Early Modern Others highlights instances of challenges to misogyny, racism, atheism, and antisemitism in the early modern period. Through deeply historicizing early modern literature and looking at its political and social contexts, Peter C. Herman explores how early modern authors challenged the biases and prejudices of their age.By examining the works of Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger amongst others, Herman reve...

Batman is one of the most recognized and popular pop culture icons. Appearing on the page of Detective Comics #27 in 1939, the character has inspired numerous characters, franchises, and spin-offs over his 80+ year history. The character has displayed versatility, appearing in stories from multiple genres, including science fiction, noir, and fantasy and mediums far beyond his comic book origins. While there are volumes analyzing Batman through literary, philosophical, and psychological le...

Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11 explores the representation of terrorism in plays, novels, and films across the centuries. Time and time again, writers and filmmakers including William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Gillo Pontecorvo, Don DeLillo, John Updike, and Steven Spielberg refer to terrorist acts as beyond comprehension, “a deed without a name,” but they do not stop there. Instead of creating works that respond to terrorism by...

The New Milton Criticism seeks to emphasize ambivalence and discontinuity in Milton's work and interrogate the assumptions and certainties in previous Milton scholarship. Contributors to the volume move Milton's open-ended poetics to the centre of Milton studies by showing how analysing irresolvable questions – religious, philosophical and literary critical – transforms interpretation and enriches appreciation of his work. The New Milton Criticism encourages scholars to embrace uncertainti...

Terrorism has long been a major shaping force in the world. However, the meanings of terrorism, as a word and as a set of actions, are intensely contested. This volume explores how literature has dealt with terrorism from the Renaissance to today, inviting the reader to make connections between older instances of terrorism and contemporary ones, and to see how the various literary treatments of terrorism draw on each other. The essays demonstrate that the debates around terrorism only give...

This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Milton's Paradise Lost addresses Milton in the light of the digital age, new critical approaches to his poem, and his continued presence in contemporary culture. It aims to help instructors enliven the teaching of Paradise Lost and address the challenges presented to students by the poemâ€"the early modern syntax and vocabulary, the political and theological contexts, and the abounding classical references.The first pa...

A Short History of Early Modern England presents the historical and cultural information necessary for a richer understanding of English Renaissance literature.Written in a clear and accessible style for an undergraduate level audienceGives an overview of the period’s history as well as an understanding of the historiographic issuesExplores key historical and literary events, from the Wars of the Roses to the publication of John Milton’s Parad...

The impetus for this Approaches to Teaching volume on The Taming of the Shrew grew from the editors' desire to discover why a play notorious for its controversial exploration of conflicts between men and women and the challenges of marriage is enduringly popular in the classroom, in the performing arts, and in scholarship. The result is a volume that offers practical advice to teachers on editions and teaching resources in part 1, "Materials," while illuminating how the play's subtle and c...

Fifteen short, accessible essays exploring the most important topics and themes in John Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost. The essays invite readers to begin their own independent exploration of the poem by equipping them with useful background knowledge, introducing them to key passages, and acquainting them with the current state of critical debates. Chapters are arranged to mirror the way the poem itself unfolds, offering exactly what readers need as they approach each movement of its...

Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and...

By bringing together Milton specialists with other innovative early modern scholars, the collection aims to embrace and encourage a methodologically adventurous study of Milton's works, analyzing them both in relation to their own moment and their many ensuing contexts.

This collection of selected writings represents the best of recent critical work on Milton. The essays cover all stages of his career, from the early poems through to the later poems of the Restoration period, especially Paradise Lost. Professor Patterson includes British and American critics such as Michael Wilding, Victoria Kahn, James Grantham Turner and Mary Ann Radzinowicz and guides the reader through the varied ways Milton's achievement has been explored and debated by mode...