Idioms of Self-Interest uncovers an emerging social integration of economic self-interest in early modern England by examining literary representations of credit relationships in which individuals are both held to standards of communal trust and rewarded for risk-taking enterprise.Drawing on women’s wills, merchants’ tracts, property law, mock testaments, mercantilist pamphlets and theatrical account books, and utilizing the latest work in economic theory and history, the ...

Shakespeare Studies is an annual peer-reviewed volume featuring the work of performance scholars, literary critics and cultural historians. The journal focuses primarily on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but embraces theoretical and historical studies of socio-political, intellectual and artistic contexts that extend well beyond the early modern English theatrical milieu. In addition to articles, Shakespeare Studies offers opportunities for extended intellectual exch...

This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. From the work of Milton and Marvell in the 1650s and 1660s through the brilliant careers of Dryden, Rochester, and Behn, Locke and Astell, Swift and Defoe, Pope and Montagu, the pressures and extremes of social, political, and sexual experience are everywhere reflected in literary texts: in the daring lyrics and intricate political allegories of this age, in the vitriol an...

"Those at the periphery of society often figure obsessively for those at its center, and never more so than with the rogues of early modern England. Whether as social fact or literary fiction-or both, simultaneously-the marginal rogue became ideologically central and has remained so for historians, cultural critics, and literary critics alike. In this collection, early modern rogues represent the range, diversity, and tensions within early modern scholarship, making this quite simply the b...

In this title, first published in 1985, Michael Bristol draws on several theoretical and critical traditions to study the nature and purpose of theatre as a social institution: on Marxism, and its revisions in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin; on the theories of Emile Durkheim and their adaptations in the work of Victor Turner; and on the history of social life and material culture as practiced by the Annales school. This valuable work is an important contribution to literary criticism...

This is the first major collection of essays to look at the literature of the entire Tudor period, from the reign of Henry VII to death of Elizabeth I. It pays particularly attention to the years before 1580. Those decades saw, amongst other things, the establishment of print culture and growth of a reading public; the various phases of the English Reformation and process of political centralization that enabled and accompanied them; the increasing emulation of Continental and classical li...

Old women in Early Modern plays are stereotypically presented as ugly, randy, mouthy, mad. So Shakespeare is rare among dramatists of the day for his lively and empowering depictions of ageing ladies. This well-researched, accessible book looks at the way his old women subvert the stereotypes. There is particular focus on Paulina in The Winter’s Tale as a uniquely powerful old woman.

Emphasizing the significance of early modern prose fiction as a hybrid genre that absorbed cultural, ideological and historical strands of the age, this fascinating study brings together an outstanding cast of critics including: Sheila T. Cavanaugh, Stephen Guy-Bray, Mary Ellen Lamb, Joan Pong Linton, Steve Mentz, Constance C. Relihan, Goran V. Stanivukovic with an afterword from Arthur Kinney.Each of the essays in this collection considers the reciprocal relation of early modern p...

Leading literary critics and historians reassess one of the defining features of early modern England -the idea of "capital." The collection reevaluates the different aspects of the concept amidst the profound changes of the period.

Reading Shakespeare Historically is a passionate, provocative book by one of the most renowned and popular Renaissance scholars writing today. Charting ten years of critical development, these challenging, witty essays shed new light on Renaissance studies. It also raises intriguing questions about how the culture and history of the past illuminates the key social and political issues of today. Lisa Jardine re-reads Renaissance drama in its historical and cultural context, from la...

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The a...

In Raving at Usurers, Dwight Codr explores the complex intersection of religion, economics, ethics, and literature in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Codr offers an alternative to the orthodox story of secular economic modernity's emergence in this key time and place, locating in early modern anti-usury literature an "ethic of uncertainty" that viewed economic transactions as ethical to the extent that their outcomes were uncertain. Codr’s development of an "anti...