Liam Semler – författare

The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 offers readers a large and fully annotated collection of primary source texts addressing the grotesque in the English Renaissance. The sources are arranged chronologically in 120 numbered items with accompanying explanatory Notes. Each Note provides clarification of difficult terms in the source text, locating it in the context of early modern English and Continental discourses on the grotesque. The Notes also direct readers to further English sources and relevant modern scholarship. This volume includes a detailed introduction surveying the vocabulary, form and meaning of the grotesque from its arrival as a word, concept and aesthetic in 16th century England to its early maturity in the 18th century. The Introduction, Items and Notes, complemented by illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography, provide an unprecedented view of the evolving complexity and diversity of the early modern English grotesque. While giving due credit to Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin as masters of grotesque theory, this ground-breaking book aims to provoke new, evidence-based approaches to understanding the specifically English grotesque. The textual archive from 1500-1700 is a rich and intriguing record that offers much to interested readers and researchers in the fields of literary studies, theatre studies and art history.

This facsimile edition reproduces the work titled Eliza's Babes which was first published in 1652. The volume comprises devotional and political verse and prose meditations. The poems cover a wide range of forms from verse epistles to poetic petitions, religious love lyrics to poems on earthly marriage, exultant poetic prayers to stern spiritual admonitions. The meditations are fine examples of the Puritan believer's plain-style response to various biblical texts, theological issues and political events. The text is historically and aesthetically unique. It reveals its anonymous author to be perhaps the first woman to publish substantial creative imitations of poems printed in George Herbert's The Temple (1633) and to rely upon and respond to Robert Herrick's Hesperides (1648). Eliza's Babes is a literary work of great originality. The narrator lives out her estate of salvation as an almost literally experienced marriage of election to Christ her Saviour. In a series of poems, 'Eliza' overcomes her initial shock and disappointment that her heavenly spouse has chosen an earthly partner for her, though this partner's prerogative is noticeably confined to the subservient role of facilitating his wife's heavenly marriage. The copy reproduced in this edition is the British Library text.