Clarendon Paperbacks – serie

A brilliant new commentary on one of the most famous comedies from ancient Greece, Aristophanes' Frogs. Edited by one of the world's leading scholars on Aristophanes, the book includes the complete Greek text, a comprehensive introduction, and a full and lively commentary covering just about every point of interest in this richly rewarding and entertaining play. It also offers help with translation. A must for all serious students of Aristophanes.

This is a paperback edition of a highly acclaimed study of English popular radicalism during the period between the anti-Jacobin government `Terror' of the 1790s and the beginnings of Chartism. Challenging conventional distinctions between `high' and `low' culture, Iain McCalman brilliantly reveals the links between the political underworld and literary culture, poverty, crime, and prophetic religion. Drawing on information from spy reports and contemporary literature, the book traces for the first time the history of the underground revolutionary-republican grouping founded by the agrarian reformer, Thomas Spence. Challenging conventional distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture, McCalman illuminates the darker, more populist sides of Romanticism. His underworld of ideas links the Shelleys to pornographer-revolutionaries and political blackmailers, millenarian prophecy to discourses of blasphemy, black revolution and saturnalian theatricality, and radical journalism to the Grub Street undergrowth of bawdy and pornography which sprang up in the opening years of Queen Victoria's reign. Radical Underworld broadens the conventional boundaries of popular politics and culture by illuminating a political underworld connected with poverty, crime, prophetic religion and literary culture. It is a model of cultural history and a major re-evaluation of its topic.

William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) was both the most characteristic and the most extraordinary of Victorians. His huge public career - in and out of office from 1834 to 1894 and four times Prime Minister - was consistently controversial and dramatic. His private life was a most curious blend of happiness and temptation. His Christian faith held the extremes of his character in sufficient harmony to avoid disintegration and to produce one of the most powerful political personalities in British history.The book describes Gladstone's early years as a Tory, the great transformation of his political position in the 1840s, his lengthy period as Chancellor of the Exchequer with its long-lasting implications for British financial policy, and his spectacular first administration from 1868 to 1874. It sets in context the remarkable private drama of sexual temptation and moral crisis which from the 1840s onwards accompanied these public developments.The account ends in December 1874, with Gladstone's formal retirement from leadership of the Liberal Party - the move which he intended as his farewell to party politics.Gladstone was perhaps the most influential political leader of modern Britain, and this book is a major contribution to our understanding of his character, his life, and his role in the Victorian political arena.

The influence of J. L. Austin on contemporary philosophy was substantial during his lifetime, and has grown greatly since his death, at the height of his powers, in 1960. Philosophical Papers, first published in 1961, was the first of three volumes of Austin's work to be edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Together with Sense and Sensibilia and How to do things with Words (both first published in 1962 and both still available), it has extended Austin's influence far beyond the circle who knew him or read the handful of papers he published in journals.

By the outbreak of the First World War England had become the world's first mass urban society. In just over sixty years the proportion of town-dwellers had risen from 50 to 80 per cent, and during this period many of the most crucial developments in English urban society had taken place.This book provides a uniquely comprehensive analysis of those developments - conurbations, suburbs, satellite towns, garden cities, and seaside resorts. The author assesses the importance of London, the provincial cities, and manufacturing centres; he also examines the continuing influence of the small country town and `rural' England on political, economic, and cultural growth. In many respects, P. J. Waller's book is a general social history of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England, seen from an urban perspective. It is both scholarly and immensely readable.

Purcell's Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England. Ellen Harris's comprehensive study examines the work in its historical and cultural context, with detailed coverage of contemporary performance practice and of the work's performance history and critical reception. The author examines the various surviving sources - all of which postdate the first performance by at least 80 years - and discusses their inconsistencies with Nahum Tate's original libretto. A useful reference section includes a critical discography and appendices charting a historical survey of national premieres and of editions.

Wagner's Ring is a great masterpiece. But because of the work's rich complexity it is difficult to think sensibly about its text and music. Deryck Cooke, author of The Language of Music and completer of Mahler's Tenth Symphony, displays his masterly common sense in this study of how and why The Ring took the shape it did. It is only a portion of the enormous book he had planned: his untimely death prevented his writing an analysis of the music. But it covers the first two operas of the cycle (Rheingold and The Valkyrie) and even as it stands gives a fresh understanding and appreciation to every lover of Wagner's music.

What is going on in English studies? Bernard Bergonzi, a literary critic and teacher, who has also published poetry and fiction and has been involved in university administration, seeks to answer this frequently-raised question. With the advent of theory and the accompanying bitter controversies, English studies have changed rapidly and the author describes the developments he has experienced in England and the United States since he began university teaching in 1959. Exploding English brings together elements of critical theory, intellectual history, and the sociology of knowledge, with a linking thread of autobiography.

Now issued for the first time in paperback with a new introduction by the author, this is a study of those narratives which were written and widely read in England during the first forty years of the eighteenth century, but which have been hitherto neglected or despised by historians of the novel. The author makes no claims for these works as literary achievements. They are seen, rather, as vigorous and highly successful commercial exploitations of enduring stereotypes such as the criminal, the traveller-merchant, the persecuted maiden, and the aristocratic seducer. Placing them against the background of the age, the book sets out to account for the attractiveness of such figures and their characteristic adventures, and to evaluate the importance of these narratives in providing a set of conventional and meaningful characters and situations for the mid-eighteenth century masters of the novel such as Richardson and Fielding.

How subject to interpretation is Shakespeare? The valid options his plays afford can seem infinite; yet in fact they are not. This book seeks to come fully to terms with Shakespeare's openness to interpretation while respecting the primacy of his creative presence. It sees Shakespeare the theatre-poet as making theatre not only by outlining an imaginary world but by providing guidelines for its enactment and reception, implying in each of his plays a distinctive rapport between the playwright, the players, and the playgoers. These guidelines may be discerned through a study of the range and limits of the options that a given text affords. The book studies a variety of plays in this way, especially Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. By doing so it seeks to provide an aesthetic for Shakespeare's theatre-poetry, one that includes the author along with the actors and the audience in the event that occurs when a play is performed.

This study concerns itself with Shakespeare no less than with Johnson. For Johnson;s account of `the poet of nature' is here maintained to be no dead commonplace but a radically challenging proposition; its cutting edge is brought out by a series of contrasts with the leading Romantic critics - Coleridge, Schlegel, and Hazlitt - and the dichotomies which emerge are found to reflect tensions exhibited by or explored within the plays themselves. The need for unexpectedly fundamental choices in our own reading of Shakespeare is implied. The author relates Johnson's feeling for general nature to the scepticism characteristic of his thought, and concludes with a fresh and provocative discussion of Johnson's response to the `unnatural deeds of Shakespearean tragedy.The Central section of the Preface to Shakespeare is reprinted here, as are many of the most critically interesting notes, so that this book offers a virtual anthology of Johnson's Shakespeare criticism as well as a commentary upon it. evaluation of Shakespeare as `the poet of nature' was no mere commonplace but a radically challenging proposition. In this study his ideas are contrasted with the leading Romantic critics Coleridge, Hazlitt, and A. W. Schlegel. A large part of his Preface to Shakespeare is reprinted as are many of the most critically interesting notes, providing a virtual anthology of Johnson's Shakespeare criticism.

This anthology of texts in translation, here presented in a fully revised and updated form, covers the single most important branch of medieval literary theory and criticism, the commentary tradition, in one of the most significant periods of its development. The majority of the texts are here translated for the first time; most of the translations have been prepared specially for this edition. They offer discussion of such topics as fiction and fable (in classical poetry and in the Bible); the ethical effects and purpose of literature; authorship and authority; the function of biography in literary interpretation; stylistic and didactic modes of writing; literary form and structure; allegory and literal-historical sense; symbolism; imagination and imagery; the semiotics of words and things, the moralization of classical texts; the status of poetry within the hierarchy of the human arts and sciences; and the prestige and purpose of vernacular literature. The selections are fully annotated and provided with introductions which form a linked series of essays towards the history of medieval literary theory and criticism.

In Poets in their Time Barbara Everett brings her extraordinary ability to read closely and her intimate knowledge of the period to an examination of Donne, Milton, Marvell, Rochester, Pope, Keats, Browning, Eliot, Auden, and Philip Larkin. The implicit argument of these twelve essays is designed to show the way each poet remains an individual while interacting with the conditions of a particular historical context.`quite exceptionally good ... one of the finest collections of criticism for years ... It blends historical insight and critical perception with real originality' Frank Kermode, London Review of Books`She has an acute ear for a poet's voice, both in the individual life and in the work as a whole. She convincingly hears the timbre of the sonnet-sequence in the sounds and silences of Keats' Odes and she catches Donne sounding both like a preacher and "a great frequenter of plays", neatly characterizing his tone as one of "amiable rancour" ... But an ear without a brain is not enough. Barbara Everett also shows a developed and fastidious historical imagination.' Tim Deveson, Times Educational Supplement`it makes me feel like a donkey munching thistles. The prose in these critical studies is knotty but nourishing and each essay emphasises the essential unfamiliarity of the well known. Jonathan Keats, Independent`the kind of thoughtful appreciation is that Donne, among others, would agree was worth waiting a few hundred years for.' Clive James, Observer

This collection of studies, which spans the past decade, was first published in hardback in 1985. As well as exploring the fault-lines marking the various kinds of ahistorical literary studies from the New Criticism to Post-Structuralism, it develops a fully elaborated socio-historical criticism for literary works. It achieves this by means of four special sets of investigations: into the relation between the so-called 'autonomous' poem and its political/historical contexts; into the relation of reception and history to literary interpretation; into the problems of canon and the characterization of period; and, finally, into the ideological dimensions of both literary works and the criticism of such works. Whilst focusing largely on nineteenth-century works - among them those of Keats, Byron, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti - its arguments are applicable to literary studies in general, and its emphasis throughout is theoretical and methodological.'... an outstandingly good book.' John Lucas, Times Literary Supplement'The essays exhibit wide and careful reading in the service of a criticism that is refreshing, even moving, in its advocacy of an old poetical ideal.' Victorian Poetry'Few practising critics can speak concurrently on scholarly, critical, and theoretical issues with the authority of McGann... The Beauty of Inflections represents a major practical and theoretical intervention.' Modern Language Notes

Medieval Europe inherited from antiquity a rich and varied tradition of thought about the aetates hominum. Scholars divided human life into three, four, six, or seven ages, and so related it to larger orders of nature and history in which similar patterns were to be found. Thus, the seven ages correspond to and are governed by the seven planets. These ideas flowed through the Middle Ages in many channels: sermons and Bible commentaries, moral and political treatises, encyclopaedias and lexicons, medical and astrological handbooks, didactic and courtly poems, tapestries, wall-paintings, and stained-glass windows.Professor Burrow's account of this material, using mainly but not exclusively English medieval sources, includes a consideration of some of the ways in which such ideas of natural order entered into the medieval writer's assessment of human behaviour.The book ends by showing how medieval writers commonly recognize and endorse the natural processes by which ordinary folk pass from the joys and folly of youth to the sorrows and wisdom of old age.`I cannot believe that it will ever be superseded... it is the very strong but perfectly clear distillate of a great amount of labour and thought.' London Review of Books`short, pointed, witty, tightly packed, richly illustrated, inspired and illuminating.' Essays in Criticism`If we regret anything as we read this excellent book, we regret that it is not longer.' Christina von Nolcken, Review of English Studies`There is much to praise in the book; Burrow is learned and imaginative, writes lucidly, and... has illuminating things to say... J. A. Burrow is one of the best living critics of medieval English literature, and this book is a rich and informative literary history of an important topic.' Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Setting out to reinstate rhetoric, this book opens with an overview of the rhetorical system as developed in classical times. In Defence of Rhetoric surveys and analyses material from Aristotle to Plato through the Renaissance to the modern novel and the critical theories of Roman Jakobson and Paul de Man.

Originally published in 1976, this highly acclaimed, full-scale account of Restoration drama is now available for the first time in a paperback edition. Following the changing patterns of drama decade by decade from 1660 to 1710, the author fully explores the diversity of the plays as they reflect the fads and fashions of a small, highly competitive theatre world constantly buffeted by political and social change. Anxious to avoid misleading generalizations - such as the dominance of `comedy of manners' and the rise of `sentimental' drama - Hume carries out a detailed, chronological survey of some five hundred plays, chronicling the emergence of numerous dramatic modes and their interaction and mutual influence. This meticulous documentation is set within the context of a critical discussion of theories of comedy and tragedy prevalent in the period.

In this ambitious study, Richard Wendorf establishes the grounds of comparison between two arts that have often been linked in a casual way but whose historical interrelations remain almost completely unexplored. By focusing on the great age of English portraiture - from the arrival of Van Dyck to the publication of Boswell's Life of Johnson - the author shows that, despite their obvious differences, visual and verbal portraits often shared similar assumptions about the representation of historical character. Grounded in modern theory devoted to the comparison of literature and painting and to the problem of representation, this book examines each form of portraiture in terms of the other. Among those writers considered are Izaak Walton, John Evelyn, John Aubrey, Roger North, Goldsmith, Johnson, Mrs Piozzi, Boswell; among the artists are Van Dyck, Lely, Samuel Cooper, Jonathan Richardson, Hogarth and Reynolds. The careers of `double agents' (painters, like Richardson and Reynolds, who experimented with biographical writing) are also discussed. The Elements of Life is a ground-breaking critical history of biography and portrait-painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Ancrene Wisse, a guide for female recluses written in the West Midlands in the early thirteenth century, and the closely related religious works of the `Katherine Group', offer a vivid insight into the religious life of the time, and their rich and varied prose style blends Latin and native English stylistic traditions with remarkable skill and assurance. The difficulty of their language, however, has made them largely inaccessible except to experts in Middle English, and this edition is designed to introduce them to a wider audience, including undergraduates with limited experience of Middle English and specialists in other disciplines, particularly history, theology, and women's studies. It provides a representative selection (the last two parts of Ancrene Wisse, and three complete works from the Katherine Group, Hali Meithhad, Sawles Warde, and Seinte Margarete) in new and readable critical texts, with a general introduction, notes, a select glossary, and interleaved translations.

Why was the topic of women and reading so controversial for the Victorians and Edwardians? What was it assumed that women read, and what advice was given about where, when, and how to read?Kate Flint examines texts ranging from fiction, painting, and poetry, through medical and psychoanalytic works, advice manuals and periodicals, to autobiographies and contemporary social research, in her detailed and highly praised study of this central cultural debate in nineteenth-century society. Engaging also in recent feminist theory, she explores the manipulation of the figure of the woman reader in well-known works like Charlotte Bronte's Shirley and Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, in sensation novels and New Woman fiction, and in stories found in series such as The Princess's Novelettes. This is supported by evidence from actual readers - working women, as well as the privileged - as to how they understood their own highly varied reading experiences.This ground-breaking work provides an invaluable source for scholars and students of nineteenth-century culture, and will be essential reading for all interested in current critical debates on women and reading.

Stephen Greenblatt has been at the centre of a major shift in literary interpretation towards a critical method that places cultural creation in history. In this book - a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method - he asks how collective beliefs and experiences are shaped, moved from one medium to another, concentrated in manageable form, and offered to the public on the stage. As well as giving us a new way of understanding Shakespeare's achievement, the book is an original analysis of a cultural process.Shakespearean Negotiations provides significant insights into Henry IV and Henry V, Twelfth Night, King Lear, and The Tempest; it also includes fascinating analyses of such aspects of early modern culture as exorcism, cross-dressing, colonial propaganda, and martial law codes. It is, as well, a masterly example of a new critical method by its leading practitioner.

This book surveys the early history of one of our most important modern myths: the story of Frankenstein and the monster he created from dismembered corpses, as it appeared in fictional and other writings before its translation to the cinema screen. It examines the range of meanings which Mary Shelley's Frankenstein offers in the light of the political images of `monstrosity' generated by the French Revolution. Later chapters trace the myth's analogues and protean transformations in subsequent writings, from the tales of Hoffmann and Hawthorne to the novels of Dickens, Melville, Conrad, and Lawrence, taking in the historical and political writings of Carlyle and Marx as well as the science fiction of Stevenson and Wells. The author shows that while the myth did come to be applied metaphorically to technological development, its most powerful associations have centred on relationships between people, in the family, in work, and in politics.

With the rise of the novel in the mid-eighteenth century came the rise of sentimentalism. While the fondness for sentiment embarrassed later literary critics, it originally legitimized a morally suspect phenomenon: the novel. This book describes that legitimation, yet it looks beyond the narrowly literary to the lives and expressed philosophies of some of the major writers of the age, showing the language of feeling to be a resource of philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith, as much as novelists like Richardson and Sterne.

This important addition to Conrad studies, as well as to the study of narrative, is the first book-length attempt to apply recent developments in critical theory and practice to the whole canon of Conrad's works.Using a broadly structuralist approach, Dr Lothe analyses Conrad's sophisticated narrative method, focusing on his use of devices, functions, variations, and thematic effects or implications. More widely, he explores the relationship between Conrad's narrative method and the complex thematics engendered and shaped by this method. Discussing the notions of major post-structuralist critics such as Edward W. Said and J. Hillis Miller, he develops and applies a critical methodology which is flexible enough to respond to the varying interpretative problems presented by Conrad's fiction.

The critical school of `new historicism' is very much at the centre of contemporary debates on literary studies and theory. Much `new historicist' writing has focused on Renaissance texts, and this book is a timely exploration of that connection and its significance for `English' as a whole. Howard Felperin subjects many of the most challenging claims of `new historicism' to rigorous analysis, distinguishes sharply between its American and British versions, and probes the causes and consequences of its politicization of literary studies. The philosophical as well as political issues central to current debates are examined and the uses served by the canonical texts at their centre analysed within a broad cultural and historical perspective. This searching reconsideration of contemporary critical theory and practice yields fresh readings of a number of classic texts - including Hamlet, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Shakespeare's Sonnets, More's Utopia, Donne's poetry, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness - as well as a deepened understanding of the complex and changing functions of the canon itself.

`And there I found very many islands filled with people innumerable, and of all of them I have taken possession for their highnesses, by proclamation made and with the royal standard unfurled, and no one contradicted me' - Christopher ColumbusMarvelous Possessions is a study of the ways in which Europeans of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, in particular the New World.In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was cunningly yoked by Columbus and others to the service of colonial appropriation. He argues that the traditional symbolic actions and legal rituals through which European sovereignty was asserted were strained to breaking-point by the unprecedented nature of the discovery of the New World. But the book also shows that the experience of the marvelous is not necessarily an agent of empire: in writers as different as Herodotus, Jean de Léry, and Montaigne - and notably in Mandeville's Travels, the most popular travel book of the Middle Ages - wonder is the sign of a remarkably tolerant recognition of cultural difference.

Despite being an aristocrat and a woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 - 1762) made herself a writer. Lady Mary has long been well-known as a `character' a letter writer, and a traveller, this revised paperback edition of her non-epistolary writings appears at a time when interest in her literary work is now widespread and serious. Lady Mary saw herself as `haunted by the Daemon of Poesie'. She wrote literary criticism of Addison and the only essay by a woman published in the Spectator, together with spirited verse replies to Pope and Swift and passionate love-poems which dispute the period's label `Age of Reason'. Her essays (some published anonymously in newspapers) and poems (many of which appeared with her secret connivance) deal with issues still alive and accessible today: love, marriage, prejudice against women writers, the medical breakthrough of smallpox innoculation. Her comedy, Simplicity, has been recently revived in productions around the U.K. Hard-hitting, eloquent and often funny, the work of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu will be essential reading for the growing number of scholars, students and general readers of women's writing.

Although is is well known that the Romantics were obsessed with Shakespeare, extraordinarily little attention has been paid to how this affected their creative practice and their theories of the imagination. Yet Shakespeare's effect on both was crucial, as Jonathan Bate shows in this detailed study, which includes the first full critical discussions of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and of the influence of the plays on the poetry of Blake and Coleridge. The book also offers a fresh account of Shakespeare's powerful presence in the letters and poems of Keats and Byron, and in the Romantic drama, especially in Shelley's The Cenci

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