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Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book examines the historical and the fictionalized reception of Ovid’s poetry in the literature and books of Tudor England. It does so through the study of a particular set of Ovidian narratives-namely, those concerning the protean heroines of the Heroides and Metamorphoses. In the late medieval and Renaissance eras, Ovid’s poetry stimulated the vernacular imaginations of authors ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower to Isabella Whitney, William Shakespeare, and Michael Drayton. Ovid’s English protégés replicated and expanded upon the Roman poet’s distinctive and frequently remarked ’bookishness’ in their own adaptations of his works....
A study of how the use of Ovid in Middle English texts affected Shakespeare's treatment of the poet. The debt owed by Shakespeare to Ovid is a major and important topic in scholarship. This book offers a fresh approach to the subject, in aiming to account for the Middle English literary lenses through which Shakespeare and his contemporaries often approached Greco-Roman mythology. Drawing its principal examples from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece, and Twelfth Night, it reinvestigates a selection of moments in Shakespeare's works that have been widely identified in previous criticism as "Ovidian", scrutinising their literary alchemy with an eye...
This collection examines early modern women’s contribution to the culturally central mode of complaint. Complaint has largely been understood as male-authored, yet, as this collection shows, early modern women used complaint across a surprising variety of forms from the early-Tudor period to the late-seventeenth century. They were some of the mode’s first writers, most influential patrons, and most innovative contributors. Together, these new essays illuminate early modern women’s participation in one of the most powerful rhetorical modes in the English Renaissance, one which gave voice to political, religious and erotic protest and loss across a diverse range of texts. This volume int...
How does soil, as an ecological element, shape culture? With the sixteenth-century shift in England from an agrarian economy to a trade economy, what changes do we see in representations of soil as reflected in the language and stories during that time? This collection brings focused scholarly attention to conceptions of soil in the early modern period, both as a symbol and as a feature of the physical world, aiming to correct faulty assumptions that cloud our understanding of early modern ecological thought: that natural resources were then poorly understood and recklessly managed, and that cultural practices developed in an adversarial relationship with natural processes. Moreover, these essays elucidate the links between humans and the lands they inhabit, both then and now.
The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesises existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the volumes. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry features a history of the birth moment of modern 'English' poetry in greater detai...
This book offers an entirely new reception history of the myth of Hercules and his wife/killer Deianira. The book poses, and attempts to answer, two important and related questions. First, why have artists across two millennia felt compelled to revisit this particular myth to express anxieties about violence at both a global and domestic level? Secondly, from the moment that Sophocles disrupted a myth about the definitive exemplar of masculinity and martial prowess and turned it into a story about domestic abuse, through to a 2014 production of Handel’s Hercules that was set in the context of the ‘war on terror’, the reception history of this myth has been one of discontinuity and conflict; how and why does each culture reinvent this narrative to address its own concerns and discontents, and how does each generation speak to, qualify or annihilate the certainties of its predecessors in order to understand, contain or exonerate the aggression with which their governors – of state and of the household – so often enforce their authority, and the violence to which their nations, and their homes, are perennially vulnerable?
The typographic imaginary is an aesthetic linking authors from William Caxton to Alexander Pope, this study centrally contends. Early modern English literature engages imaginatively with printing and this book both characterizes that engagement and proposes the typographic imaginary as a framework for its analysis. Certain texts, Rachel Stenner states, describe the people, places, concerns, and processes of printing in ways that, over time, generate their own figurative authority. The typographic imaginary is posited as a literary phenomenon shared by different writers, a wider cultural understanding of printing, and a critical concept for unpicking the particular imaginative otherness that ...
This book showcases the variety and vitality of contemporary scholarship on Old Norse and related medieval literatures and their modern afterlives. The volume features original new work on Old Norse poetry and saga, other languages and literatures of medieval north-western Europe, and the afterlife of Old Norse in modern English literature. Demonstrating the lively state of contemporary research on Old Norse and related subjects, this collection celebrates Heather O’Donoghue’s extraordinary and enduring influence on the field, as manifested in the wide-ranging and innovative research of her former students and colleagues.
This volume provides up-to-date coverage of recent screen versions of Shakespeare's plays, as well as critical reviews of older canonical films.