Sue spent a lifetime being invisible.Metamorphosis is a deeply vulnerable account of Sues journey as she attempts to find love and success. She shares how she became accustomed to paying a high price for acceptance.Sue intertwines her pursuit of professional success and her quest for love from a Native American man who could not openly acknowledge his love for her to his closest friends and family.When she and Michael were alone their relationship was magical, spiri...

A fresh perspective on Elizabethan fictionIn Cosmographical Glasses Constance Relihan examines the ways in which sixteenth-century English texts—traveler’s reports, ethnographic studies, and geographic guides—provide the foundation for how fictional prose of the period envisions the locations in which its tales are set. Relihan suggests that this nonfictional discourse becomes central to how the fictional prose of the period imagines cultural identity, fictional p...

Various factors in late 16th-century England contributed to an environment more hospitable to prose fiction than had existed previously-among them, changes in educational opportunities, socioeconomic structures, literacy rates, and access to European literature. Such cultural alterations inevitably produced changes in modes of literary production. Furthermore, access to the bookstall to a new class of readers altered the structures and subjects writers employed. Within this tumultuous cont...

A vibrant tribute to Lewis Nordan’s unforgettable blend of Southern surrealism, dark humor, and deep humanity.Lewis Nordan: Humor, Heartbreak, and Hope is a rich collection of essays that examines the life and work of one of the South’s most distinctive literary voices. Edited by Barbara A. Baker, this volume brings together scholars and writers who explore Nordan’s use of magical realism, dark humor, and emotional vulnerability to portray the com...

Literary historians have been giving increased attention to texts that have hitherto been largely ignored. The works of women, the disenfranchised, and “commoners” have all benefited from such critical analysis. Similarly, letters, memoirs, popular poetry, and serialized fiction have become the subject of scholarly inquiry. Elizabethan fiction has also profited from the newer odes of critical inquiry. Such texts as George Gascoigne’s The Adventurers of Master F.J., John Lyly’s Euphues, Geo...

Featuring essays by major international scholars, this Companion combines analysis of themes crucial to Renaissance tragedy with the interpretation of canonical and frequently taught texts. Part I introduces key topics, such as religion, revenge, and the family, and discusses modern performance traditions on stage and screen. Bridging this section with Part II is a chapter which engages with Shakespeare. It tackles Shakespeare's generic distinctiveness and how our familiarity with Shakespe...

First published in 2001, this is an accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's comedies and romances. Rather than taking each play in isolation, the chapters trace recurring issues, suggesting both the continuity and the variety of Shakespeare's practice and the creative use he made of the conventions he inherited. The first section puts Shakespeare in the context of classical and Renaissance comedy and comic theory, the work of his Elizabethan predecessors and the...

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...

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...

Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England is a groundbreaking collection of seventeen essays, drawing together leading and emerging scholars to discuss and challenge critical assumptions about the transgressive nature of the early modern English stage. These essays shed new light on issues of gender, race, sexuality, law and politics. Staged Transgression was followed by a companion collection, Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England (2019), also available from Palg...

During the early modern period in England, social expectations for men came under extreme pressure - the armed knight went into decline and humanism appeared. Here, original essays analyze a wide-range of violent acts in literature and culture, from civic violence to chivalric combat to brawls and battles.

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...