Katie Petherick is young, beautiful and successful, but not content. For three years she has been earning a good living as an upmarket live-in maternity nurse, working closely with wealthy couples and gaining their trust. It is not enough. Now it is decision time. Katie has a devious plan to make some serious cash, but there is considerable risk. She knows she is playing with fire, and she realises people are likely to get hurt - not least her boyfriend, Peter Dunkett. He is crazy about he...

Controversy raged through England during the 1570-80s as Puritans denounced all manner of games & pastimes as a danger to public morals. Writers quickly turrned their attention to their own art and the first & most influential response came with Philip Sidney's Defense. Here he set out to answer contemporary critics &, with reference to Classical models of criticism, formulated a manifesto for English literature. Also includes George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy, Samuel Daniel's Defenc...

What is criticism? And where is it to be found? Thinking about literature and the visual arts is found in many places - in treatises, apologies, and paragoni; in prefaces, letters, and essays; in commentaries, editions, reading notes, and commonplace books; in images, sculptures, and built spaces; within or on the thresholds of works of poetry and visual art. It is situated between different disciplines and methods. Critical ideas and methods come into England from other countries, and tak...

The Renaissance saw a renewed and energetic engagement with classical rhetoric; recent years have seen a similar revival of interest in Renaissance rhetoric. As Renaissance critics recognised, figurative language is the key area of intersection between rhetoric and literature. This book is the first modern account of Renaissance rhetoric to focus solely on the figures of speech. It reflects a belief that the figures exemplify the larger concerns of rhetoric, and connect, directly or by ana...

Spenser in the Moment collects specially commissioned essays critical of established readings, each of which in surveying the state of the art attempts radically to unsettle our conception of the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552–1599).The editors were drawn together by a shared restlessness with the canonical Spenser, and a sense that attention especially to Spenser’s musical qualities, and the distinctiveness of his poetic style compared with that of his contemporaries, could displa...

The Model of Poesy is one of the most exciting literary discoveries of recent years. A manuscript treatise on poetics written by William Scott in 1599, at the end of the most revolutionary decade in English literary history, it includes rich discussions of the works of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and their contemporaries. Scott's work presents a powerful and coherent theoretical account of all aspects of poetics, from the nature of representation to the rules of versification, with a comm...

Writing After Sidney examines the literary response to Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), author of the Arcadia, Astrophil and Stella, and The Defence of Poesy, and the most immediately influential writer of the Elizabethan period. It does so by looking closely both at Sidney and at four writers who had an important stake in his afterlife: his sister Mary Sidney, his brother Robert Sidney, his best friend Fulke Greville, and his niece Mary Wroth. At the same t...

Adam Bede is the first novel by English author George Eliot, first published in 1859. The novel is set in the fictional community of Hayslope—a rural, pastoral, and close-knit community—in 1799. It revolves around a love "rectangle" among the beautiful but self-absorbed Hetty Sorrel; Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduces her; Adam Bede, her unacknowledged suitor; and Dinah Morris, Hetty's cousin, a fervent, virtuous, and beautiful Methodist lay preacher.

This is the first critical anthology of writings about memory in Renaissance England. Drawing together excerpts from more than seventy writers, poets, physicians, philosophers and preachers, and with over twenty illustrations, the anthology offers the reader a guided exploration of the arts of memory. The introduction outlines the context for the tradition of the memory arts from classical times to the Renaissance and is followed by extracts from writers on the art of memory in general, th...

The Oxford Shakespeare General Editor: Stanley Wells The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers - A new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from all existing printings - On-page commentary and notes explain meaning, staging, language, and allusions - Detailed introduction provides a full account of the play's performance history and explores issues of gender, g...

'This masterly work ought to be The Elizabethan Encyclopedia, and no less.' - Cahiers ElizabethainsEdmund Spenser remains one of Britain's most famous poets. With nearly 700 entries this Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive one-stop reference tool for:* appreciating Spenser's poetry in the context of his age and our own* understanding the language, themes and characters of the poems* easy to find entries arranged by subject.

In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, providing the historical and cultural background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It describes the "image" discarded by later years as "the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organization of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe." This, Lewis’s last book, has been hailed as "the final memorial to the work of a gr...