Reader's Guides provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts.William Blake is a Romantic poet who remains popular today, in part beca...

Science fiction is at the intersection of numerous fields. It is a literature which draws on popular culture, and which engages in speculation about science, history, and all types of social relations. This volume brings together essays by scholars and practitioners of science fiction, which look at the genre from these different angles. After an introduction to the nature of science fiction, historical chapters trace science fiction from Thomas More to more recent years, including a chapt...

This book offers a comprehensive, readable and authoritative introduction to the study of Shakespeare, by means of nineteen newly commissioned essays. An international team of prominent scholars provide a broadly cultural approach to the chief literary, performative and historical aspects of Shakespeare's work. They bring the latest scholarship to bear on traditional subjects of Shakespeare study, such as biography, the transmission of the texts, the main dramatic and poetic genres, the st...

The best way to learn about Romantic poetry is to plunge in and read a few Romantic poems. This book guides the new reader through this experience, focusing on canonical authors - Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Blake and Shelley - whilst also including less familiar figures as well. Each chapter explains the history and development of a genre or sets out an important context for the poetry, with a wealth of practical examples. Michael Ferber emphasizes connections between poets as th...

Written by an international team of literary scholars and historians, this collaborative volume illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs and practices in Shakespeare's England, and considers how religious culture is imaginatively reanimated in Shakespeare's plays. Fourteen new essays explore the creative ways Shakespeare engaged with the multifaceted dimensions of Protestantism, Catholicism, non-Christian religions including Judaism and Islam, and secular perspectives, c...

Engaging with recent thinking about performance, political theory and canon formation, this study addresses the significance of the formal changes in seventeenth-century French theater. Each chapter takes up a particularity of seventeenth-century theatrical style and staging”for example, the clearing of violence from the stage”and shows how the conceptualization of these French stylistic shifts appropriates a rich body of Italian political writing on questions of action, temporality, and l...

First published in 2001, this is an accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's comedies and romances. Rather than taking each play in isolation, the chapters trace recurring issues, suggesting both the continuity and the variety of Shakespeare's practice and the creative use he made of the conventions he inherited. The first section puts Shakespeare in the context of classical and Renaissance comedy and comic theory, the work of his Elizabethan predecessors and the...

This is a study of mock-epic poetry in English, French, and German from the 1720s to the 1840s. While mock-heroic poetry is a parodistic counterpart to serious epic, mock-epic poetry starts by parodying epic but moves on to much wider and richer literary explorations; it relies heavily on intertextual allusion to other works, on narratorial irony, on the sympathetic and sometimes libertine presentation of sexual relatons, and on a range of satirical devices. It includes well-known texts (P...

This book analyzes early twenty-first century film and television’s fascination with representing the Anglo-American eighteenth century. Grounded in cultural studies, film studies, and adaptation theory, the bookexamines how these works represented the eighteenth century to assuage anxieties about values, systems, and institutions at the start of a new millennium. The first two chapters reveal how films like Gulliver’s Travels (2010) or the remake of Poldark (2015) use hi...

Before a great discovery, the Renaissance scientists had to endure long days of working in sometimes unhygienic places. You need to know these gross facts in order to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of the work these early scientists did for the sake of knowledge. Are you ready to read the dirty truth? Then open this book today!

Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas explores how women in England participated in the considerable intellectual and cultural diversity which characterised the 'late' early modern period, from the mid-seventeenth century to the early eighteenth century. This collection looks particularly at early modern women philosophers, playwrights and novelists, and considers how they engaged with ideas and debates over philosophical and scientific ideas, as well as literary innovations. This volume...

With its dominance as a European power and the explosion of its prose and dramatic writing, Spain provided an irresistible literary source for English writers of the early modern period. But the deep and escalating political rivalry between the two nations led English writers to negotiate, disavow, or attempt to resolve their fascination with Spain and their debt to Spanish sources. Amid thorny issues of translation and appropriation, imperial competition, the rise of commercial authorship...