The first full-length historical study of pre-abolition black British writing, this book challenges established narratives of eighteenth-century black history that focus almost exclusively on slavery and abolition. Ryan Hanley expands our perspectives to encompass the often neglected but important black writers of the time, and highlights their contribution to politics, culture, and the arts. He considers the lives and works of contemporary black literary celebrities alongside largely forgotten evangelical authors and political radicals to uncover how they came to produce such diverse and powerful work. By navigating the social, religious, political and professional networks that surrounded these authors and their writing, he also reveals that black intellectuals were never confined to the peripheries of British culture. From the decks of Royal Navy ships to the drawing rooms of country houses, from the pub to the pulpit, black writers, and the work they produced, helped to build moder
Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, investigates the notion that British Victorians did see themselves as naturally dominant species over other humans and over animals. They conscien
The early modern period in Britain was defined by tremendous upheaval - the upending of monarchy, the unsettling of church doctrine, and the pursuit of a new method of inquiry based on an inductive experimental model. Political Turmoil: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1623–1660 offers an innovative and ambitious re-appraisal of seventeenth-century British literature and history. Each of the contributors attempts to address the 'how' and 'why' of aesthetic change by focusing on political and cultural transformations. Instead of forging a grand narrative of continuity, the contributors attempt to piece together the often complex web of factors and events that contributed to developments in literary form and matter - as well as the social and religious changes that literature sometimes helped to occasion. These twenty chapters, reading across traditional periodization, demonstrate that early modern literary works - when they were conceived, as they were created, and after they circ
Studies of British Romanticism have traditionally tended to envisage it as an intensely local, indeed insular, phenomenon. Yet, just as the seemingly isolated British Isles became more and more central in international geo-political and economic contexts between the 1780s and the 1830s, so too literature and culture were characterized by an increasingly close and relevant dialogue with foreign and especially Continental European traditions, both past and contemporary. Diego Saglia casts new light on the significantly transformative impact of this dialogue on Britain during the years that saw a return to unimpeded cross-border cultural traffic after the end of the Napoleonic emergency. Focusing on modes of translation and appropriation in a variety of literary and cultural forms, this book reconsiders the notion of the supposed intrinsic insularity of Britain through the lens of new key questions about the national, international and transnational features of Romantic-period literature
"What did she say? – Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does."This book explores the act of declaring love in works of literature written between the middle of the eighteenth century and th
Modernism à la Mode argues that fashion describes why and how literary modernism matters in its own historical moment and ours. Bringing together texts, textiles, and theories of dress, Elizabeth Shee
Whether situated in churches or circulating in more flexible, mobile works - manuscript or printed texts, jewels or rosaries, personal bequests or antique 'rarities' - monuments were ubiquitous in post-Reformation England. In this period of religious change, the unsettled meanings of sacred sites and artifacts encouraged a new conception of remembrance and, with it, changed relationships between devotional and secular writings, arts, and identities. Beginning in the parish church, Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton moves beyond that space to see remembrance as shaping dynamic systems within which early modern men and women experienced loss and recollection. Removing monuments from parochial or antiquarian concerns, this study re-imagines them as pervasively involved with other commemorative works, not least the writings of our most canonical authors. These far-reaching, flexible chapters combine three critical strands - religion, materiality, and gender - to describe the ar
This cutting-edge volume demonstrates both the literary quality and the socio-economic importance of works on "the matter of the greenwood" over a long chronological period. These include drama texts,
This book scrutinizes physical, temporal and psychological strata across early twentieth-century literature, focusing on geological and archaeological tropes and conceptions of the stratified psyche.
This book explores how Australian Indigenous people’s histories and cultures are deployed, represented and transmitted in post-Mabo children’s literature authored by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writ
The figure of the wartime child in the mid-twentieth century unsettles and disturbs. This book employs a range of material – biographical, literary and historical – to chart some of the surprising and
The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group is the most comprehensive available survey of contemporary scholarship on the Bloomsbury Group – the set of influential writers, artists and thinkers whose members
Relations and Networks in South African Indian Writing explores recent writing by a variety of South African authors of Indian descent. The essays highlight the sociality and patterns of connectedness
Perceptions of the Great War have changed significantly since its outbreak and children's authors have continually attempted to engage with those changes, explaining and interpreting the events of 191
Following the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, nineteenth-century liberal economic thinkers insisted that a globally hegemonic Britain would only profit by abandoning the forma
Following the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, nineteenth-century liberal economic thinkers insisted that a globally hegemonic Britain would only profit by abandoning the formal empi
The first applied research volume in Scottish Romanticism, this collection foregrounds the concept of progress as "improvement" as a constitutive theme of Scottish writing during the long eighteenth c
Patrick Cheney's new book places the sublime at the heart of poems and plays in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Specifically, Cheney argues for the importance of an 'early modern sublime' to the advent of modern authorship in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Chapters feature a model of creative excellence and social liberty that helps explain the greatness of the English Renaissance. Cheney's argument revises the received wisdom, which locates the sublime in the eighteenth-century philosophical 'subject'. The book demonstrates that canonical works like The Faerie Queene and King Lear reinvent sublimity as a new standard of authorship. This standard emerges not only in rational, patriotic paradigms of classical and Christian goodness but also in the eternizing greatness of the author's work: free, heightened, ecstatic. Playing a centralizing role in the advent of modern authorship, the early modern sublime becomes a catalyst in the formation of an Englis
An indispensable reference for scholars and students of eighteenth-century English literature This addition to the celebrated Wiley-Blackwell Keywords series explores the meanings of fifty-eight of t
