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His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and 18th-Century Literature
Exploring territory seldom visited by feminist scholars, Ann Messenger in this new book presents eight studies of literary relationships between men and women writers, ranging from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. The essays show men and women working together, praising and criticizing each other’s work, borrowing—and changing—each other’s plots and characters, recording their different perceptions of their common world. From Dryden’s praise of Anne Killigrew, through Gay’s and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s collaboration on a town eclogue, Thomas Southerne’s dramatizations of novels by Aphra Behn, and Eliza Haywood’s version of the Spectator, to Cornelia Knight’s sequel ...Read More
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The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–1750
“Is it not monstrous, that our Seducers should be our Accusers? Will they not employ Fraud, nay often Force to gain us? What various Arts, what Stratagems, what Wiles will they use for our Destruction? But that once accomplished, every opprobrious Term with which our Language so plentifully abounds, shall be bestowed on us, even by the very Villains who have wronged us”—Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs (1748).
In her scandalous Memoirs, Laetitia Pilkington spoke out against the English satires of the Restoration and eighteenth century, which employed “every opprobrious term” to chastise women. In The Brink of All We Hate, Felicity ...Read More
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Crime and God's Judgment in Shakespeare
Divine retribution, Robert Reed argues, is a principal driving force in Shakespeare's English history plays and three of his major tragedies. Reed finds evidence of the playwright's growing ingenuity and maturing skill in his treatment of the crime of political homicide, its impact on events, and God's judgment on the criminal.
Reed's analysis focuses upon Tudor concepts that he shows were familiar to all Elizabethans—the biblical principle of inherited guilt, the doctrine that God is the fountainhead of retribution, with man merely His instrument, and the view that conscience serves a fundamentally divine function—and he urges us to look at ...Read More
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With Mortal Voice: The Creation of Paradise Lost
More often than not, critics have looked upon Milton's great epic not as a literary work but rather as a theological tract or a display of Renaissance learning. In this book John Shawcross seeks to redress that critical imbalance by examining the poem for its literary values. In doing so he reveals the scope and depth of Milton's poetic craftsmanship in his control of such elements as structure, myth, style, and language; and he offers new approaches to reading Paradise Lost as a literary masterpiece rather than a relic of religious history.
John T. Shawcross, professor of English at the ...Read More
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The Guardian
In 1713, soon after publication of the Spectator had come to an end, its place on breakfast tables of Queen Anne’s London was taken by the Guardian. Richard Steele, continuing in the new paper the blend of learning, wit, and moral instruction that had proved so attractive in the Tatler and Spectator, was the editor and principal writer; in the 175 numbers of the Guardian he included 53 essays by Joseph Addison, as well as contributions by Alexander Pope, George Berkeley, and several others, some of whom doubtless transmitted their papers through the famous lion's head letterbox that Addison had ...Read More
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The Shadow of Eternity: Belief and Structure in Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne
The poetry of Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne represents “an attempt to shape their lives and verse around the fact of divine presence and influence,” writes Sharon Seelig. The relationship between belief and expression in these three metaphysical poets is the subject of this deeply perceptive study.
Each of these poets held to some extent the notion of dual reality, of the world as indicative of a higher reality, but their responses to this tradition vary greatly—from the ongoing struggle between God and the poet of The Temple, which finally transforms the materials of everyday life and worship; to the more ...Read More
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The Gothic Novel 1790–1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs
A research guide for specialists in the Gothic novel, the Romantic movement, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, and popular culture, this work contains summaries of more than two hundred novels, reputed to be Gothic, published in English between 1790 and 1830. Also included are indexes of titles and characters and an extensive index of characteristic objects, motifs, and themes that recur in the novels—such as corpses, bloody and otherwise, dungeons, secret passageways, filicide, fratricide, infanticide, matricide, patricide, and suicide.
The novels described, including those by such writers as Charlotte Dacre, Louisa Sidney Stanhope, Regina Maria Roche, Charles Maturin, and Mary ...Read More
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Beyond Tragedy: Structure and Experience in Shakespeare's Romances
In this compact, yet comprehensive exploration of Shakespeare's romances, Robert W. Uphaus suggests that the romances bring us to a realm of human and dramatic experience that is "beyond tragedy." The inexorable movement of tragedy toward death and a final close is absorbed in romance by a further movement in which death can lead to renewed life, characters can experience a second time of joy and peace, and the audience's conventional expectations about reality and literature are challenged and enlarged.
In the late tragedies of King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, Uphaus finds the tragic structure augmented by elements that ...Read More
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The Faith of John Dryden: Change and Continuity
John Dryden’s celebrated conversion to Roman Catholicism is revealed in this provocative study as the culmination of a lifelong search that began with his youth in an actively Puritan family. Atkin’s familiarity with the religious thought of the times allows him to range widely among Dryden’s contemporaries and predecessors and to bring a fresh perspective to those key poems in Dryden’s religious development: Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. Through a sensitive reappraisal of all Dryden’s texts—including those less widely known—Atkins shows that Dryden had a lifelong antipathy for all “priests” of whatever sect, whether pagan or Christian; ...Read More
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Quest for Eros: Browning and 'Fifine'
Students of Browning have long been puzzled by the discrepancies between the dramatic framework of Fifine and its symbolic development, but these difficulties are resolved in Southwell’s explication by a biographical hypothesis. The powerful influence of the memory of his beloved wife, Elizabeth, involved Browning in a deep ambivalence, and Fifine at the Fair represents his effort to escape the effects of the profound inhibitions associated with her memory, while at the same time remaining loyal to it.
The poem is itself a flawed quest for Eros. Browning’s symbolic vision of sexuality as the central vitalizing force in human culture—a ...Read More
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