Bøger udgivet af University of Delaware Press

Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney's Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney's four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. It describes Burney's eluding the major modernisms through which critics have tried to read her: Feminism (with its ';gendering' of beauty and reversal of gender roles); Capitalism and its Marxist critique (here the details of Burney's housekeeping become important); Professionalism (as a response to status inconsistency and class conflict); and Ian Watt's ';Formal Realism' (Burney perhaps saved the novel from a sharp decline it suffered in the 1770s, even as she tried to distance herself from the genre).Burney's most successful writing appeared before the coining of ';ideology.' But her standing ';prior to ideology' is not a matter of chronological accident. Rather, she quietly but forcefully resisted shared explanationsdomesticity as model for household management, debt as basis for family finance, professional status as a means to social confidence, the novel as the dominant literary genrethat became popular during her long and eventful life.Frederic Jameson has described Paul de Man, ';in private conversation,' claiming, ';Marxism . . . has no way of understanding the eighteenth century.' Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology conjoins Burney's ';eighteenth-centuryness' with her modernity.

Textiles have long provided metaphors for storytelling: a compelling novel ';weaves a tapestry' and we enjoy hearing someone ';spin' a tale. To what extent, however, should we take these metaphors seriously? Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama reveals that in the early modern period, when cloth-making was ubiquitous and high-quality tapestries called arras hangings were the most valuable objects in England, such metaphors were literal. The arras in particular provided a narrative model for writers such as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, who exploited their audience's familiarity with weaving to engage them in highly idiosyncratic and ';hands on' ways. Specifically, undescribed or ';blank' tapestries in the period's fiction presented audiences with opportunities to ';see' whatever they desired, and thus weave themselves into the story. Far more than background objects, literary and dramatic arras hangings have much to teach us about the intersections between texts and textiles at the dawn of print, and, more broadly, about the status of visual art in post-Reformation England.

This book traces the development of the idea that the sciences were morally enlightening through an intellectual history of the secretaires perpetuels of the French Royal Academy of Sciences and their associates from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. Academy secretaries such as Fontenelle and Condorcet were critical to the emergence of a central feature of the narrative of the Enlightenment in that they encouraged the notion that the ';philosophical spirit' of the Scientific Revolution, already present among the educated classes, should guide the necessary reformation of society and government according to the ideals of scientific reasoning. The Idea of the Sciences also tells an intellectual history of political radicalization, explaining especially how the marquis de Condorcet came to believe that the sciences could play central a role in guiding the outcome of the Revolution of 1789.

This book deals with changing conditions and conceptions of authorship in the long eighteenth century, a period often said to have witnessed the birth of the modern author. It focuses not on authorial self-presentation or self-revelation but on an author's interactions with booksellers, collaborators, rivals, correspondents, patrons, and audiences. Challenging older accounts of the development of authorship in the period as well as newer claims about the ';public sphere' and the ';professional writer,' it engages with recent work on print culture and the history of the book. Methodologically eclectic, it moves from close readings to strategic contextualization. The book is organized both chronologically and topically. Early chapters deal with writers notably Milton and Dryden at the beginning of the long eighteenth century, and later chapters focus more on writers -- among them Johnson, Gray, and Gibbon -- toward its end. Looking beyond the traditional canon, it considers a number of little-known or little-studied writers, including Richard Bentley, Thomas Birch, William Oldys, James Ralph, and Thomas Ruddiman. Some of the essays are organized around a single writer, but most deal with a broad topic literary collaboration, literary careers, the republic of letters, the alleged rise of the ';professional writer,' and the rather different figure of the ';author by profession.'

This book analyzes the genre subjects created by Jean Simeon Chardin in the 1730s and 1740s as exemplars of a period-specific aesthetic known as the gout moderne or Modern taste, a category shaped by the literary Quarrel of the Ancients versus the Moderns.

This book explores representations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside Shakespearean exceptionalism, the study reads a wide variety of plays to explain how intellectual context could allow for such characterization.

The degree to which shopping, or, more broadly, consumerism, is both critiqued and defended in American society confirms the role that commercial goods play in our daily lives. This collection of essays provides case studies depicting selected aspects of this engaging activity.

Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts (selections from plays and masques) into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays is the first to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays. As this under-examined archival evidence shows, play readers and playgoers viewed plays as malleable and modular texts to be altered, appropriated, and, most importantly, used. These records provide information that is not available in other forms about the popularity and importance of early modern plays, the reasons plays appealed to their audiences, and the ideas in plays that most interested audiences. Tracing the course of dramatic extracting from the earliest stages in the 1590s, through the prolific manuscript circulation at the universities, to the closure and reopening of the theatres, Estill gathers these microhistories to create a comprehensive overview of seventeenth-century dramatic extracts and the culture of extracting from plays. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays explores new archival evidence (from John Milton's signature to unpublished university plays) while also analyzing the popularity of perennial favorites such as Shakespeare's The Tempest. The study of dramatic extracts is the study of particulars: particular readers, particular manuscripts, particular plays or masques, particular historic moments. As D. F. McKenzie puts it, ';different readers [bring] the text to life in different ways.' By providing careful analyses of these rich source texts, this book shows how active play-viewing and play-reading (that is, extracting) ultimately led to changing the plays themselves, both through selecting and manipulating the extracts and positioning the plays in new contexts.

Shakespeare's Folktale Sources argues that seven playsThe Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, All's Well that End's Well, Measure for Measure, and Cymbelinederive one or more of their plots directly from folktales. In most cases, scholars have accepted one literary version of the folktale as a source. Recognizing that the same story has circulated orally and occurs in other medieval and early modern written versions allows for new readings of the plays. By acknowledging that a play's source story circulated in multiple forms, we can see how the playwright was engaging his audience on common ground, retelling a story that may have been familiar to many of them, even the illiterate. We can also view the folktale play as a Shakespearean genre, defined by source as the chronicle histories are, that spans and traces the course of Shakespeare's career. The fact that Shakespeare reworked folktales so frequently also changes the way we see the history of the literary folk- or fairy-tale, which is usually thought to bypass England and move from Italian novella collections to eighteenth-century French salons. Each chapter concludes with a bibliography listing versions of each folktale source as a resource for further research and teaching.

Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France was inspired by the observation that small slips of the flesh (involuntary confessions of the flesh) are omnipresent in early modern texts of many kinds. These slips (which bear similarities to what we would today call the Freudian slip) disrupt and destabilize readings of body, self, and textthree categories whose mutual boundaries this book seeks to softenbut also, in their very messiness, participate in defining them. Involuntary Confessions capitalizes on the uncertainty of such volatile moments, arguing that it is instability itself that provides the tools to navigate and understand the complexity of the early modern world. Rather than locate the body within any one discourse (Foucauldian, psychoanalytic), this book argues that slips of the flesh create a liminal space not exactly outside of discourse, but not necessarily subject to it, either. Involuntary confessions of the flesh reveal the perpetual and urgent challenge of early modern thinkers to textually confront and define the often tenuous relationship between the body and the self. By eluding and frustrating attempts to contain it, the early modern body reveals that truth is as much about surfaces as it is about interior depth, and that the self is fruitfully perpetuated by the conflict that proceeds from seemingly irreconcilable narratives. Interdisciplinary in its scope, Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France pairs major French literary works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (by Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne, Madame de Lafayette) with cultural documents (confession manuals, legal documents about the application of torture, and courtly handbooks). It is the first study of its kind to bring these discourses into thematic (rather than linear or chronological) dialog. In so doing, it emphasizes the shared struggle of many different early modern conversations to come to terms with the bodys volatility.

This book discusses some rituals of justice-such as public executions, printed responses to the Archbishop of Canterbury's execution speech, and King Charles I's treason trial-in early modern England. Focusing on the ways in which genres shape these events' multiple voices, I analyze the rituals' genres and the diverse perspectives from which we must understand them.The execution ritual, like such cultural forms as plays and films, is a collaborative production that can be understood only, and only incompletely, by being alert to the presence of its many participants and their contributions. Each of these participants brings a voice to the execution ritual, whether it is the judge and jury or the victim, executioner, sheriff and other authorities, spiritual counselors, printer, or spectators and readers. And each has at least one role to play. No matter how powerful some institutions and individuals may appear, none has a monopoly over authority and how the events take shape on and beyond the scaffold. The centerpiece of the mid-seventeenth-century's theatre of death was the condemned man's last dying utterance. This study focuses on the words and contexts of many of those final speeches, including King Charles I's (1649), Archbishop William Laud's (1645), and the Earl of Strafford's (1641), as well as those of less well known royalists and regicides. Where we situate ourselves to view, hear, and comprehend a public execution-through specific participants' eyes, ears, and minds or accounts-shapes our interpretation of the ritual. It is impossible to achieve a singular, carefully indoctrinated meaning of an event as complex as a state-sponsored public execution.Along with the variety of voices and meanings, the nature and purpose of the rituals of justice maintain a significant amount of consistency in a number of eras and cultural contexts. Whether the focus is on the trial and execution of the Marian martyrs, English royalists in the 1640s and 1650s, or the Restoration's regicides, the events draw on a set of cultural expectations or conventions. Because rituals of justice are shaped by diverse voices and agendas, with the participants' scripts and counterscripts converging and colliding, they are dramatic moments conveying profound meanings.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

During the first two decades of the eighteenth century, two evolving dance-historical realms intersected-theory and practice. While the French produced works on notation, choreography, and repertoire, German dance writers responded with an important body of work on dance theory. This book examines the reception of French dance in Germany.

The Papist Represented situates eighteenth-century literature within the history and culture of the English Catholic community and its interactions with the nation's Protestant majority. It demonstrates Catholic influence on some of the period's most popular and experimental literary works, challenging the assumption that eighteenth-century literature was a fundamentally Protestant enterprise.

Explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English retellings of the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the way they informed and were informed by religious and political developments. The siege functioned as a touchstone for writers who sought to locate their own national drama of civil and religious tumult within a larger biblical context.

This captivating biography traces the life of Eliza Fenwick, an extraordinary woman who paved her own unique path throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as she made her way from country to country as writer, teacher, and school owner.

Explores how authors and readers are represented in printed editions of three major literary figures: Jean Lemaire de Belges, Clement Marot, and Francois Rabelais. Print culture is marked by an anxiety of reception that became much more pronounced with increasingly anonymous and unpredictable readerships in the sixteenth century.

The essays collected in The Circuit of Apollo attest to the vital practice of commemorating women's artistic and personal relationships. In doing so, they illuminate the complexity of female friendships and honour as well as the robust creativity and intellectual work contributed by women to culture in the long eighteenth century.

The essays collected in The Circuit of Apollo attest to the vital practice of commemorating women's artistic and personal relationships. In doing so, they illuminate the complexity of female friendships and honour as well as the robust creativity and intellectual work contributed by women to culture in the long eighteenth century.

Examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. Andrea Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres.