man,"
King Arthur was not an Englishman, but a Celtic warrior, according to Loomis, whose research into the background of the Arthurian legend reveals findings which are both illuminating and highly controv
In The Birth of Modernism Leon Surette offers a radical revision of our understanding of high modernism. Acknowledging that current post-modern and theoretical critiques have provoked fresh examinatio
