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Singing by Herself reinterprets the rise of literary loneliness by foregrounding the female and feminized figures who have been overlooked in previous histories of solitude. Many of the earliest records of the terms "lonely" and "loneliness" in British literature describe solitaries whose songs positioned them within the tradition of female complaint. Amelia Worsley shows how these feminized solitaries, for whom loneliness was both a space of danger and a space of productive retreat, helped to make loneliness attractive to future lonely poets, despite the sense of suspicion it evoked. Although loneliness today is often associated with states of atomized interiority, soliloquy, and self-enclo...
This volume adds a new dimension to authorship studies by linking the editorial tradition to the transformative reception of early modern authors and their works across time. Aleida Auld argues that the editorial tradition provides privileged access to the reception of early modern literature, informing our understanding of certain reconfigurations and sometimes helping to produce them between their time and our own. At stake are reconfigurations of oeuvre and authorship, the relationship between the author and work, the relationship between authors, and the author’s own role in establishing an editorial tradition. Ultimately, this study recognizes that the editorial tradition is a stabilizing force while asserting that it may also be a source of strange and provocative reconceptions of early modern authors and their works in the present day. Scholars and students of early modern literature will benefit from this approach to editing as a form of reception that encompasses all the editorial decisions that are necessary to ‘put forth’ a text.
Based on an exhaustive study of the manuscripts and printed editions in which these poems have appeared, the eighth in the series of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne presents newly edited critical texts of thirteen Divine Poems and details the genealogical history of each poem, accompanied by a thorough prose discussion. Arranged chronologically within sections, the material is organized under the following headings: Dates and Circumstances; General Commentary; Genre; Language, Versification, and Style; the Poet/Persona; and Themes. The volume also offers a comprehensive digest of general and topical commentary on the Divine Poems from Donne's time through 2012.
The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface provides a ground-breaking investigation into media-specific spaces where Shakespeare is experienced. While such operations may be largely invisible to the average reader or viewer, the interface properties of books, screens, and stages profoundly mediate our cognitive engagement with Shakespeare. This volume considers contemporary debates and questions including how mobile devices mediate the experience of Shakespeare; the impact of rapidly evolving virtual reality technologies and the interface architectures which condition Shakespearean plays; and how design elements of hypertext, menus, and screen navigation operate within internet Shakespeare spaces. Charting new frontiers, this diverse collection delivers fresh insight into human–computer interaction and user-experience theory, cognitive ecology, and critical approaches such as historical phenomenology. This volume also highlights the application of media and interface design theory to questions related to the medium of the play and its crucial interface with the body and mind.
This book uses textual and material evidence -- in poetry, prayers, physiologies, sermons, church buildings and monuments, manuscript diaries and notebooks -- to explore how material things held spiritual meaning in George Herbert's poetry, and to reflect on scholarly approaches to matter and form in devotional poetry.
This book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors' distinctive new approaches and insights illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggesting new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take. Some chapters explore concrete instances of collaboration or communication between Donne and Herbert, and others find fresh ways to contextualize the Donnean and Herbertian lyric, carefully setting the poetry alongside discourses of apophatic theology or early modern political theory, while still others link Herbert's verse to Donne's devotional prose. Several chapters establish specific theological and aesthetic grounds for comparison, considering Donne and Herbert's respective positions on religious assurance, comic sensibility, and virtuosity with poetic endings.
This open access book studies breath and breathing in literature and culture and provides crucial insights into the history of medicine, health and the emotions, the foundations of beliefs concerning body, spirit and world, the connections between breath and creativity and the phenomenology of breath and breathlessness. Contributions span the classical, medieval, early modern, Romantic, Victorian, modern and contemporary periods, drawing on medical writings, philosophy, theology and the visual arts as well as on literary, historical and cultural studies. The collection illustrates the complex significance and symbolic power of breath and breathlessness across time: breath is written deeply into ideas of nature, spirituality, emotion, creativity and being, and is inextricable from notions of consciousness, spirit, inspiration, voice, feeling, freedom and movement. The volume also demonstrates the long-standing connections between breath and place, politics and aesthetics, illuminating both contrasts and continuities.
This book is based on the postmedieval journal special issue Prophetic Futures. It calls for renewed attention to prophecy and temporality, challenging in the process critical lenses that adhere to strict dualities of medieval/modern, superstitious/rationalized, and other problematic dyads that occlude our understanding of vatic language. The language, texts, and bodies of prophecy challenge commonplaces about a disenchanted modernity and point the way to new critical approaches to texts out of time. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 10, issue 1, March 2019.
This book examines the centrality of envy in the works of Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's greatest literary rival.
In Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution, Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille explores Lucy Hutchinson's historical writings and the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, which, although composed between 1664 and 1667, were first published in 1806. The Memoirs were a best-seller in the nineteenth century, but largely fell into oblivion in the twentieth century. They were rediscovered in the late 1980s by historians and literary scholars interested in women's writing, the emerging culture of republicanism, and dissent. By approaching the Memoirs through the prism of history and form, this book challenges the widely-held assumption that early modern women did not - and could not - write the history of wars, a field that was supposedly gendered as masculine. On the contrary, Gheeraert-Graffeuille shows that Lucy Hutchinson, a reader of ancient history and an outstanding Latinist, was a historian of the English Revolution, to be ranked alongside Richard Baxter, Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.