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The Pack of Autolycus
Or, Strange and Terrible News of Ghosts, Apparitions, Monstrous Births, Showers of Wheat, Judgments of God, and Other Prodigious and Fearful Happenings as Told in Broadside Ballads of the Years 1624-1693
Hyder Edward Rollins
Harvard University Press

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"Pamphilia to Amphilanthus" in Manuscript and Print
Lady Mary Wroth
Iter Press, 2017
Lady Mary Wroth’s private manuscript, printed here for the first time, shows her to be a great poet, more psychologically insightful, verbally sophisticated, and boldly original than scholars had realized. Her carefully curated and re-conceptualized printed collection also reveals her to be a remarkably self-reflexive and critically astute writer. When the manuscript and printed sequences are read together, as this edition encourages readers to do, Wroth’s poetry is seen clearly as innovative, erotic, and shrewdly multivalent.
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Paper Minds
Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness
Jonathan Kramnick
University of Chicago Press, 2018
How do poems and novels create a sense of mind? What does literary criticism say in conversation with other disciplines that addresses problems of consciousness? In Paper Minds, Jonathan Kramnick takes up these vital questions, exploring the relations between mind and environment, the literary forms that uncover such associations, and the various fields of study that work to illuminate them.
          Opening with a discussion of how literary scholarship’s particular methods can both complement and remain in tension with corresponding methods particular to the sciences, Paper Minds then turns to a series of sharply defined case studies. Ranging from eighteenth-century poetry and haptic theories of vision, to fiction and contemporary problems of consciousness, to landscapes in which all matter is sentient, to cognitive science and the rise of the novel, Kramnick’s essays are united by a central thematic authority. This unified approach of these essays shows us what distinctive knowledge that literary texts and literary criticism can contribute to discussions of perceptual consciousness, created and natural environments, and skilled engagements with the world.
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The Papist Represented
Literature and the English Catholic Community, 1688-1791
Geremy Carnes
University of Delaware Press, 2017
Most eighteenth-century literary scholarship implicitly or explicitly associates the major developments in English literature and culture during the rise of modernity with a triumphant and increasingly tolerant Protestantism while assuming that the English Catholic community was culturally moribund and disengaged from Protestant society and culture. However, recent work by historians has shown that the English Catholic community was a dynamic and adaptive religious minority, its leaders among the aristocracy cosmopolitan, its intellectuals increasingly attracted to Enlightenment ideals of liberty and skepticism, and its membership growing among the middle and working classes. This community had an impact on the history of the English nation out of all proportion with its size—and yet its own history is glimpsed only dimly, if at all, in most modern accounts of the period.

The Papist Represented reincorporates the history of the English Catholic community into the field of eighteenth-century literary studies. It examines the intersections of literary, religious, and cultural history as they pertain to the slow acceptance by both Protestants and Catholics of the latter group’s permanent minority status. By focusing on the Catholic community’s perspectives and activities, it deepens and complicates our understanding of the cultural processes that contributed to the significant progress of the Catholic emancipation movement over the course of the century. At the same time, it reveals that this community’s anxieties and desires (and the anxieties and desires it provoked in Protestants) fuel some of the most popular and experimental literary works of the century, in forms and modes including closet drama, elegy, the novel, and the Gothic. By returning the Catholic community to eighteenth-century literary history, The Papist Represented challenges the assumption that eighteenth-century literature was a fundamentally Protestant enterprise.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Patron to Painter
Elizabethan Programs for Five Allegorical Paintings
David Evett
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2020
For more than two centuries the group of early modern English manuscripts presented in this volume sat mostly ignored on the shelves of the British Library, known only to the librarians who catalogued them. Six of them, for four different elaborate allegorical paintings, appear in the manuscript catalog of the Sloane Collection as “Instructions to painters.” A seventh, from the Harley collection in the same library, has more recently been added to the group. On art historical, iconographic, and historical grounds the manuscripts add significantly to our knowledge of Elizabethan visual allegory, and reveal a provocative new contribution to the evolution of English political thought. And the development across three of the programs of a warm personal relationship between the patron and the artist opens a unique window into early modern relationships of this kind. Unlike most other surviving artistic programs, this one reveals its author’s personality and interests in a rich and beguiling way, and although as a writer he is no Sidney or Nashe, the naïve yet widely informed enthusiasm with which he addresses his readers has considerable force and charm.
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Patterns of Epiphany
From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning
Martin Bidney
Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

After explaining his new methodology, Bidney identifies and discusses epiphanies in the works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walter Pater, Thomas Carlyle, Leo Tolstoy, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Taking his cue from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Bidney postulates that any writer’s epiphany pattern usually shows characteristic elements (earth, air, fire, water), patterns of motion (pendular, eruptive, trembling), and/or geometric shapes. Bachelard’s analytic approach involves studying patterns of perceived experience—phenomenology—but unlike most phenomenologists, Bidney does not speculate on internal processes of consciousness. Instead, he concentrates on literary epiphanies as objects on the printed page, as things with structures that can be detected and analyzed for their implications.

Bidney, then, first identifies each author’s paradigm epiphany, finding that both the Romantics and the Victorians often label such a paradigm as a vision or dream, thereby indicating its exceptional intensity, mystery, and expansiveness. Once he identifies the paradigm and shows how it is structured, he traces occurrences of each writer’s epiphany pattern, thus providing an inclusive epiphanic portrait that enables him to identify epiphanies in each writer’s other works. Finally, he explores the implications of his analysis for other literary approaches: psychoanalytical, feminist, influence-oriented or intertextual, and New Historical.

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A Pepysian Garland
Broadside Ballads of the Years 1595-1639
Hyder Edward Rollins
Harvard University Press, 1971

“Although a scholar's name is usually writ in water,” wrote Herschel Baker in Hyder Edward Rollins: A Bibliography (HUP 1960), “it is unlikely that Hyder Rollins' work will be soon forgotten... In at least three large areas—Elizabethan poetry, the broadside ballad, and the Romantic poets—his erudition was unmatched.” Rollins viewed the broadside ballads as important social documents and he edited many collections of them. “In them,” he wrote, “are clearly reflected the lives and thoughts...of sixteenth and seventeenth century Englishmen. In them history becomes animated.”

This volume, originally published in 1922 and long out of print, was the first edition ever to appear of ballads from Samuel Pepys's important collection. It is now reissued with its twenty-six woodcuts and new, up-to-date information on the music.

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Perceiving Animals
Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture
Erica Fudge
University of Illinois Press, 2000
The boundaries between human and beast forged a rugged philosophical landscape across early modern England.  Spectators gathered in London's Bear Garden to watch the callous and brutal baiting of animals.  A wave of "new" scientists performed vivisections on live animals to learn more about the human body.
 
In Perceiving Animals, the British scholar Erica Fudge traces the dangers and problems of anthropocentrism in texts written from 1558 to 1649. Meticulous examinations of scientific, legal, political, literary, and religious writings offer unique and fascinating depictions of human perceptions about the natural world.
 
Views carried over from bestiaries--medieval treatises on animals--
posited animals as nonsentient beings whose merits were measured solely by what provisions they afforded humans: food, medicine, clothing, travel, labor, scientific knowledge.  Without consciences or faith, animals were deemed far inferior to humans.
 
While writings from the period asserted an enormous biological superiority, Fudge contends actual human behavior and logic worked, sometimes accidentally, to close the alleged gap.  In the Bear Garden, even a man of the lowest social rank had power over a tortured animal, sinking him, though, below the beasts.  The beast fable itself fails to show a true understanding of animals, as it merely attributes human characteristics to beasts in an attempt to teach humanist ideals.  Scholars and writers continually turned to the animal world for reflection.  Despite this, scientists of the period used animals for empirical and medical knowledge, recognizing biological and spiritual similarities but refusing to renege human superiority.
 
Including an insightful reexamination of Ben Jonson's Volpone and fascinating looks at works by Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, and Richard Overton, among others, Fudge probes issues of animal ownership and biological and spiritual superiority in early modern England that resonate with philosophical quandaries still relevant in contemporary society.
 
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The Perfect Murder
A Study in Detection
David Lehman
University of Michigan Press, 2000
In this lively, enjoyable look at the best American and British detective fiction, David Lehman investigates the mystery of mysteries: the profound satisfactions we get from evil, disorder, mayhem, and deception--that we know will be put right by the last page.
As Lehman shows, the detective story draws deeply from ancient storytelling traditions. The mystery's conventions--the locked room, the clue "hidden" in plain sight, the diabolical double, the villainous least likely subject--work on us as childhood fairy tales do; they prey upon our darkest fears, taking us to the brink of the unbearable before restoring a comforting sense of order. The myth of Oedipus, for example, contains the essential elements of a whodunit, with the twist that the murderer the detective pursues is himself.
With their wisecracking gumshoe heroes, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler fashioned an existential romance out of the detective novel. More recent writers such as Ross MacDonald, P. D. James, and Ruth Rendell have raised the genre to a new level of psychological sophistication. Yet the form evolves still, and Lehman guides us to the epistemological riddles of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco, who challenge the notion of a knowable truth. Originally published in 1989, this new edition features an additional chapter on the mystery novels of the 1990s.
"A lively study of the development and varieties of the detective story since Poe, its relations with other forms high and low, and the latter-day appropriation of its techniques by such writers as Borges and Eco. . . . A thoroughly intelligent and readable book." --Richard Wilbur, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet
David Lehman is the series editor of both the The Best American Poetry, published by Scribner, and the Poets on Poetry series published by the University of Michigan Press. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, and the author of several books of criticism and collections of poems.
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Performance Art in Ireland
A History
Edited by Áine Phillips
Intellect Books, 2015
The first book devoted to Irish performance art and the first attempt at a history of this art form in the north and south of Ireland, this book brings together contributions by prominent Irish artists and major academics. It features rigorous critical and theoretical analysis as well as historical commentaries that provide an absorbing sense of the rich histories of performance art in Ireland. Presenting diverse visual documentation of performance art practices, this collection shows how performance art in Ireland engaged with—and in turn influenced and led by—contemporary performance and live art internationally.
 
Copublished with the Live Art Development Agency.
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PERFORMING THE VICTORIAN
JOHN RUSKIN AND IDENTITY IN THEATER, SCIENCE, AND EDUCATION
SHARON ARONOFSKY WELTMAN
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is the first book to examine Ruskin’s writing on theater.
            In works as celebrated as Modern Painters and obscure as Love’s Meinie, Ruskin uses his voracious attendance at the theater to illustrate points about social justice, aesthetic practice, and epistemology. Opera, Shakespeare, pantomime, French comedies, juggling acts, and dance prompt his fascination with performed identities that cross boundaries of gender, race, nation, and species. These theatrical examples also reveal the primacy of performance to his understanding of science and education.
            In addition to Ruskin on theater, Performing the Victorian interprets recent theater portraying Ruskin (The Invention of Love, The Countess, the opera Modern Painters) as merely a Victorian prude or pedophile against which contemporary culture defines itself. These theatrical depictions may be compared to concurrent plays about Ruskin’s friend and student Oscar Wilde (Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, The Judas Kiss). Like Ruskin, Wilde is misrepresented on the fin-de-millennial stage, in his case anachronistically as an icon of homosexual identity. These recent characterizations offer a set of static identity labels that constrain contemporary audiences more rigidly than the mercurial selves conjured in the prose of either Ruskin or Wilde.
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Permanent Revolution
The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism
James Simpson
Harvard University Press, 2019

How did the Reformation, which initially promoted decidedly illiberal positions, end up laying the groundwork for Western liberalism?

The English Reformation began as an evangelical movement driven by an unyielding belief in predestination, intolerance, stringent literalism, political quietism, and destructive iconoclasm. Yet by 1688, this illiberal early modern upheaval would deliver the foundations of liberalism: free will, liberty of conscience, religious toleration, readerly freedom, constitutionalism, and aesthetic liberty. How did a movement with such illiberal beginnings lay the groundwork for the Enlightenment? James Simpson provocatively rewrites the history of liberalism and uncovers its unexpected debt to evangelical religion.

Sixteenth-century Protestantism ushered in a culture of permanent revolution, ceaselessly repudiating its own prior forms. Its rejection of tradition was divisive, violent, and unsustainable. The proto-liberalism of the later seventeenth century emerged as a cultural package designed to stabilize the social chaos brought about by this evangelical revolution. A brilliant assault on many of our deepest assumptions, Permanent Revolution argues that far from being driven by a new strain of secular philosophy, the British Enlightenment is a story of transformation and reversal of the Protestant tradition from within. The gains of liberalism were the unintended results of the violent early Reformation.

Today those gains are increasingly under threat, in part because liberals do not understand their own history. They fail to grasp that liberalism is less the secular opponent of religious fundamentalism than its dissident younger sibling, uncertain how to confront its older evangelical competitor.

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Personification and the Sublime
Milton to Coleridge
Steven Knapp
Harvard University Press, 1985

Eighteenth-century and Romantic readers had a peculiar habit of calling personified abstractions “sublime.” This has always seemed mysterious, since the same readers so often expressed a feeling that there was something wrong with turning ideas into people—or, worse, turning people into ideas. In this wide-ranging, carefully argued study, Steven Knapp explains the connection between personification and the aesthetics of the sublime.

Personifications, such as Milton’s controversial figures of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost, were seen to embody a unique combination of imaginative power and overt fictionality, and these, Knapp shows, were exactly the conflicting requirements of the sublime in general. He argues that the uneasiness readers felt toward sublime personifications was symptomatic of broader ambivalences toward archaic beliefs, political and religious violence, and poetic fiction as such.

Drawing on recent interpretations of Romanticism, allegory, and the sublime, Knapp provides important new readings of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Kant, and William Collins. His provocative thesis sheds new light on the relationship between Romanticism and the eighteenth century.

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Perspectives
Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England
Linda M. Shires
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England reopens the question of classical perspective and its vicissitudes in aesthetic practice with a focus on texts of the 1830s to the end of the 1870s. Linda M. Shires demonstrates why and how artists and writers across media experimented with techniques of dissolution, combination, and multiple viewpoints much earlier in the century than intellectual historians generally assume.
 
Arguing for a relationship between what she calls the disappearing “I” in poetry, a compromised omniscience, and the testing of a mastering eye in painting and photography, Shires argues that art forms themselves, rather than new technologies alone, reshaped the period by educating readers and viewers into new ways of knowing. In chapters on visual and verbal art and a waning theocentrism; D.G. Rossetti; Henry Peach Robinson and Lady Clementina Hawarden; and Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, Shires revitalizes the currently available scholarship on connections among nineteenth-century art forms.
 
This interdisciplinary study offers nuanced, close readings in order to rebut assertions of delayed artistic responses to the decreasing influence of traditional perspective. It shows how vision is bound up with all the senses of a viewer and it supports current concepts of modernism as transitional, rather than radical.
 
 
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Persuasion
An Annotated Edition
Jane Austen
Harvard University Press, 2011

Published posthumously with Northanger Abbey in 1817, Persuasion crowns Jane Austen’s remarkable career. It is her most passionate and introspective love story. This richly illustrated and annotated edition brings her last completed novel to life with previously unmatched vitality. In the same format that so rewarded readers of Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition, it offers running commentary on the novel (conveniently placed alongside Austen’s text) to explain difficult words, allusions, and contexts, while bringing together critical observations and scholarship for an enhanced reading experience. The abundance of color illustrations allows the reader to see the characters, locations, clothing, and carriages of the novel, as well as the larger political and historical events that shape its action.

In his Introduction, distinguished scholar Robert Morrison examines the broken engagement between Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth, and the ways in which they wander from one another even as their enduring feelings draw them steadily back together. His notes constitute the most sustained critical commentary ever brought to bear on the novel and explicate its central conflicts as well as its relationship to Austen’s other works, and to those of her major contemporaries, including Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and Maria Edgeworth.

Specialists, Janeites, and first-time readers alike will treasure this annotated and beautifully illustrated edition, which does justice to the elegance and depth of Jane Austen’s time-bound and timeless story of loneliness, missed opportunities, and abiding love.

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Philosophical Writing
Locke, Berkeley, Hume
John J. Richetti
Harvard University Press, 1983

Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have profoundly influenced moral and political thought. Yet part of their persuasiveness and stature is inextricably bound to their skill with words. In Philosophical Writing, John Richetti suspends purely philosophical questions in order to analyze the writing strategies of the three great eighteenth-century British philosophers.

In place of recent analysis that finds philosophical writing undermined by its rhetorical operations, this assessment explores the self-conscious attempts of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume to strike a balance between the rational demonstration they adhere to as philosophers and the powerful persuasiveness they manage in their writing. Richetti shows that, though the three share a deep distrust of language and rhetoric, they also share a confidence in crafted writing and a dependence on its techniques for dramatizing and promoting their thought. Placing each in context of the thought and literature of the times, he describes their differing approaches to the problem of a suitable rhetorical mode for philosophy.

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The Phœnix Nest, 1593
Hyder Edward Rollins
Harvard University Press
A reissue of a volume published in 1931. Originally published in 1593, this book is one of the best of the many Elizabethan anthologies and includes poems of such fine writers as Thomas Lodge, Nicholas Breton, Sir Walter Raleigh, George Peele, and Robert Greene.
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Pictorial Victorians
The Inscription of Values in Word and Image
Julia Thomas
Ohio University Press, 2005

The Victorians were image obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes. But this was not a wholly visual culture. Pictorial Victorians focuses on two of the most popular mid-nineteenth-century genres—illustration and narrative painting—that blurred the line between the visual and textual.

Illustration negotiated text and image on the printed page, while narrative painting juxtaposed the two media in its formulation of pictorial stories. Author Julia Thomas reassesses mid-nineteenth-century values in the light of this interplay. The dialogue between word and image generates meanings that are intimately related to the Victorians' image of themselves. Illustrations in Victorian publications and the narrative scenes that lined the walls of the Royal Academy reveal the Victorians' ideas about the world in which they lived and their notions of gender, class, and race.

Pictorial Victorians surveys a range of material, from representations of the crinoline, to the illustrations that accompanied Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tennyson's poetry, to paintings of adultery. It demonstrates that the space between text and image is one in which values are both constructed and questioned.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray
An Annotated, Uncensored Edition
Oscar Wilde
Harvard University Press, 2011

The Picture of Dorian Gray altered the way Victorians understood the world they inhabited. It heralded the end of a repressive Victorianism, and after its publication, literature had—in the words of biographer Richard Ellmann—“a different look.” Yet the Dorian Gray that Victorians never knew was even more daring than the novel the British press condemned as “vulgar,” “unclean,” “poisonous,” “discreditable,” and “a sham.” Now, more than 120 years after Wilde handed it over to his publisher, J. B. Lippincott & Company, Wilde’s uncensored typescript is published for the first time, in an annotated, extensively illustrated edition.

The novel’s first editor, J. M. Stoddart, excised material—especially homosexual content—he thought would offend his readers’ sensibilities. When Wilde enlarged the novel for the 1891 edition, he responded to his critics by further toning down its “immoral” elements. The differences between the text Wilde submitted to Lippincott and published versions of the novel have until now been evident to only the handful of scholars who have examined Wilde's typescript.

Wilde famously said that Dorian Gray “contains much of me”: Basil Hallward is “what I think I am,” Lord Henry “what the world thinks me,” and “Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” Wilde’s comment suggests a backward glance to a Greek or Dorian Age, but also a forward-looking view to a more permissive time than his own, which saw Wilde sentenced to two years’ hard labor for gross indecency. The appearance of Wilde’s uncensored text is cause for celebration.

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Picturing Religious Experience
George Herbert, Calvin, and the Scriptures
Daniel Doerksen
University of Delaware Press, 2012
Little has been said about the relationship of Herbert’s writings to those of John Calvin, yet the latter were abundant and influential in Herbert’s Church of England. Accordingly Picturing Religious Experience studies Herbert’s poetry in relation to those writings, particularly regarding “spiritual conflicts,” which the poet himself said would be found depicted in his book of poems. Much more than is generally realized, Calvin wrote about the experience of living the Christian life—which is also Herbert’s subject in many of his poems. Altogether, this study maintains that Herbert owes to his religious orientation not just themes or details, but an impulse to observe and depict the inner life, and scriptural patterns which significantly contribute to the substance and literary excellence of The Temple.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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Picturing the Postcard
A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century
Monica Cure
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

The first full-length study of a once revolutionary visual and linguistic medium

Literature has “died” many times—this book tells the story of its death by postcard. Picturing the Postcard looks to this unlikely source to shed light on our collective, modern-day obsession with new media. The postcard, almost unimaginably now, produced at the end of the nineteenth century the same anxieties and hopes that many people think are unique to twenty-first-century social media such as Facebook or Twitter. It promised a newly connected social world accessible to all and threatened the breakdown of authentic social relations and even of language. 

Arguing that “new media” is as much a discursive object as a material one, and that it is always in dialogue with the media that came before it, Monica Cure reconstructs the postcard’s history through journals, legal documents, and sources from popular culture, analyzing the postcard’s representation in fiction by well-known writers such as E. M. Forster and Edith Wharton and by more obscure writers like Anne Sedgwick and Herbert Flowerdew. Writers deployed uproar over the new medium of the postcard by Anglo-American cultural critics to mirror anxieties about the changing nature of the literary marketplace, which included the new role of women in public life, the appeal of celebrity and the loss of privacy, an increasing dependence on new technologies, and the rise of mass media. Literature kept open the postcard’s possibilities and in the process reimagined what literature could be. 

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Plague Writing in Early Modern England
Ernest B. Gilman
University of Chicago Press, 2009

During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. Surveying a wide range of responses to these epidemics—sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary—Plague Writing in Early Modern England brings to life the many and complex ways Londoners made sense of such unspeakable devastation.

Ernest B. Gilman argues that the plague writing of the period attempted unsuccessfully to rationalize the catastrophic and that its failure to account for the plague as an instrument of divine justice fundamentally threatened the core of Christian belief. Gilman also trains his critical eye on the works of Jonson, Donne, Pepys, and Defoe, which, he posits, can be more fully understood when put into the context of this century-long project to “write out” the plague. Ultimately, Plague Writing in Early Modern England is more than a compendium of artifacts of a bygone era; it holds up a distant mirror to reflect our own condition in the age of AIDS, super viruses, multidrug resistant tuberculosis, and the hovering threat of a global flu pandemic.

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Playing Dirty
Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy
Will Stockton
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Playing Dirty is full of dirty jokes. Arguing that the early modern excremental body is in many ways an erotic body, Will Stockton—with humor and dry wit—reads psychoanalytic theory through early modern comedies, claiming that it is helpful, rather than inimical, to the project of historicizing the body.

Noting that psychoanalysis has traditionally operated in a paranoid framework that relentlessly produces evidence of the same “truths,” Stockton turns to a minority practice in psychoanalysis—associated with Jean Laplanche—to develop a more “playful” analytic for literary studies. This analytic brings together different discourses of sexuality and the body and allows individual writings to reform psychoanalytic wisdom about sexuality, waste, and comedy. Through original explorations of works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir John Harington, Thomas Nashe, and Geoffrey Chaucer, Stockton further encourages the reconciliation of psychoanalysis and queer historicism. He focuses in large part on the less-often-read texts of the early modern English canon, assessing the ways in which these books have been purged from the canon in the name of generic purity.

Playing Dirty builds on recent calls by Renaissance and medieval queer scholars for a method of literary analysis that is less constrained by the boundaries of periodicity and the supposed exigencies of historicism. To take Playing Dirty seriously is to accept its invitation to “play”—to queerly disrupt the modern divide in moving promiscuously between texts past and present.
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The Plays of David Storey
A Thematic Study
By William Hutchings
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988

This is the first comprehensive play-by-play analysis of the drama of David Storey, one of the most acclaimed and innovative, sometimes controversial, writers in the British theatre since World War II. Grouping the plays according to theme, Hutchings demonstrates that the central focus in the drama of David Storey is the devaluation of traditional rituals in contemporary life and the disintegration of the family. A playwright attuned to the poetry in the ordinary, to the profundity, subtle eloquence, and dramatic tension in the mundane, Storey explores the ways people cope, or fail to cope, with complexity, with uncertainty, with constant, bewildering flux. He writes about groups—families (In Celebration, The Farm), rugby teams (The Changing Room), and construction crews (The Contractor). In his plays, individuals seek to overcome isolation and integrate themselves into a significant assemblage that transcends the self.

Hutchings notes that Storey frequently deals with working-class parents who cannot "understand their grown children’s anxieties, their discontentedness with life, their unstable marriages, and their inability to enjoy the benefits of the education and advantages they labored so hard for so many years to provide."

Storey understands and sympathizes with parents who have paid to educate their children out of their own spheres. He saw it happen in his own family, knew the disapproval of his father: "What else could my father think when, nearing sixty, he came home each day from the pit exhausted, shattered by fatigue, to find me—a young man ideally physically equipped to do the job which now left him totally prostrated—painting a picture of flowers, or writing a poem about a cloud. There was, and there is, no hope of reconciliation."

Hutchings supplements his thematic analysis of Storey’s plays by interweaving into his text 90 percent of a major interview with the playwright, the only such comprehensive interview in existence. Storey, who believes that readers "ought to be chary of all interviews," discusses alleged literary influences on his work, the current state of British theatre, and his reactions to critics. He also provides insight into various productions and performances in his work.

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The Pleasure of Miss Pym
By Charles Burkhart
University of Texas Press, 1987

When British writers Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil named Barbara Pym one of the twentieth century's most underrated authors in a 1977 Times Literary Supplement survey, they started a Barbara Pym revival that continued unabated in Great Britain and the United States. Barbara Pym's delightful tales of jumble sales and parish meetings, her ironic insights into the relationships between women and men, have won a devoted following. Indeed she is often compared to that most accomplished author of comedies of manners, Jane Austen.

The Pleasure of Miss Pym is a critical study of Pym as comic writer and of the links between her life and autobiographical writings and her fiction, written with a liveliness of style and tone that matches Pym's own. Not only does Charles Burkhart provide perceptive discussions of Pym's life and novels, he also illuminates the worldview represented in her work, the unique nature of her comedy, her religion, her place within the history of the novel, and her penetrating insights into male-female relationships. All of Pym's work, including the 1986 posthumous publication, An Academic Question, is intelligently surveyed here. Scholars of contemporary English literature will derive both instruction and pleasure from this elegantly written study, as will Pym's admiring readers, for whom it is also intended.

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The Plot Thickens
Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to du Maurier
Mary Elizabeth Leighton
Ohio University Press, 2018

In the early 1800s, books were largely unillustrated. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, innovations in wood- and steel-engraving techniques changed how Victorian readers consumed and conceptualized fiction. A new type of novel was born, often published in serial form, one that melded text and image as partners in meaning-making.

These illustrated serial novels offered Victorians a reading experience that was both verbal and visual, based on complex effects of flash-forward and flashback as the placement of illustrations revealed or recalled significant story elements. Victorians’ experience of what are now canonical novels thus differed markedly from that of modern readers, who are accustomed to reading single volumes with minimal illustration. Even if modern editions do reproduce illustrations, these do not appear as originally laid out. Modern readers therefore lose a crucial aspect of how Victorians understood plot—as a story delivered in both words and images, over time, and with illustrations playing a key role.

In The Plot Thickens, Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge uncover this overlooked narrative role of illustrations within Victorian serial fiction. They reveal the intricacy and richness of the form and push us to reconsider our notions of illustration, visual culture, narration, and reading practices in nineteenth-century Britain.

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PLOTS OF OPPORTUNITY
REPRESENTING CONSPIRACY IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND
ALBERT D. PIONKE
The Ohio State University Press, 2004

The working classes, colonial subjects, European nationalists, and Roman Catholics—these groups generated intense anxiety for Victorian England’s elite public, which often responded by accusing them of being dangerous conspirators. Bringing together a wide range of literary and historical evidence, Albert D. Pionke argues that the pejorative meanings attached to such opportunistic accusations of conspiracy were undermined by the many valorized versions of secrecy in Victorian society.

After surveying England’s evolving theories of representative politics and individual and collective secretive practices, Pionke traces the intersection of democracy and secrecy through a series of case histories. Using works by Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, John Henry Newman, and others, along with periodicals, histories, and parliamentary documents of the period, he shows the rhetorical prominence of groups such as the Freemasons, the Thugs, the Carbonari, the Fenians, and the Jesuits in Victorian democratic discourse.

By highlighting the centrality of representations of conspiracy in every case, Plots of Opportunity shows for the first time the markedly similar strategies of repression, resistance, and concealment used by competing agents in the democracy debate.

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Poems, 1922-1961
Donald Davidson
University of Minnesota Press, 1966
Poems, 1922-1961 was first published in 1966.This volume contains a collection of the most important work of Donald Davidson, one of America’s greatest contemporary poets. The selection range from the time of his association with the Fugitive group of Southern writers during the 1920’s to his most recently published book of poems, The Long Street (1961). The Tall Men, first published in 1927, is included here in its revised version of 1938. Among the other early poems are selections from An Outland Piper (1924) and from Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems (1938).The critic Louis D. Rubin, Jr. calls this “the life work of a master poet.” He comments: “These poems don’t date; they represent no outmoded school or clique . . . and the new poems have a simplicity about them that does not hide so much as it enhances their rich imaginativeness and wealth of imagery. These are the poems of a man of great sensitivity and an exciting imagination and command of the language.”
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Poems and Fancies with The Animal Parliament
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
Iter Press, 2018
Margaret Cavendish released her Poems and Fancies during a brief reprieve from exile, and at a time when international conversations on questions regarding science, mathematics, and metaphysics significantly advanced the state of knowledge across Britain and Europe despite war and political turmoil. This volume offers the first complete modernized version of the third edition of Cavendish’s book, including prefaces and dedications, all 274 poems on nature’s various avatars, interludes and masques, and the final prose parable, The Animal Parliament. Cavendish offers views on physics, chemistry, algebraic geometry, medicine, political philosophy, ethics, psychology, and animal intelligence, as she develops her own theory of vital matter within the scope of nature’s ordering principles.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. The Toronto Series: Volume 64
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Poems and Meditations
Anne Bradstreet
Iter Press, 2019
This volume presents all the surviving writings of the poet Anne Bradstreet (ca. 1612–1672): the poems published during her lifetime in The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America; or, Several Poems (London, 1650), poems added to the posthumous edition of Bradstreet’s Several Poems (Boston, 1678), and the material in her hand and that of her son preserved in a manuscript volume known as the Andover manuscript. Extensive footnotes illuminate Bradstreet’s broad reading in the medical, scientific, and historical literature of her day, as well as her interest in recent and current English history and politics.
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Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda
Lady Hester Pulter
Iter Press, 2014
Scholars who study early modern women’s writing have been eager for a full-text edition of the works of Hester Pulter since her manuscript was discovered in the mid-1990s. Now that Alice Eardley has brought together all of Pulter’s writing—poetry, emblems, and a prose romance—in a modern-spelling edition, students and academics will be able to access a remarkable body of work. The introduction does a brilliant job of situating Pulter in various milieux (the Civil War, religion, science) and in assessing the genres in which she worked. Eardley’s edition is clear and comprehensive enough to be useful to a wide audience of non-specialists, but its learned glosses are also illuminating for more experienced readers of early modern texts.
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The Poems of John Keats
John Keats
Harvard University Press, 1978

Here at last is the definitive Keats—an edition of John Keats’s poems that embodies the readings the poet himself most probably intended. The culmination of a tradition of literary and textual scholarship, it is the work of the one scholar best qualified to do the job.

Largely because of the wealth and complexity of the manuscript materials and the frequency with which first printings were based on inferior sources, there has never been a thoroughly reliable edition of Keats. Indeed, in The Texts of Keats’s Poems Jack Stillinger demonstrated that fully one third of the poems as printed in current standard editions contain substantive errors. This edition is the first in the history of Keats scholarship to be based on a systematic investigation of the transmission of the texts. The readings given here represent in each case, as exactly as can be determined, the version that Keats preferred. The chronological arrangement of the poems and the full record of variants and manuscript alterations (presented in a style that will be clear to the general reader as well as useful to the scholar) display the development of Keats’s poetic artistry. Notes at the back provide dates of composition, relate extant manuscripts and early printings, and explain the choices of texts.

The London Times said of Stillinger’s earlier study of the texts: “Thanks to Mr. Stillinger a revolution in Keats studies is at hand.” Here is the crucial step in that revolution.

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The Poems of William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke
William Herbert
Iter Press, 2023
A collection of poems by a pivotal figure in the literary culture of Stuart England.

William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke, was a pivotal figure in the literary and political cultures of Stuart England. He wrote poetry primarily for social occasions: A debate with a friend, seductions or apologies to beloveds, or support for a deceased political ally. This volume collects his work along with an introduction, detailed notes, and other apparatus that explore the networks in which the poems circulated, the interpretive contexts suggested in miscellanies, and alternative readings revealed through scribal variants. The book also features five contemporary musical settings.
 
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Poetic Relations
Intimacy and Faith in the English Reformation
Constance M. Furey
University of Chicago Press, 2017
What is the relationship between our isolated and our social selves, between aloneness and interconnection? Constance M. Furey probes this question through a suggestive literary tradition: early Protestant poems in which a single speaker describes a solitary search for God.

As Furey demonstrates, John Donne, George Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and others describe inner lives that are surprisingly crowded, teeming with human as well as divine companions. The same early modern writers who bequeathed to us the modern distinction between self and society reveal here a different way of thinking about selfhood altogether. For them, she argues, the self is neither alone nor universally connected, but is forever interactive and dynamically constituted by specific relationships. By means of an analysis equally attentive to theological ideas, social conventions, and poetic form, Furey reveals how poets who understand introspection as a relational act, and poetry itself as a form ideally suited to crafting a relational self, offer us new ways of thinking about selfhood today—and a resource for reimagining both secular and religious ways of being in the world.
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A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century
Theorizing Unruly Narratives
Brian Richardson
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Story, in the largest sense of the term, is arguably the single most important aspect of narrative. But with the proliferation of antimimetic writing, traditional narrative theory has been inadequate for conceptualizing and theorizing a vast body of innovative narratives. In A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives, Brian Richardson proposes a new model for evaluating literature—returning to the basis of narrative theory to illuminate how authors play with and help clarify the boundaries of narrative theory. While he focuses on late modernist, postmodern, and contemporary narratives, the study also includes many earlier works, spanning from Aristophanes and Shakespeare through James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter.

By exploring fundamental questions about narrative, Richardson provides a detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive theory that includes neglected categories of storytelling and significantly enhances our treatment of traditional areas of analysis. Ultimately, this book promises to transform and expand the study of story and plot. 
 
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Poetics Of Plot
The Case of English Renaissance Drama
Thomas Pavel
University of Minnesota Press, 1985
A unique methodology for plot analysis focusing on an important body of English Renaissance dramas. "Lucid, rich, and consistently thought-provoking This book marks a decisive advance in formal plot analysis." Poetics Today
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The Poetics of Repetition in English and Chinese Lyric Poetry
Cecile Chu-chin Sun
University of Chicago Press, 2010

For more than half a century, Chinese-Western comparative literature has been recognized as a formal academic discipline, but critics and scholars in the field have done little to develop a viable, common basis for comparison between these disparate literatures. In this pioneering book, Cecile Chu-chin Sun establishes repetition as the ideal perspective from which to compare the poetry and poetics from these two traditions.

Sun contends that repetition is at the heart of all that defines the lyric as a unique art form and, by closely examining its use in Chinese and Western poetry, she demonstrates howone can identify important points of convergence and divergence. Through a representative sampling of poems from both traditions, she illustrates how the irreducible generic nature of the lyric transcends linguistic and cultural barriers but also reveals the fundamental distinctions between the traditions. Most crucially, she dissects the two radically different conceptualizations of reality—mimesis and xing—that serve as underlying principles for the poetic practices of each tradition.

Skillfully integrating theory and practice, The Poetics of Repetition in English and Chinese Lyric Poetryprovides a much-needed model for future study of Chinese and English poetry as well as lucid, succinct interpretations of individual poems.

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The Poet-Physician
Keats and Medical Science
Donald C. Goellnicht
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984

For six years of his brief like, Keats studied medicine, first as an apprentice in Edmonton and then as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital in London. His biographers have generally glossed over this period of his life, and critics have ignored it and denied the influence of medical training on his poetry and thought.


In this challenging reappraisal, Goellnicht argues that Keats’ writings reveal a distinct influence of science and medicine. Goellnicht researches Keats’ course work and texts to reconstruct the milieu of the early nineteenth-century medical student. He then explores the scientific resonances in Keats’’ individual works, and convincingly shows the influence of his early medical training.

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The Poetry of George Herbert
Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, 1975

The transparent beauty and effortless grace of George Herbert's poetry have made it seem almost devoid of art. In this comprehensive reading of Herbert, Helen Vendler reveals the complexity inherent in the apparent simplicity of his lyrics. Herbert appears here, both in introspective and in devotional verse, as a poet of universal feeling whose work can be given a human interpretation independent of any religious conviction.

Very nearly all of Herbert's poems are treated in this finely written, forcefully argued study. By looking at the poet's less successful attempts as well as at his best work, Vendler is able to trace his surest line of development in the various modes and forms in which he worked. Comparisons with the work of his adapters and imitators make apparent the perfection and finish of his lines, their interior intellectual and psychological harmony.

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The Poetry of John Tyndall
Edited by Roland Jackson, Nicola Jackson, and Daniel Brown
University College London, 2020
John Tyndall (c. 1822–1893), is best known as a leading natural philosopher and trenchant public intellectual of the Victorian age, who spoke and wrote controversially on the relationship between science and religion. Far fewer people know that he also wrote poetry.
 
The Poetry of John Tyndall contains annotated transcriptions of all 76 of Tyndall’s extant poems, the majority of which have not been published before. The poems are complemented by an extended introduction, which explores what the poems can tell us about Tyndall’s self-fashioning, his values and beliefs, and the role of poetry for him and his circle. More broadly, this introduction addresses the relationship between the scientific and poetic imaginations, and wider questions of the purpose of poetry in relation to science and religion in the nineteenth century.
 
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Poetry of Mourning
The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney
Jahan Ramazani
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Called the "mother of beauty" by Wallace Stevens, death has been perhaps the favorite muse of modern poets. From Langston Hughes's lynch poems to Sylvia Plath's father elegies, modern poetry has tried to find a language of mourning in an age of mass death, religious doubt, and forgotten ritual. For this reason, Jahan Ramazani argues, the elegy, one of the most ancient of poetic genres, has remained one of the most vital to modern poets.

Through subtle readings of elegies, self-elegies, war poems, and the blues, Ramazani greatly enriches our critical understanding of a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney. He also interprets the signal contributions to the American family elegy of Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich, Michael Harper, and Amy Clampitt. Finally, he suggests analogies between the elegy and other kinds of contemporary mourning art—in particular, the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Grounded in genre theory and in the psychoanalysis of mourning, Ramazani's readings also draw on various historical, formal, and feminist critical approaches. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the psychology of mourning or the history of modern poetry.

"Consists of full, intelligent and lucid exposition and close reading. . . . Poetry of Mourning is itself a welcome contribution to modern poetry's search for a 'resonant yet credible vocabulary of grief in our time."—Times Literary Supplement
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Poetry Of Resistance
Seamus Heaney
Sidney Burris
Ohio University Press, 1990

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Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing
The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra
Ohio University Press, 2011

In Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing eminent Rossetti scholar Lorraine Janzen Kooistra demonstrates the cultural centrality of a neglected artifact: the Victorian illustrated gift book. Turning a critical lens on “drawing-room books” as both material objects and historical events, Kooistra reveals how the gift book’s visual/verbal form mediated “high” and popular art as well as book and periodical publication.

A composite text produced by many makers, the poetic gift book was designed for domestic space and a female audience; its mode of publication marks a significant moment in the history of authorship, reading, and publishing. With rigorous attention to the gift book’s aesthetic and ideological features, Kooistra analyzes the contributions of poets, artists, engravers, publishers, and readers and shows how its material form moved poetry into popular culture. Drawing on archival and periodical research, she offers new readings of Eliza Cook, Adelaide Procter, and Jean Ingelow and shows the transatlantic reach of their verses. Boldly resituating Tennyson’s works within the gift-book economy he dominated, Kooistra demonstrates how the conditions of corporate authorship shaped the production and receptionof the laureate’s verses at the peak of his popularity.

Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing changes the map of poetry’s place—in all its senses—in Victorian everyday life and consumer culture.

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Poets and Playwrights
Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, Milton
Elmer Edgar Stoll
University of Minnesota Press, 1967

Poets and Playwrights was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Poets and Playwrights is a collection of nine essays by the eminent Shakespearean scholar and critic, the late Elmer Edgar Stoll. In this work, which was first published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1930, Professor Stoll presents his maturest consideration of the art of the poets and playwrights of his subtitle—Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and Milton. The most extensive essay, "Shakespeare and the Moderns," includes, in Mr. Stoll's words, "a review of Shakespeare as I conceive him, in order the better to compare him with those who in some respect or other are his peers."

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Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England
By Norman K. Farmer, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 1984

In the twentieth century, the pioneering work of such art historians as Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind heightened our awareness of the relationship between Renaissance literature and the visual arts. By focusing on that relationship in the work of such poets as Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Edmund Waller, and Robert Herrick, Norman K. Farmer, Jr., convincingly shows that they and other writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England wrote with a lively and creative sense of the visual—a sense richly informed by the theory and practice of Renaissance art.

Farmer begins by describing the powerful visual matrix that underlies the narrative structure of Sidney's New Arcadia. He compares the role of the visual in the poetry of Donne and Ben Jonson, and demonstrates how works by both Thomas Carew and Lord Herbert exhibit poetic invention according to familiar Renaissance pictorial themes. Herrick's Hesperides is shown to be the major seventeenth-century poetic application of the Horatian idea ut pictura poesis.

A special feature of this gracefully written and enlightening volume is Farmer's discussion of Lady Drury's oratory at Hawstead Hall. Published here for the first time are photographs of this uniquely decorated oratory, in which themes from a variety of English and Continental emblem books were painted on the walls of a room apparently designed for private meditation.

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Poets of Reality
Six Twentieth-Century Writers
J. Hillis Miller
Harvard University Press

Although many books deal individually with each of the major writers treated in Poets of Reality, none attempts through analyses of these particular men and their works, to identify the new directions taken by twentieth-century literature. J. Hillis Miller, challenging the assumption that modern poetry is merely the extension of an earlier romanticism, presents critical studies of the six central figures—Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams—who played key roles in evolving a poetry in which “reality comes to be present to the senses, and present in the words of the poem which ratify this possession.”

A new kind of poetry has appeared in the twentieth century, the author claims, a poetry which, growing out of romanticism and symbolism, goes far beyond it. The old generalizations about the nature and use of poetry are no longer applicable, and it is the gradual emergence of new forms, culminating in the work of Williams, that Miller traces and defines.

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Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare
Edited by Christopher Pye
Northwestern University Press, 2020
The turn to political concerns in Renaissance studies, beginning in the 1980s, was dictated by forms of cultural materialism that staked their claims against the aesthetic dimension of the work. Recently, however, the more robustly political conception of the aesthetic formulated by theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Jacques Rancière has revitalized literary analysis generally and early modern studies in particular. For these theorists, aesthetics forms the crucial link between politics and the most fundamental phenomenological organization of the world, what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible.”

Taking up this expansive conception of aesthetics, Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare suggests that the political stakes of the literary work—and Shakespeare’s work in particular—extend from the most intimate dimensions of affective response to the problem of the grounds of political society. The approaches to aesthetic thought included in this volume explore the intersections between the literary work and the full range of concerns animating the field today: political philosophy, affect theory, and ecocritical analysis of environs and habitus.
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Political Appetites
Food in Medieval English Romance
Aaron Hostetter
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Political Appetites: Food in Medieval English Romance is the first book-length examination of the cultural and theoretical resonances of food and cooking in medieval English literature, offering a new assessment of the vexed and critically underappreciated genre of romance. Aaron Hostetter moves beyond the critical assumptions of the food practices of medieval English culture as only reflecting Eucharistic preoccupations. Focusing on the romance literature of England, from tenth-century hagiographic verse to fifteenth-century courtly adventures, he also engages the politics of secular eating. Focus on the edible allows Political Appetites to apply fresh insights from cultural studies and critical theory to these narratives—to adumbrate their unique political perspectives. The analysis of food reveals these stories to be sophisticated responses to the material and political conditions of their day.
  
If humanity has attempted through its brief history to render the material world edible, then food and food practice not only influence our aspirations but also shift focus to the limits of human existence on this planet. In studying the foodways of the past as a fundamental economic activity, Political Appetites questions contemporary attitudes towards consumption as their proliferation and abuses create social inequities, menace ecosystems, and threaten to bring about the end of the Anthropocene Era.
 
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Politics and History in William Golding
The World Turned Upside Down
Paul Crawford
University of Missouri Press, 2002
Politics and History in William Golding provides a much needed politicized and historicized reading of William Golding’s novels as a counter to previous, universalizing criticism. Paul Crawford argues that an understanding of fantastic and carnivalesque modes in Golding’s work is vital if we are to appreciate fully his interrogation of twentieth-century life.
            Golding’s early satirical novels question English constructions of national identity in opposition to Nazism and the “totalitarian personality.” For Crawford, Golding can and must be studied in the wider European tradition of “literature of atrocity.” His early novels, especially Lord of the Flies, are preoccupied with atrocity, whereas the later work betrays a greater concern for the status of language and literature.
In Golding’s later fiction, such as Darkness Visible, the fantastic and carnivalesque are used in an increasingly nonsatirical manner to complement first modernist and then postmodernist self-consciousness and indeterminacy. Even his critique of class and religious authority, which carries through all of his fiction, gives way to more lighthearted productions—a symptom of which is his crude, absurd attack against the English literary industry in The Paper Men. This reduction of satire marks a decline in Golding’s political commitment and the production of more complex and arguably less satisfying novels.
            The fantastic and carnivalesque are foundational to both the satirical and nonsatirical approaches that mark Golding’s early and late fiction. No previous study has analyzed this structure that is so central to his work. Politics and History in William Golding examines this writer’s work more fully than it has been studied within the convoluted context of the last half of the twentieth century. Crawford directly links Golding’s various deployments of the fantastic and carnivalesque to historical, political, and social change.
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The Politics of Mirth
Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes
Leah S. Marcus
University of Chicago Press, 1987
"Leah Marcus's The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes is a fascinating study of why James and Charles promoted some types of rural sport and festival and of how certain literary texts participated in promoting or critiquing royal policy. . . . Marcus provocatively links texts not often studied in conjunction with one another, and she provides strong and detailed readings of those texts."—Jean E. Howard
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The Politics of Rape
Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage
Jennifer L. Airey
University of Delaware Press, 2013
The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage is the first full-length study to examine representations of sexual violence on the Restoration stage. By reading theatrical depictions of sexual violence alongside political tracts, propaganda pamphlets, and circulating broadsides, this study argues that authors used dramatic representations of rape to respond to and engage with late-century upheavals in British political culture. Beginning with an examination of rape scenes in English Civil War propaganda, The Politics of Rape argues that Roundhead authors described acts of rape and atrocity to demonize their enemies, the Irish, the Catholics, and the Cavaliers. After the Restoration, propagandists and playwrights on each side of every political conflict would follow suit, altering the rhetoric of sexual violence in response to each new moment of political upheaval: The Restoration of Charles II, the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the accession of William and Mary. The study offers an intensive look at British propaganda culture, gathering together a wealth of understudied pamphlet texts, and identifying a series of stock figures that recur throughout the century: The demonic Irishman, sexually violent villain of the 1641 Irish Rebellion tracts; the debauched Cavalier, the secretly Catholic royalist rapist; the poisonous Catholic bride, the malignant consort who encourages the rapes of Protestant women; the cannibal father, the evil patriarch who rapes his daughters-in-laws before ingesting his own sons as a symbol of monarchical overreach; and the ravished monarch, the male rape victim whose sexual violation protests his political disenfranchisement. The study also traces the appearance of these figures on the British stage, examining well-known works by Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Lee, and Shadwell, alongside lesser-known plays by Orrery, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Ravenscroft, Pix, Cibber, and Brady. The Politics of Rape thus offers a new method for understanding of the geo-political implications of theatrical sexual violence.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance
Ester Gilman Richey
University of Missouri Press, 1998

Recognizing that the seventeenth century's volatile debate over apocalyptic interpretation has since become a one-sided discussion, Esther Gilman Richey develops a context that recovers the dynamism so inherent in the writings of the period and provides illuminating details that enhance the prophetic continuum. The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance does not ignore the familiar prophetic verse of Spenser and Milton, but it significantly expands the scope of study by examining the interpretations of both men and women who represent a range of ecclesiastical and political perspectives.

Richey rejects Barbara Lewalski's claim that the radical, prophetic writers and metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century drew inspiration from distinct biblical models, the former from the Apocalypse and the latter from the Psalms. Instead she contends that even writers such as Donne and Herbert, whom we have long considered "literary," were in reality using their poetry to participate in the hottest debates of the time.

While the radical writers, such as Spenser and Milton, were immediately responsive to ecclesiastical and political controversies, the conservative, metaphysical poets—Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan—were posing equally politically charged questions: Is the pope Antichrist? Is the Bride of Christ pure? Is the Temple a model of ecclesiastical reform? The writers of the period did not move in divided and distinguished worlds, but in fact constantly responded to one another through poetic and politically charged dialogue.

By drawing from the writings of various individuals, both radical and conformist, male and female, Richey traces the shifting representations of the apocalyptic Bride and Temple over time. Organized chronologically, the chapters of The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance reveal the escalating debate among the pacifists, conformists, militants, and feminists. Not only does Richey uncover the prophetic dimension of conformist writers usually described as apolitical and devotional, but she also explores the writings of lesser-known women prophets: Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Cary, Anna Trapnel, and Margaret Fell. In such biblical passages as the apocalyptic "woman clothed with the sun," these early feminists find the authority for their own prophetic speech.

This provocative analysis—at once far-reaching and tightly focused—reveals the complexity of the apocalyptic discourse that transpired among Renaissance writers and poets.

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The Pooh Perplex
Frederick Crews
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In this devastatingly funny classic, Frederick Crews skewers the ego-inflated pretensions of the schools and practitioners of literary criticism popular in the 1960s, including Freudians, Aristotelians, and New Critics. Modeled on the "casebooks" often used in freshman English classes at the time, The Pooh Perplex contains twelve essays written in different critical voices, complete with ridiculous footnotes, tongue-in-cheek "questions and study projects," and hilarious biographical notes on the contributors. This edition contains a new preface by the author that compares literary theory then and now and identifies some of the real-life critics who were spoofed in certain chapters.
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Poor Naked Wretches
Shakespeare’s Working People
Stephen Unwin
Reaktion Books, 2022
Disputing the notion that William Shakespeare scorned the rabble, an illuminating look at the complex working people of his plays.
 
Was Shakespeare a snob? Poor Naked Wretches challenges the idea that one of the greatest writers of the English language despised working people, showing that he portrayed them with as much insight, compassion, and purpose as the rich and powerful. Moreover, working people play an important role in his dramatic method. Stephen Unwin reads Shakespeare anew, exploring the astonishing variety of working people in his plays, as well as the vast range of cultural sources from which they were drawn. Unwin argues that the robust realism of these characters, their independence of mind, and their engagement in the great issues of the day, make them much more than mere comic relief. Compassionate, cogent, and wry, Poor Naked Wretches grants these often-overlooked figures the dignity and respect they deserve.
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Poor Tom
Living "King Lear"
Simon Palfrey
University of Chicago Press, 2014
King Lear is perhaps the most fierce and moving play ever written. And yet there is a curious puzzle at its center. The figure to whom Shakespeare gives more lines than anyone except the king—Edgar—has often seemed little more than a blank, ignored and unloved, a belated moralizer who, try as he may, can never truly speak to the play’s savaged heart. He saves his blinded father from suicide, but even this act of care is shadowed by suspicions of evasiveness and bad faith.

In Poor Tom, Simon Palfrey asks us to go beyond any such received understandings—and thus to experience King Lear as never before. He argues that the part of Edgar is Shakespeare’s most radical experiment in characterization, and his most exhaustive model of both human and theatrical possibility. The key to the Edgar character is that he spends most of the play disguised, much of it as “Poor Tom of Bedlam,” and his disguises come to uncanny life. The Edgar role is always more than one person; it animates multitudes, past and present and future, and gives life to states of being beyond the normal reach of the senses—undead, or not-yet, or ghostly, or possible rather than actual. And because the Edgar role both connects and retunes all of the figures and scenes in King Lear, close attention to this particular part can shine stunning new light on how the whole play works.

The ultimate message of Palfrey’s bravura analysis is the same for readers or actors or audiences as it is for the characters in the play: see and listen feelingly; pay attention, especially when it seems as though there is nothing there.
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Portrait of a Marriage
Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson
Nigel Nicolson
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet, and biographer, is best known as the friend of Virginia Woolf, who transformed her into an androgynous time-traveler in Orlando. The story of Sackville-West's marriage to Harold Nicolson is one of intrigue and bewilderment. In Portrait of a Marriage, their son Nigel combines his mother's memoir with his own explanations and what he learned from their many letters. Even during her various love affairs with women, Vita maintained a loving marriage with Harold. Portrait of a Marriage presents an often misunderstood but always fascinating couple.

"Portrait of a Marriage is as close to a cry from the heart as anybody writing in English in our time has come, and it is a cry that, once heard, is not likely ever to be forgotten. . . . Unexpected and astonishing."—Brendan Gill, New Yorker

"The charm of this book lies in the elegance of its narration, the taste with which their son has managed to convey the real, enduring quality of his parents' love for each other."—Doris Grumbach, New Republic
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Posthumous Love
Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England
Ramie Targoff
University of Chicago Press, 2014
For Dante and Petrarch, posthumous love was a powerful conviction. Like many of their contemporaries, both poets envisioned their encounters with their beloved in heaven—Dante with Beatrice, Petrarch with Laura. But as Ramie Targoff reveals in this elegant study, English love poetry of the Renaissance brought a startling reversal of this tradition: human love became definitively mortal. Exploring the boundaries that Renaissance English poets drew between earthly and heavenly existence, Targoff seeks to understand this shift and its consequences for English poetry.
 
Targoff shows that medieval notions of the somewhat flexible boundaries between love in this world and in the next were hardened by Protestant reformers, who envisioned a total break between the two. Tracing the narrative of this rupture, she focuses on central episodes in poetic history in which poets developed rich and compelling compensations for the lack of posthumous love—from Thomas Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch’s love sonnets and the Elizabethan sonnet series of Shakespeare and Spencer to the carpe diem poems of the seventeenth century. Targoff’s centerpiece is Romeo and Juliet, where she considers how Shakespeare’s reworking of the Italian story stripped away any expectation that the doomed teenagers would reunite in heaven. Casting new light on these familiar works of poetry and drama, this book ultimately demonstrates that the negation of posthumous love brought forth a new mode of poetics that derived its emotional and aesthetic power from its insistence upon love’s mortal limits.
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Post-Personal Romanticism
Democratic Terror, Prosthetic Poetics, and the Comedy of Modern Ethical Life
Bo Earle
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Post-Personal Romanticism: Democratic Terror, Prosthetic Poetics, and the Comedy of Modern Ethical Life by Bo Earle offers a broad recasting of Romantic lyric’s formal innovations in terms of Hegel’s historical ethics. These innovations attempt to come to terms with the Enlightenment’s paradoxical legacy: industrial and consumerist modernity depends on the Enlightenment norm of rationally autonomous individuality even as it makes this norm ever more implausible. In turn, a key insight of the Romantics is that modernity depends most crucially upon the very elusiveness of this norm of autonomous individuality. The Romantics emphasize that modernity is constitutively a culture of fantasy, a culture self-conscious about the impossibility of its own organizing values and goals.
  
Tracing this insight to Hegel’s suggestion that modern subjectivity is in some sense post-individual or even posthumous, Earle argues that signature Romantic lyrics offer a way forward that avoids postmodernism’s wholesale rejection of autonomous selfhood. With chapters on Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, Earle traces how Romantic lyrics mine this interminability to recover figurative emblems or masks of selfhood from experiences of its inevitable normative failure. This model is of particularly urgent value today when the costs of modern narcissism, economic exploitation, and political imperialism have come to include the normalization of torture, signature drone strikes, and climate change.
 
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A Power to Do Justice
Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law
Bradin Cormack
University of Chicago Press, 2008
English law underwent rapid transformation in the sixteenth century, in response to the Reformation and also to heightened litigation and legal professionalization. As the common law became more comprehensive and systematic, the principle of jurisdiction came under particular strain. When the common law engaged with other court systems in England, when it encountered territories like Ireland and France, or when it confronted the ocean as a juridical space, the law revealed its qualities of ingenuity and improvisation. In other words, as Bradin Cormack argues, jurisdictional crisis made visible the law’s resemblance to the literary arts.  
A Power to Do Justice
shows how Renaissance writers engaged the practical and conceptual dynamics of jurisdiction, both as a subject for critical investigation and as a frame for articulating literature’s sense of itself. Reassessing the relation between English literature and law from More to Shakespeare, Cormack argues that where literary texts attend to jurisdiction, they dramatize how boundaries and limits are the very precondition of law’s power, even as they clarify the forms of intensification that make literary space a reality.

Tracking cultural responses to Renaissance jurisdictional thinking and legal centralization, A Power to Do Justice makes theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological contributions that set a new standard for law and the humanities and for the cultural history of early modern law and literature.
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Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays
Matthew Sergi
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Amid the crowded streets of Chester, guild players portraying biblical characters performed on colorful mobile stages hoping to draw the attention of fellow townspeople. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these Chester plays employed flamboyant live performance to adapt biblical narratives. But the original format of these fascinating performances remains cloudy, as surviving records of these plays are sparse, and the manuscripts were only written down a generation after they stopped. Revealing a vibrant set of social practices encoded in the Chester plays, Matthew Sergi provides a new methodology for reading them and a transformative look at medieval English drama.

Carefully combing through the plays, Sergi seeks out cues in the dialogues that reveal information about the original staging, design, and acting. These “practical cues,” as he calls them, have gone largely unnoticed by drama scholars, who have focused on the ideology and historical contexts of these plays, rather than the methods, mechanics, and structures of the actual performances. Drawing on his experience as an actor and director, he combines close readings of these texts with fragments of records, revealing a new way to understand how the Chester plays brought biblical narratives to spectators in the noisy streets. For Sergi, plays that once appeared only as dry religious dramas come to life as raucous participatory spectacles filled with humor, camp, and devotion.
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Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages
Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve
Eleanor Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature.
 
Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.
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Prayer and Power
George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship
Michael C. Schoenfeldt
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Michael C. Schoenfeldt here offers the first major exploration of the connections between George Herbert's devotional poetry and the social practices and political discourse of his day. Viewing The Temple and The Country Parson as part of the larger "civilizing process" of Western Europe, Schoenfeldt shows how Herbert discovers in the discourses of courtesy and theology a common vocabulary of authority, selfhood, petition, and discipline.

Before entering the priesthood, Herbert nourished contacts in court, was elected University Orator at Cambridge, and served in Parliament. In turning to God, Schoenfeldt argues, Herbert did not simply turn away from the secular world but also turned its language, particularly the language of courtesy, into the medium for his lyric worship of God. The confluence of courtesy and spirituality in Herbert's poetry provides a fascinating insight into a society searching for an appropriate discourse of reverence in a time of baffling change. The first five chapters investigate the manifold ways in which Herbert's life and works exemplify the interdependence of social and religious behavior in the English Renaissance. The sixth and final chapter extends this investigation into the nervous eroticism of Herbert's poems.

Considering The Temple as well as Herbert's letters, speeches, Latin poems, collections of foreign proverbs, translations, The Country Parson, and less familiar lyrics, Schoenfeldt offers a thorough and detailed reading of Herbert's rich and conflicted corpus. Prayer and Power is not only a bold redefinition of the accomplishment of one of the finest poets of the English Renaissance but also the first sustained study to advance a cultural poetics of the religious lyric.
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Precious Bane
Collins and the Miltonic Legacy
By Paul S. Sherwin
University of Texas Press, 1977

During his brief and sorrowful career William Collins wrote a handful of enduring poems, the most powerful and innovative verse of the Age of Sensibility. This study traces Collins' struggle to assimilate or transcend rather than to be overwhelmed by the influence of his Sublime precursor Milton. Collins' achievement is remarkably diverse, his restless experimentation a manifestation of the quest for imaginative autonomy which is the dominant impulse of all his writing. Authoritatively and eloquently, Sherwin interprets Collins' major works including the "Ode to Evening," the poem in which Milton's presence is most enriching, the "Ode on the Poetical Character," "The Passions," "Popular Superstitions Ode," and the "Ode to Fear," Collins' most haunting and painfully burdened poem.

Although Harold Bloom and other prominent theorists of literary influence have recognized that Milton is the chief "daemonic" precursor of the Sensibility poets and the Romantics, Precious Bane represents the first extensive analysis of Milton's power both to daunt and emancipate an aspirant to the Sublime tradition. Bloom writes:

"Paul Sherwin's Precious Bane is at once the definitive study of the poetry of William Collins and also the best informed, most critically acute book yet written upon the Miltonic influence on subsequent poetry. Sherwin's deep learning and original insights illuminate Milton and Keats quite as much as they do Collins and the other tragic poets of Sensibility.

"Readers who seek rich speculation and advanced knowledge on such associated critical and historical problems as Romanticism, the Sublime mode, the agonies of poetic incarnation, and the relation of psychoanalysis to literature, will find abundant recompense in Sherwin's pages. No one in the future will teach, read or write about Collins, or the burdens of Miltonic influence, without starting from Sherwin's achievement."

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Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel
Livia Arndal Woods
The Ohio State University Press, 2023

In Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel—the first book-length study of the topic—Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the long nineteenth century. Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule and only rarely as an embodied experience) to advocate for “somatic reading,” a practice attuned to impressions of the body on the page and in our own messy lived experiences. 

Examining works by Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and others, Woods considers instances of pregnancy that are tied to representations of immodesty, poverty, and medical diagnosis. These representations, Woods argues, should be understood in the arc of Anglo-American modernity and its aftershocks, connecting backward to early modern witch trials and forward to the criminalization of women for pregnancy outcomes in twenty-first-century America. Ultimately, she makes the case that by clearing space for the personal and anecdotal in scholarship, somatic reading helps us analyze with uncertainty rather than against it and allows for richer and more relevant textual interpretation.

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The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle
Edited by Cecil Y. Lang
University of Chicago Press, 1975
This useful volume presents the major works of the five leading Pre-Raphaelite poets. Foremost in the collection, and included in their entirety are D. G. Rossetti's The House of Life, C. G. Rossetti's "Monna Innominata," William Morris's "Defence of Guenevere," Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, and Meredith's "Modern Love." Complementing these major poems is a fine, generous selection of the poets' shorter pieces that are typical of their work as a whole. For this second edition, Cecil Lang has substituted two early Swinburne poems, "The Leper" and "Anactoria," for Fitzgerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. These poems, which the editor describes as "shocking," show a new aspect of Swinburne not discussed previously.  
 
Lang's Introduction describes briefly the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, discusses each of the Pre-Raphaelite poets, both individually and in relation to the others, and grapples with the questions of definition of Pre-Raphaelitism and the similarities between its painting and poetry. The book is appropriately illustrated with thirty-two works by D. G. Rossetti, John Ruskin, William H. Hunt, and other Pre-Raphaelite artists.

This is the only anthology available that provides a representative selection of the work of these important poets. It will be indispensable to students of Victorian poetry and appreciated by readers interested in the Pre-Raphaelites.

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PRESENCE OF THE PRESENT
TOPICS OF THE DAY IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
RICHARD D. ALTICK
The Ohio State University Press, 1991

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Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840
Jonathan Lamb
University of Chicago Press, 2001
The violence, wonder, and nostalgia of voyaging are nowhere more vivid than in the literature of South Seas exploration. Preserving the Self in the South Seas charts the sensibilities of the lonely figures that encountered the new and exotic in terra incognita. Jonathan Lamb introduces us to the writings of South Seas explorers, and finds in them unexpected and poignant tales of selves alarmed and transformed.

Lamb contends that European exploration of the South Seas was less confident and mindful than we have assumed. It was, instead, conducted in moods of distraction and infatuation that were hard to make sense of and difficult to narrate, and it prompted reactions among indigenous peoples that were equally passionate and irregular. Preserving the Self in the South Seas also examines these common crises of exploration in the context of a metropolitan audience that eagerly consumed narratives of the Pacific while doubting their truth. Lamb considers why these halting and incredible journals were so popular with the reading public, and suggests that they dramatized anxieties and bafflements rankling at the heart of commercial society.
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Pride and Prejudice
An Annotated Edition
Jane Austen
Harvard University Press, 2010

Along with the plays of William Shakespeare and the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen’s novels are among the most beloved books of Western literature. Pride and Prejudice (1813) was in Austen’s lifetime her most popular novel, and it was the author’s personal favorite. Adapted many times to the screen and stage, and the inspiration for numerous imitations, it remains today her most widely read book. Now, in this beautifully illustrated and annotated edition, distinguished scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks instructs the reader in a larger appreciation of the novel’s enduring pleasures and provides analysis of Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, Lady Catherine, and all the characters who inhabit the world of Pride and Prejudice.

This edition will be treasured by specialists and first-time readers, and especially by devoted Austen fans who think of themselves as Friends of Jane. In her Introduction, Spacks considers Austen’s life and career, the continuing appeal of Pride and Prejudice, and its power as a stimulus for fantasy (Maureen Dowd, writing in the New York Times, can hold forth at length on Obama as a Darcy-figure, knowing full well her readers will “understand that she wished to suggest glamour and sexiness”). Her Introduction also explores the value and art of literary annotation. In her running commentary on the novel, she provides notes on literary and historical contexts, allusions, and language likely to cause difficulty to modern readers. She offers interpretation and analysis, always with the wisdom, humor, and light touch of an experienced and sensitive teacher.

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Primitive Minds
Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel
Anna Neill
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
For twenty-first-century veterans of the evolution culture wars, Primitive Minds: Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel, by Anna Neill, makes unlikely bedfellows of two Victorian “discoveries”: evolutionary theory and spiritualism. Victorian science did much to uncover the physical substratum of mystical or dreamy experience, tracing spiritual states to a lower, reflex, or more evolutionarily primitive stage of consciousness. Yet science’s pursuit of knowledge beyond sense-based evidence uncannily evoked powers associated with this primitive mind: the capacity to link events across space and time, to anticipate the future, to uncover elements of the forgotten past, and to see into the minds of others.
Neill does not ask how the Victorians explained away spiritual experience through physiological psychology, but instead explores how physical explanation interacted with dreamy content in Victorian accounts of the mind’s most exotic productions. This synthesis, she argues, was particularly acute in realist fiction, where, despite novelists’ willingness to trace the nervous origins of individual behavior and its social consequences, activity in hidden regions of the mind enabled levels of perception inaccessible to ordinary waking thought. The authors in her study include Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Thomas Hardy.
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Prince of Tricksters
The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook
Matt Houlbrook
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Meet Netley Lucas, Prince of Tricksters—royal biographer, best-selling crime writer, and gentleman crook. In the years after the Great War, Lucas becomes infamous for climbing the British social ladder by his expert trickery—his changing names and telling of tales. An impudent young playboy and a confessed confidence trickster, he finances his far-flung hedonism through fraud and false pretenses. After repeated spells in prison, Lucas transforms himself into a confessing “ex-crook,” turning his inside knowledge of the underworld into a lucrative career as freelance journalist and crime expert. But then he’s found out again—exposed and disgraced for faking an exclusive about a murder case. So he reinvents himself, taking a new name and embarking on a prolific, if short-lived, career as a royal biographer and publisher. Chased around the world by detectives and journalists after yet another sensational scandal, the gentleman crook dies as spectacularly as he lived—a washed-up alcoholic, asphyxiated in a fire of his own making.

The lives of Netley Lucas are as flamboyant as they are unlikely. In Prince of Tricksters, Matt Houlbrook picks up the threads of Lucas’s colorful lies and lives. Interweaving crime writing and court records, letters and life-writing, Houlbrook tells Lucas’s fascinating story and, in the process, provides a panoramic view of the 1920s and ’30s. In the restless times after the Great War, the gentlemanly trickster was an exemplary figure, whose tall tales and bogus biographies exposed the everyday difficulties of knowing who and what to trust. Tracing how Lucas both evoked and unsettled the world through which he moved, Houlbrook shows how he prompted a pervasive crisis of confidence that encompassed British society, culture, and politics.

Taking readers on a romp through Britain, North America, and eventually into Africa, Houlbrook confronts readers with the limits of our knowledge of the past and challenges us to think anew about what history is and how it might be made differently.
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PRINT MANUSCRIPT PERFORMANCE
THE CHANGING RELATIONS OF THE MEDIA IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
ARTHUR F. MAROTTI
The Ohio State University Press, 2000
The eleven essays in this volume explore the complex interactions in early modern England between a technologically advanced culture of the printed book and a still powerful traditional culture of the spoken word, spectacle, and manuscript. Scholars who work on manuscript culture, the history of printing, cultural history, historical bibliography, and the institutions of early modern drama and theater have been brought together to address such topics as the social character of texts, historical changes in notions of literary authority and intellectual property, the mutual influence and tensions between the different forms of “publication,” and the epistemological and social implications of various communications technologies.

Although canonical literary writers such as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Rochester are discussed, the field of writing examined is a broad one, embracing political speeches, coterie manuscript poetry, popular pamphlets, parochially targeted martyrdom accounts, and news reports. Setting writers, audiences, and texts in their specific historical context, the contributors focus on a period in early modern England, from the late sixteenth through the late seventeenth century, when the shift from orality and manuscript communication to print was part of large-scale cultural change. Arthur F. Marotti’s and Michael D. Bristol’s introduction analyzes some of the sociocultural issues implicit in the collection and relates the essays to contemporary work in textual studies, bibliography, and publication history.
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The Printed Reader
Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Amelia Dale
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Shortlisted for the 2021 BARS First Book Prize (British Association for Romantic Studies)​

The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. Through intersecting readings of quixotic narratives, including work by Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, George Colman, Richard Graves, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Dale argues that literature was envisaged as imprinting—most crucially, in gendered terms—the reader’s mind, character, and body. The Printed Reader brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism. Tracing the meanings of quixotic readers’ bodies, The Printed Reader claims the social and political text that is the quixotic reader is structured by the experiential, affective, and sexual resonances of imprinting and impressions. 

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Printed Writings by George W. Russell
A Bibliography
George W. Russell; Compiled by Alan Denson
Northwestern University Press, 2019
This bibliography lists the books, paintings, and portraits of the mystic Irish poet George William Russell, best known by his pseudonym, “AE.” Russell was a late nineteenth-and early twentieth century Irish poet and essayist whose first book of poems, Homeward: Songs by the Way (1894), established him in what was known as the Irish Literary Revival.
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Privacy
Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self
Patricia Meyer Spacks
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity.

In Privacy, Patricia Meyer Spacks explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. She examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. She considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, she explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat—one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through inspired readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, along with a penetrating glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the period, Spacks ultimately shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions.

Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spacks's new work will fascinate anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.
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Private Theatricals
The Lives of the Victorians
Nina Auerbach
Harvard University Press, 1990

"Everyman" as actor on life's stage has been a recurrent theme in popular literature--epecially persuasive in these times of powerful electronic media, celebrity hype, and professional image-makers--but the great Victorians exuded sincerity. Nina Auerbach reminds us that all lives can be subversive performances. Charting the notable impact of the theater and theatricality on the Victorian imagination, she provocatively reexamines the concept of sincerity and authenticity as literary ideal.

In novels, popular fiction, and biographies, Auerbach unveils the theatrical element in lives imagined and represented. Focusing on three major points in the life cycle--childhood, passage to maturity, and death--she demonstrates how the process of living was for Victorians the acting of a role; only dying generated a creature with an "own self." Her discussion draws not only on theater history, but on demonology-the ghosts and monsters so much a part of the nineteenth-century imagination.

Nina Auerbach has written a closely reasoned and stimulating book for everyone interested in the Victorian age, and everyone interested in theatricality---whether private or on the stage.

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PROBLEM NOVELS
VICTORIAN FICTION THEORIZES THE SENSATIONAL SELF
ANNA MARIA JONES
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
In Problem Novels, Anna Maria Jones argues that, far from participating “invisibly” in disciplinary regimes, many Victorian novels articulate sophisticated theories about the role of the novel in the formation of the self. In fact, it is rare to find a Victorian novel in which questions about the danger or utility of novel reading are not embedded within the narrative. In other words, one of the stories that the Victorian novel tells, over and over again, is the story of what novels do to readers. This story occurs in moments that call attention to the reader’s engagement with the text.
 
In chapters on Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith, Jones examines “problem novels”—that is, novels that both narrate and invite problematic reading as part of their theorizing of cultural production. Problem Novels demonstrates that these works posit a culturally imbedded, sensationally susceptible reader and, at the same time, present a methodology for critical engagement with cultural texts. Thus, the novels theorize, paradoxically, a reader who is both unconsciously interpellated and critically empowered. And, Jones argues, it is this paradoxical construction of the unconscious/critical subject that re-emerges in the theoretical paradigms of Victorian cultural studies scholarship. Indeed, as Problem Novels shows, Victorianists’ attachments to critical “detective work” closely resemble the sensational attachments that we assume shaped Victorian novel readers.
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The Problem of Shape in The Prelude
The Conflict of Private and Public Speech
Jonathan R. Grandine
Harvard University Press
Wordsworth found expression for both his public and his private speech in the expansive form and peculiar organization of The Prelude; this fact, together with the problems and limitations that resulted, is the subject of Jonathan Grandine's study.
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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 18
1998 and 1999
Michael Linkletter
Harvard University Press

The Harvard Celtic Colloquium was established in 1980 by two graduate students in the Harvard University Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures as a forum in which graduate students could share their work and gain experience in professional academia. Since then, it has been organized annually by a team of students in the department, grown in size, and gained an international reputation which annually draws a diverse mix of scholars from around the world to present papers on all facets of Celtic Studies.

The Harvard Celtic Colloquium is the only conference in the field of Celtic Studies to be wholly organized and run by graduate students. Since its inception, established and internationally-renowned scholars in Celtic as well as graduate students, junior academics, and unaffiliated scholars have been drawn to this dynamic setting, presenting papers on ancient, medieval, and modern topics in the many disciplines relating to Celtic Studies; including literature, linguistics, art, archeology, government, economics, music, and history.

Papers given at the Colloquium may be submitted for review to the organizers of the conference, who become the editors for those papers selected for publication in the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium. Only papers presented at the annual conference are considered for publication.

Harvard University Press is proud to announce that we will distribute the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium. Two new issues are available this Fall: Volume 18/19 (1998 and 1999) and Volume 20/21 (2000 and 2001). Back issues are also available.

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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 20
2000 and 2001
Hugh Fogarty
Harvard University Press

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 20 includes “Retoiric and Composition in Geneamuin Chormaic,” by Hugh Fogarty; “Classical Ethnography and Celts: Can We Trust the Sources?” by Philip Freeman; “Prayers, Prizefights and Prostitution: The Medieval Irish Cemetery and Its Many Uses,” by Susan Leigh Fry; “Magical Realism and the Mabinogi: An Exercise in Methodology,” by Michael Linkletter; “Rebuke and Revision in the Early Irish Annals: The Death-Notices of Muirchertach mac Ercae [†534],” by Laurence Maney; “‘To a man for the King’: The Allegiance of Welsh Catholics during the First Civil War, 1642–46,” by Robert Matthews; “King and Druid,” by Arun Micheelsen; “‘Words, words, words’: Language about Language in France and Ireland,” by Grace Neville; “Ystoria Tri Brenin o Gwlen,” by Prydwyn Piper; and “Highland Motives in the Jacobite Rising of 1745–46: ‘Forcing Out,’ Traditional Documentation and Gaelic Poetry,” by James A. Stewart, Jr.

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 21 includes “Gendering the Vita Prima: An Examination of St. Brigid’s Role as ‘Mary of the Gael,’” by Diane Peters Auslander; “Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica: A Mythology of Greek Expansion in Celtic Lands,” by Timothy P. Bridgman; “The Wealth of the Medieval Welsh Gentry: The Case of Gwilym ap Gruffydd of Penrhyn,” by A. D. Carr; “Celtic Languages in the 1910 U.S. Census,” by Jonathan Dembling; “Digging Deeper: Adventures in Medieval Irish Burial and the Case for Interdisciplinary Scholarship,” by Susan Leigh Fry; “Laoiseach Mac an Bhaird and the Politics of Close Reading,” by Sarah E. McKibben; “Prescient Birds and Prospective Kings: Further Comments on Irish Elements in the Eddic Poem Rígsþula,” by Amy Eichhorn Mulligan; “The Descent of the Gods: Creation, Cosmogony, and Divine Order in Lebor Gabála,” by Sharon Paice Macleod; “Babel Is Come Again: Linguistic Colonisation and the Bardic Response in Early Modern Ireland,” by Patricia Palmer; “‘In Defiance of the Gospel and by Authority of the Devil’: Criticism of Welsh Marriage Law by the English Ecclesiastical Establishment and Its Socio-Political Context,” by Laura Radiker; and “The Way We Were: Twentieth Century Brittany through the Eyes of Breton Language Memorialists,” by Lenora Timm.

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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 22
2002
Kathryn Izzo
Harvard University Press
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 22 includes “Toward a Breton Musical Patrimony: Symbiosis and Synthesis of the Folkloric, the Classical, and the Impressionistic,” by Paul-André Beméchat; “Celts and Hyperboreans: Crossing Mythical Boundaries,” by Timothy Bridgman; “The Sea as an Emotional Landscape in Scottish Gaelic Song,” by Màiri Sìne Chaimbeul; “Patriarchy and Power in Medieval Welsh Literature,” by Kirstie Chandler; “Tamlachta: The Map of Plague Burials and Some Implications for Early Irish History,” by Gene Haley; “A Social History of Houses: The Hebridean Example,” by Catriona Machie; “Some Thoughts on the Operation of Native Law in Medieval Ireland,” by Kevin Murray; “French Connections from Tipperary to Toulouse in the Ryan of Inch Papers, 1820,” by Grace Neville; “‘On va Parler Breton a Bruxelles?’: The Impact of the European Union on Celtic Cultural and National Identities,” by Lenora Timm; and “The Search for the Holy Grail: Scholars, Critics, and Occultists,” by Juliette Wood.
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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 23
2003
Bettina Kimpton
Harvard University Press
This volume includes “Milesians and Alans in the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula and the Mythical Invasion of Ireland,” by Manuel Alberro; “The Breton Compositions of Jean Cras,” by Paul André Bempéchat; “The ‘Gallic Disaster’: Did Dionysius I of Syracuse Order It?,” by Timothy Bridgman; “Dangerous Liaisons,” by Marion Deane; “Cernunnos: Looking a Different Way,” by David Fickett-Wilbar; “Epic or Exegesis? The Form and Genesis of the Táin Bó Cúalnge,” by John J. Fisher; “Introducing King Nuadha: Mythology and Politics in the Belfast Murals,” by Alexandra Hartnett; “‘Gaelic Political Scripture’: Uí Mhaoil Chonaire Scribes and the Book of Mac Murchadha Caomhánach,” by Benjamin James Hazard; “Voice, Power, and Narrative Structure in Orgain Denna Rig,” by Bettina Kimpton; “Cú Chulainn: God, Man, or Animal?,” by Erik Larsen; “The Celtic Seasonal Festivals in the Light of Recent Approaches to the Indo-European Ritual Year,” by Emily Lyle; “The Date and Provenance of Vita Prima Sanctae Brigitae,” by Laurance Maney†; “Spirit and Flesh in Twentieth-Century Welsh Poetry: A Comparison of the Works of D. Gwenalt Jones (1899–1968) and Pennar Davies (1911–1996),” by D. Densil Morgan; “Joseph Cooper Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786): Significance and Impact,” by Lesa Ní Mhunghaile; “Old Irish *desgabál and the Concept of Ascension in Irish Religious Texts,” by Brian Ó Broin; “Oenach Aimsire na mBan: Early Irish Seasonal Celebrations, Gender Roles, and Mythological Cycles,” by Sharon Paice MacLeod; “Literature Reviews in An Claidheamh Soluis: A Journalistic Insight to Irish Literary Reviews in the Revival Period 1899–1932,” by Regina Uí Chollatáin; and “Celtic Ornament, Irish Gospel Book Decoration, and the Illustrated Prose Lancelot of Yale 229,” by Elizabeth Moore Willingham.
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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 24
2004 and 2005
Samuel Jones
Harvard University Press

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 24 includes “The Celticity of Galicia and the Arrival of the Insular Celts,” by Manuel Alberro; “Reading Aislinge Óenguso as a Christian-Platonist Parable,” by Brenda Gray; “Celtic Legends in Irish Opera, 1900–1930,” by Axel Klein; “‘I wonder what the king is doing tonight’—Looking for Arthur in All the Wrong Places,” by Laurance J. Maney†; “What Future for the Irish Gaeltacht Communities in the Twenty-First Century?” by Nollaig Ó Gadhra†; “Acallam Na Senórach as Prosimetrum,” by Geraldine Parsons; “Traditional and Courtly Themes in a Medieval Welsh Elegy to a ‘Góann Wargann Wery’ (‘A Fair Virgin, Meek and Mild’),” by Laura Radiker; and “Welsh Prophetic Poetry in the Age of the Princes,” by Elizabeth Schoales.

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 25 includes “Keltoi, Galatai, Galli: Were They All One People?” by Timothy P. Bridgman; “On Verbal Nouns in Celtic Languages,” by Chao Li; “Cross-Linguistic Discourse Markers in Manx Gaelic and English,” by Marie Clague; “The Acallam na Senórach: A Medieval Instruction Manual,” by Annie Donahue; “Gendered Postcolonial Discourse in the Mabinogi,” by Morgan Kay; “Language Death and Resurrection in the Isle of Man: The Continuity of Manx Gaelic Exemplified by the Use of Inflected Verb Tenses,” by Jennifer Kewley Draskau; “High Kings and Pipe Dreams: Revisiting John Vincent Kelleher’s Theory of Revision to the Early Irish Annals,” by Laurance J. Maney†; and “The Rise of Christian Nomenclature in Medieval Scotland,” by David Morris.

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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 26
2006 and 2007
Christina Chance
Harvard University Press

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 26 includes “Heroic Recycling in Celtic Tradition,” by Joseph F. Nagy; “On the Celtic-American Fringe: Irish–Mexican Encounters in the Texas–Mexico Borderlands,” by Marian J. Barber; “The Encomium Urbis in Medieval Welsh Poetry,” by Helen Fulton; “Prophecy in Welsh Manuscripts,” by Morgan Kay; “‘Ceol agus Gaol’ (‘Music and Relationship’): Memory, Identity, and Community in Boston’s Irish Music Scene,” by Natalie Kirschstein; “Colonization Circulars: Timber Cycles in the Time of Famine,” by Kathryn Miles; “Up Close and Personal: The French in Bantry Bay (1796) in the Bantry Estate Papers,” by Grace Neville; “In Praise of Two Margarets: Two Laudatory Poems by Piaras Feiritéar,” by Deirdre Nic Mhathúna; “Observations on Cross-Cultural Names and Name Patterns in Medieval Wales and the March,” by Laura Radiker; and “Mouth to Mouth: Gaelic Stories as Told within One Family,” by Carol Zall.

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 27 includes “Poets and Carpenters: Creating the Architecture of Happiness in Late-Medieval Wales,” by Richard Suggett; “Revisiting Preaspiration: Evidence from the Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland,” by Anna Bosch; “The Anoetheu Dialogue in Culhwch ac Olwen,” by Fiona Dehghani; “Homophony and Breton Loss of Lexis,” by Francis Favereau; “The Origins of ‘the Jailtacht,’” by Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost; “A Confluence of Wisdom: The Symbolism of Wells, Whirlpools, Waterfalls and Rivers in Early Celtic Sources,” by Sharon Paice MacLeod; “The Real Charlotte: The Exclusive Myth of Somerville and Ross,” by Donald McNamara; “Language Shift in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland,” by Máire Ní Chiosáin; and “Conceptions of an Urban Ideal and the Early Modern Welsh Town,” by Sally-Anne Shearn.

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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 28
2008
Kassandra Conley
Harvard University Press
This volume includes “The Influence of Nineteenth-Century Anthologies of Celtic Music in Redefining Celtic Nationalism,” by Graham Aubrey; “Breuddwyd Rhonabwy and Memoria,” by Matthieu Boyd; “A Reactionary Dimension in Progressive Revolutionary Theories? The Case of James Connolly’s Socialism Founded on the Re-Conversion of Ireland to the Celtic System of Common Ownership,” by Olivier Coquelin; “The Spiteful Tongue: Breton Song Practices and the Art of the Insult,” by Natalie A. Franz; “Celtic Democracy: Appreciating the Role Played by Alliances and Elections in Celtic Political Systems,” by D. Blair Gibson; “Pendragon’s Ancestors,” by Nathalie Ginoux; “When Historians Study Breton Oral Ballads: A Cultural Approach,” by Éva Guillorel; “Textual and Historical Evidence for an Early British Tristan Tradition,” by Sabine Heinz; “Time and the Irish: An Analysis of the Temporal Frameworks Employed by Sir Henry Maine, Eóin MacNeill, and James Connolly in Their Writings on Early Modern Ireland,” by Heather Laird; “‘And thus I will it’: Queen Medh and the Will to Power,” by Edyta Lehmann; “Judas, His Sister, and the Miraculous Cock in the Middle Irish Poem Críst ro crochadh,” by Christopher Leydon; “Se principen nominat: Rhetorical Self-Fashioning and Epistolary Style in the Letters of Owain Gwynedd,” by Patricia Malone; “Abduction, Swordplay, Monsters, and Mistrust: Findabair, Gwenhwyfa, and the Restoration of Honour,” by Sharon Paice MacLeod; and “Performing a Literary Paternity Test: Bonedd yr Arwyr and the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi,” by Sarah Zeiser.
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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 29
2009
Kassandra Conley
Harvard University Press
This volume includes “Fabricating Celts: How Iron Age Iberians Became Indo-Europeanized during the Franco Regime,” by Aarón Alzola Romero and Eduardo Sánchez-Moreno; “Nations in Tune: The Influence of Irish Music on the Breton Musical Revival in the 1960s and 1970s,” by Yann Bévant; “Ethnicity, Geography, and the Passage of Dominion in the Mabinogi and Brut y Brenhinedd,” by Christina Chance; “Rejecting Mother’s Blessing: The Absence of the Fairy in the Welsh Search for Identity,” by Adam Coward; “Gwalarn: An Attempt to Renew Breton Literature,” by Gwendal Denez and Erwan Hupel; “At the Crossroads: World War One and the Shifting Roles of Men and Women in Breton Ballad Song Practice,” by Natalie Anne Franz; “Apocryphal Sanctity in the Lives of Irish Saints,” by Máire Johnson; “An Dialog etre Arzur Roe d’an Bretounet ha Guynglaff and Its Connections with Arthurian Tradition,” by Herve Le Bihan; “A Walk on the Wild Side: Women, Men, and Madness,” by Edyta Lehmann; “The Early Establishment of Celtic Studies in North American Universities,” by Michael Linkletter; “‘In t-indellchró bodba fer talman’: A Reading of Cú Chulainn’s First Recension ríastrad,” by Elizabeth Moore; “Dream and Vision in Late-Medieval Scotland: The Epic Case of William Wallace,” by Kylie Murray; “‘Some of you will curse her’: Women’s Writing during the Irish-Language Revival,” by Riona Nic Congáil; “Dating Peredur: New Light on Old Problems,” by Natalia I. Petrovskaia; “‘From the shame you have done’: Comparing the Stories of Blodeuedd and Bláthnait,” by Sarah L. Pfannenschmidt; and “‘And there was a fourth son’: Narrative Variation in Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys,” by Kelly Ann Randell.
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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 30
2010
Erin Boon
Harvard University Press, 2011

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium has in its purview all aspects of culture, language, and history of the Celtic peoples, from ancient to modern times.

This volume of PHCC contains articles on medieval Irish, Welsh, and Breton literature; post-1800 to modern poetry in Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic; the Irish Revival Movement; and modern Irish and Welsh linguistics. The volume also features the 2010 J. V. Kelleher Lecture by Dr. M. Katharine Simms on the social expression of the literary model of the barefoot king in late medieval Ireland.

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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 31
2011
Deborah Furchtgott
Harvard University Press, 2012
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium has in its purview all aspects of culture, language, and history of the Celtic peoples, from ancient to modern times. PHCC, 31 features “Culture, Identity and the Medieval Revival in Victorian Wales,” the 2011 J. V. Kelleher lecture given by Huw Pryce of Bangor University, Wales, which looks at Victorian views of the past in Wales. The volume also considers the linguistic shifts in several of the Celtic languages, both in early periods and more recent times, and it contains articles concerning the history, culture, and literatures of Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall. In addition, PHCC, 31 includes several articles on historiography in various areas and times, as well as others that examine later reflections on the Easter Rising in Ireland (1916), the renewed interest in regional language in Cornwall, the historic reflexes of the title Bragmaticus, and literary reflexes of archaeological remains in medieval Wales.
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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 32
2012
Deborah Furchtgott
Harvard University Press
The Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium has in its purview all aspects of culture, language, and history of the Celtic peoples, from ancient to modern times. PHCC, 32 is largely focused on the culture and literature of medieval Ireland, with some attention to the additional topics of Scots Gaelic poetry, medieval Welsh genealogy, and twentieth century pan-Celtic nationalism. The articles on Irish literature consider a wide variety of genre: place name lore, annals, hagiography, native tales, and the national epic Táin Bó Cuailnge. Contributors to this volume discuss both prose and poetry, and they consider cultural influences, history, archaic sources, and affinities with European and Indo-European models, tropes, and styles.
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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 33
2013
Liam Anton Brannelly
Harvard University Press

The Harvard Celtic Colloquium provides a small but international audience for presentations by scholars from all ranks of scholarship and all areas of Celtic Studies. Among the topics covered are the archaeology, history, culture, linguistics, literatures, politics, religion, and social structures of the countries and regions in which Celtic languages are, or were, spoken, as well as their extended influence, from prehistory to the present. The broad range of the conference is reflected in the content of its published proceedings, which will interest both students newly attracted to Celtic Studies and senior scholars in the field.

PHCC, 33 features the annual John V. Kelleher Lecture for 2013, given by Thomas Owen Clancy, Professor of Celtic at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Clancy discusses connections between Scottish saints’ names and cults and the onomastics of settlements and topographical features gathered and investigated in preparation for a digital atlas project, “Commemoration of Saints in Scottish Place Names.” In addition, PHCC, 33 includes contributions in the areas of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish history, Irish and Welsh literature and poetry, and Irish ecclesiastical learning.

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Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 41
2022
Lorena Alessandrini
Harvard University Press
The sixteen articles in Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 41, present a broad range of topics in Celtic Studies and an equally broad time scale. The October 2022 keynote by Dr. Natasha Sumner examines the common folklore trope in Celtic literature of an individual trapped, tricked, or accidentally trespassing into the Otherworld, seeking escape or rescue. Several contributions to the volume examine Irish and Welsh poetry, medieval and modern in both form and content. Women, as poets as well as subjects, are highlighted. Literary culture in the early modern period in Ireland is covered through published reviews, as well as in an article about an Irish émigré’s notebook. Medieval Irish religious beliefs feature in articles on Irish hagiography, divination, and the use of relics. Drama and performance are represented in two articles which discuss Welsh translations of Shakespeare and Scots-Gaelic theatre. A study of place names in the vicinity of Iona reveals a cultural topography as well as actual landscape. An investigation into the attitudes towards the disabled and impaired in medieval Irish literature, an apparently modern concern, finds surprising resonance with themes of compassion and acceptance.
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Professing Poetry
Seamus Heaney’s Poetics
Michael Cavanagh
Catholic University of America Press, 2009
The first full-length study of Heaney's poetics, Professing Poetry explores Heaney's unusual concept of influence and the various ways in which Heaney interacts with other writers
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The Professor and the Profession
Robert Bechtold Heilman
University of Missouri Press, 1999

Robert Bechtold Heilman is one of the last survivors of a remarkable generation of American critics that included such literary giants as Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson, men to whom literary criticism was not a profession or an academic necessity but a calling. In a distinguished career that has spanned nearly six decades, Heilman has influenced generations of scholars and critics through his exquisitely written commentaries on subjects ranging from William Shakespeare to Thomas Hardy.

In The Professor and the Profession, Heilman looks back over his life and times from his perspective as both an academic and an American. Differing in theme and subject matter, the essays included in this collection are ultimately unified by the author himself. Whether the topic is football, Robert Penn Warren, or education, Heilman's generous and intelligent voice emerges on every page. Yet this collection is more than one academic's personal reminiscences; it is a reflection upon American literary history itself.

In the first section of essays, "The Self Displayed," Heilman reveals how he developed from a small-town boy into a distinguished critic and teacher, touching upon his participation in baseball and love of football along the way. "Writers Portrayed" and "Literary Types and Problems Inspected," the following sections, offer his opinions on the past and on the current state of American literary criticism, including personal portraits of such renowned friends as Eric Voegelin, Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, and Malcolm Cowley. The final section, "Education Examined," is an enlightening inquiry into the development of American universities in the twentieth century.

A fascinating chronicle of a significant academic life, The Professor and the Profession will appeal to a broad array of scholars, from young academics wanting to know where they came from to those of Heilman's generation who can appreciate this personal reminiscence into the world of letters.

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Prolific Ground
Landscape and British Women's Writing, 1690-1790
Nicolle Jordan
Bucknell University Press
Land ownership—and engagement with land more generally—constituted a crucial dimension of female independence in eighteenth-century Britain. Because political citizenship was restricted to male property owners, women could not wield political power in the way propertied men did. Given its foundational socio-political function, land necessarily generated copious writing that vested it with considerable aesthetic and economic value. This book, then, situates these issues in relation to the historical transformation of landscape under emergent capitalism. The women writers featured herein—including Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Sarah Scott, and Elizabeth Montagu—participated in this transformation by celebrating female estate stewardship and evaluating the estate stewardship of men. By asserting their authority in such matters, these writers acquired a degree of independence and self-determination that otherwise proved elusive.
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Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater
Gender and Comedy, Performance and Print
Diana Solomon
University of Delaware Press, 2013
Often perceived as merely formulaic or historical documents, dramatic prologues and epilogues – players’ comic, poetic bids for the audience’s good opinion – became essential parts of Restoration theater, appearing in over 90 percent of performed and printed plays between 1660 and 1714. Their popularity coincided with the rise of the English actress, and Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater unites these elements in the first book-length study on the subject. It finds that these paratexts provided the first sanctioned space for actresses in Britain to voice ideas in public, communicate directly with other women, and perform comedy – arguably the most powerful type of speech, and one that enabled interrogation of misogynist social practices. This book provides a taxonomy of prologues and epilogues with a corresponding appendix, and demonstrates through case studies of Anne Bracegirdle and Anne Oldfield how the study of prologues and epilogues enriches Restoration theater scholarship.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer
Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen
Mary Poovey
University of Chicago Press, 1984
"A brilliant, original, and powerful book. . . . This is the most skillful integration of feminism and Marxist literary criticism that I know of." So writes critic Stephen Greenblatt about The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Mary Poovey's study of the struggle of three prominent writers to accommodate the artist's genius to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideal of the modest, self-effacing "proper lady." Interpreting novels, letters, journals, and political tracts in the context of cultural strictures, Poovey makes an important contribution to English social and literary history and to feminist theory.

"The proper lady was a handy concept for a developing bourgeois patriarchy, since it deprived women of worldly power, relegating them to a sanctified domestic sphere that, in complex ways, nourished and sustained the harsh 'real' world of men. With care and subtle intelligence, Poovey examines this 'guardian and nemesis of the female self' through the ways it is implicated in the style and strategies of three very different writers."—Rachel M. Brownstein, The Nation

"The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer is a model of . . . creative discovery, providing a well-researched, illuminating history of women writers at the turn of the nineteenth century. [Poovey] creates sociologically and psychologically persuasive accounts of the writers: Wollstonecraft, who could never fully transcend the ideology of propriety she attacked; Shelley, who gradually assumed a mask of feminine propriety in her social and literary styles; and Austen, who was neither as critical of propriety as Wollstonecraft nor as accepting as Shelley ultimately became."—Deborah Kaplan, Novel

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The Prose of Things
Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century
Cynthia Sundberg Wall
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Virginia Woolf once commented that the central image in Robinson Crusoe is an object—a large earthenware pot. Woolf and other critics pointed out that early modern prose is full of things but bare of setting and description. Explaining how the empty, unvisualized spaces of such writings were transformed into the elaborate landscapes and richly upholstered interiors of the Victorian novel, Cynthia Sundberg Wall argues that the shift involved not just literary representation but an evolution in cultural perception.

In The Prose of Things, Wall analyzes literary works in the contexts of natural science, consumer culture, and philosophical change to show how and why the perception and representation of space in the eighteenth-century novel and other prose narratives became so textually visible. Wall examines maps, scientific publications, country house guides, and auction catalogs to highlight the thickening descriptions of domestic interiors. Considering the prose works of John Bunyan, Samuel Pepys, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, David Hume, Ann Radcliffe, and Sir Walter Scott, The Prose of Things is the first full account of the historic shift in the art of describing.
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Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly before 1500
Bartlett Jere Whiting
Harvard University Press

This book is a collection of English proverbs, sentences, and proverbial phrases from the Middle Ages. The material is drawn from an exhaustive examination of the surviving texts, mainly printed ones but some still in manuscript. Certain books written later than 1500, usually by authors who were born twenty years or so before the turn of the century, are included, and John Heywood, the first great assembler of English proverbs, is represented by the sayings he compiled.

,"No matter how popular a saying may appear," Mr. Whiting points out in his Preface, "it comes to us at one remove or more from popular usage. The medieval proverbs which survive do so only because they were written down by educated men, none of them collectors from the field. In most cases the sayings were incorporated in literary works by authors who did not hesitate to make changes suggested by context, application, and meter. We sometimes forget that Heywood's Dialogue and Epigrams are poems, although Heywood's standards of prosody are such as to let him use proverbs without too drastic changes for rhyme and rhythm's sake. What we have in most quotations is the proverb, not as an author may have heard or read it, but in the form which suited his immediate convenience or whim."

The sayings are alphabetized by key words and the quotations are in chronological order. Cross-references link sayings of similar import, and the index is a guide to important words other than those by which the alphabetical order is established. References are given to the standard collections of English proverbs, so that the user can trace the later history of many of the sayings.

Filling a long-felt gap in the field, this work will be indispensable to students of Old and Middle English literature and of great value to everyone interested in the rich resources of proverb lore.

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PUNCH
THE LIVELY YOUTH OF A BRITISH INSTITUTIO
RICHARD ALTICK
The Ohio State University Press, 2010

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Puritanism and Modernist Novels
From Moral Character to the Ethical Self
Lynne W. Hinojosa
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
In Puritanism and Modernist Novels: From Moral Character to the Ethical Self, Lynne W. Hinojosa complicates traditional interpretations of the novel and literary modernism as secular developments of modernity by arguing that the British novel tradition is fundamentally shaped by Puritan hermeneutics and Bible-reading practices. This tradition, however, simultaneously works to dismantle the categories associated with social morality and moral character, helping to form “Puritanism” into a fictional stereotype. Hinojosa demonstrates that the novel thus perpetuates a narrative that associates Puritanism with moral and religious confinement, on the one hand, and modern longing with escape, on the other—even as it remains tied to Puritan views of history and the self.
 
Puritanism and Modernist Novels offers new formal and contextual readings of early modernist novels by Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, and Ford Madox Ford. Hinojosa demonstrates that, while they long for escape, these authors still question the value of the novelistic narrative of confinement and escape. Bridging modernist and novel studies, Puritanism and Modernist Novels contributes to conversations about secularization and religion in both fields, highlighting the limitations created by the secularization narrative of modernity.
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