English Association Monographs: English at the Interface – serie

In the middle years of the sixteenth century, English drama witnessed the emergence of the ‘tyrant by entrie’ or the usurper, who supplanted earlier ‘tyrant by the administration’ as the main antihero of political drama. This usurper or, in Machiavellian terms principe nuove, was the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own ‘virtù’ and through an act of ‘lawmaking’ violence. Early Tudor morality plays were exclusively concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant; in the political drama of the first half of the sixteenth century, we do not encounter a single instance of usurpation among the texts that are still available to us. In contrast, the historical and tragic plays of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods teem with illegitimate monarchs. Almost all of Shakespeare’s history plays, at least four of his ten tragedies, and even a few of his comedies feature usurpation or potential usurpation of sovereign power as a crucial plot device. Why and how does usurpation emerge as a preoccupation in English theatre? What are the political, historical, legal, and dramaturgical transformations that influence and are influenced by this moment of emergence? As the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the study of usurpation and tyranny in sixteenth-century drama and politics, Tyranny and Usurpation: The New Prince and Lawmaking Violence will challenge existing disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with these critical questions.

John Keats was a trained surgeon who studied at Guy’s Hospital, London while simultaneously making his way as a poet. This book focuses attention on an important but hitherto neglected Keats manuscript: the notebook he maintained during this period. Reconstructing the lively medical world that played a formative role in Keats’ intellectual and imaginative development, it seeks to show the intriguing connections between Keats’ medical knowledge and his greatest poetry. It offers new research on Keats’ medical career – including a new edition of his medical Notebook compiled from the manuscript – and recovers the various ways in which Keats’ creativity found expression in his two careers of medicine and poetry, enriching both. Topics explored include the ‘hospital poems’ Keats wrote at Guy’s; the medical milieu of his daily life; his methods of working as revealed by his medical Notebook and other archival sources; and the medical contexts that informed his composition of Endymion and the collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).John Keats’ Medical Notebook: Text, Context and Poems reveals how Keats’ visceral knowledge of human life, gained during his medical training at Guy’s, transformed him into ‘a mighty poet of the human heart’.

In the middle years of the sixteenth century, English drama witnessed the emergence of the ‘tyrant by entrie’ or the usurper, who supplanted earlier ‘tyrant by the administration’ as the main antihero of political drama. This usurper or, in Machiavellian terms principe nuove, was the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own ‘virtù’ and through an act of ‘lawmaking’ violence. Early Tudor morality plays were exclusively concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant; in the political drama of the first half of the sixteenth century, we do not encounter a single instance of usurpation among the texts that are still available to us. In contrast, the historical and tragic plays of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods teem with illegitimate monarchs. Almost all of Shakespeare’s history plays, at least four of his ten tragedies, and even a few of his comedies feature usurpation or potential usurpation of sovereign power as a crucial plot device. Why and how does usurpation emerge as a preoccupation in English theatre? What are the political, historical, legal, and dramaturgical transformations that influence and are influenced by this moment of emergence? As the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the study of usurpation and tyranny in sixteenth-century drama and politics, Tyranny and Usurpation: The New Prince and Lawmaking Violence will challenge existing disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with these critical questions.

With the pressing work of decolonising our reading lists gaining traction in UK higher educational contexts, Decolonising the Conrad Canon shows how those author-Gods most associated with the colonial literary canon can also be retooled through decolonial, queer, feminist readings. This book finds pockets of powerful anti-colonial resistance and queer dissonance in Joseph Conrad’s lesser-known works – breathing spaces from the colonial rhetoric that dominates his novels – and traces the female characters who voice them off the page and into their transmedia (digital/illustrative/cinematic) afterlives. From Immada and Edith’s queer gaze in The Rescue and the periodicalillustrations that accompanied its initial serialization, to Aïssa’s sustained critique of imperialism in An Outcast of the Islands and her portrayal on mass-market paperback book covers, to the structural female bonds of Almayer’s Folly and Nina’s embodiment in Chantal Akerman’s adaptation La Folie Almayer, this book centres Conrad’s female characters as viable, meaning-making citizens of the canon. Through this intervention, Decolonising the Conrad Canon proposes an innovative model for teaching, reading and studying not just Joseph Conrad’s work but the colonial literary canon more broadly.

This book is about the intertextual relationships between the works of the Shelleys and the Brownings. While a lot of research has been done on the relationship between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Browning, virtually nothing has been said about the links between Mary Shelley and Robert Browning, and very little on the connections between the Shelleys and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Rieko Suzuki seeks to address this blind spot by focusing on three areas in particular: firstly, the way that Browning’s later poems reflect back on and re-engage with Shelley’s work; secondly, Mary Shelley’s influence on Browning’s early poems; and thirdly, Shelley’s presence in and influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s writing. In mapping out the various ways in which texts relate to other texts, the book also identifies a number of important thematic threads that run throughout the work of all four writers. These include theories of history and historical consciousness, providing a further dimension to the question of ‘influence’. They also include ideas about exile, gender, liberal politics and cultural heritage, central to almost all the texts discussed here, as the Shelleys and the Brownings, in different ways and in varying contexts, tried to negotiate the possibility of a more tolerant and resilient social, political and cultural environment.

Written by one of the editors of the new complete works of Henry Vaughan, Keeping the Ancient Way is the first book-length study of the poet by a single author for twenty years. It deals with a number of key topics that are central to the understanding and appreciation of this major seventeenth-century writer. These include his debt to the hermetic philosophy espoused by his twin brother (the alchemist, Thomas Vaughan); his royalist allegiance in the Civil War; his loyalty to the outlawed Church of England during the Interregnum; the unusual degree of intertextuality in his poetry (especially with the Scriptures and the devotional lyrics of George Herbert); and his literary treatment of the natural world (which has been variously interpreted from Christian, proto-Romantic, and ecological perspectives). Each of the chapters is self-contained and places its topic in relation to past and current critical debates, but the book is organized so that the biographical, intellectual, and political focus of Part One informs the discussion of poetic craftsmanship in Part Two. A wealth of historical information and close critical readings provide an accessible introduction to the poet and his period for students and general readers alike. The up-to-date scholarship will also be of interest to specialists in theliterature and history of the Civil War and Interregnum.

Written by one of the editors of the new complete works of Henry Vaughan, Keeping the Ancient Way is the first book-length study of the poet by a single author for twenty years. It deals with a number of key topics that are central to the understanding and appreciation of this major seventeenth-century writer. These include his debt to the hermetic philosophy espoused by his twin brother (the alchemist, Thomas Vaughan); his royalist allegiance in the Civil War; his loyalty to the outlawed Church of England during the Interregnum; the unusual degree of intertextuality in his poetry (especially with the Scriptures and the devotional lyrics of George Herbert); and his literary treatment of the natural world (which has been variously interpreted from Christian, proto-Romantic, and ecological perspectives). Each of the chapters is self-contained and places its topic in relation to past and current critical debates, but the book is organized so that the biographical, intellectual, and political focus of Part One informs the discussion of poetic craftsmanship in Part Two. A wealth of historical information and close critical readings provide an accessible introduction to the poet and his period for students and general readers alike. The up-to-date scholarship will also be of interest to specialists in theliterature and history of the Civil War and Interregnum.

John Keats was a trained surgeon who studied at Guy’s Hospital, London while simultaneously making his way as a poet. This book focuses attention on an important but hitherto neglected Keats manuscript: the notebook he maintained during this period. Reconstructing the lively medical world that played a formative role in Keats’ intellectual and imaginative development, it seeks to show the intriguing connections between Keats’ medical knowledge and his greatest poetry. It offers new research on Keats’ medical career – including a new edition of his medical Notebook compiled from the manuscript – and recovers the various ways in which Keats’ creativity found expression in his two careers of medicine and poetry, enriching both. Topics explored include the ‘hospital poems’ Keats wrote at Guy’s; the medical milieu of his daily life; his methods of working as revealed by his medical Notebook and other archival sources; and the medical contexts that informed his composition of Endymion and the collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).John Keats’ Medical Notebook: Text, Context and Poems reveals how Keats’ visceral knowledge of human life, gained during his medical training at Guy’s, transformed him into ‘a mighty poet of the human heart’.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Reimagining Urban Nature questions some of the underlying imaginaries which have for so long allowed us humans to develop technologically at great cost to the more-than-human world and ourselves. In urban places, cultural and more-than-human entities are in frequent contact; however, the non-human is often seen as expendable in these human-centric places. While much important work has been done on improving care for the more rural and wild areas of the globe, to really address environmental damage we must work towards reimagining the city. These are places where the majority of people live and work, and where the majority of decisions are made about the care and protection of many environments within and beyond the city. This book contributes to the still under-developed field of urban ecocriticism by adding a posthumanist perspective, as well as expanding current discussions within urban studies and environmental activism that seek to shift political and cultural imaginaries of urban nature. Importantly, this investigation is grounded in the Australian (and more broadly, the Australasian) context to allow for the analysis of a more diverse set of voices, texts and ecologies in an area still dominated by the northern hemisphere and the Global North.

Before we write, we draw. In Playing with Lines, Thomas Gould reflects on the melancholic persistence of child drawing in modern and contemporary literary writing. Moving among psychoanalysis, philosophy, and poetry, the book argues for children’s drawings as textual forms that shape the horizon of literary experience. Through diverse and playful readings that include Anne Carson, Jacques Derrida, Marianne Moore, and D.W. Winnicott, Playing with Lines explores how writing repeatedly returns to drawing as a lost childhood counterpart: a site of play, expressive experimentation, and encounter with the external world.From the classical origin of drawing as a scene of youthful desire and loss, through the role of children’s drawings in the development of wartime psychoanalytic theory, to a range of writers’ reflections on their own childhood sketches, Playing with Lines traces a constellation of instances in which literature both recovers and represses forms of graphic infancy. Repositioning the study of word-image relations, it invites us to reflect on the squiggly lines between work and play, expression and selection, and childhood and adulthood.

Honourable Mention in the 2023 British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph PrizeThe Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.

In 1565, migrants escaping religious persecution and economic hardship in the Low Countries began to arrive in the city of Norwich in eastern England. Many of the migrants spoke Dutch, whilst others spoke French, with some speaking both languages. By 1578, the migrants, known locally as Strangers, accounted for about 40 per cent of Norwich’s population. The city therefore had three language communities: English, Dutch, and French. Members of each language community used Latin, making early modern Norwich a quadrilingual city.In this book, Christopher Joby examines the language practices that emerged in early modern Norwich and the epistemic outcomes of contact between these four languages. He does this from multiple perspectives, devoting chapters to language education, language practices by social domain, language varieties, the outcomes of lexical interference, proper names, and translation. The final chapter, on language shift, examines the processes by which Norwich returned by the mid-eighteenth century to being an essentially monolingual, Anglophone, city.This is the first book-length study of the language practices and outcomes of contact between languages in an early modern European city, and will be of interest to scholars of multilingualism, historical sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, dialectology, translation studies, and British and European early modern history.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.Creative nonfictional writing about place became increasingly prominent in British and Irish literary culture during the 2010s. More particularly, a wide range of writers, exploring a diverse range of landscapes, focused on the local and the everyday in examining ‘the undiscovered country of the nearby’ (Robert Macfarlane). This literary geographical monograph is the first book-length study of such works of place writing and offers detailed readings of key texts by, amongst others, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Rachel Lichtenstein, Amy Liptrot, Iain Sinclair, Richard Skelton, and Jean Sprackland. Many of these place writing books have been described as immersive works of literature; but, to date, the precise meaning of that term has remained unexamined. How, then, do a range of creative nonfictional texts from the 2010s function as works of immersive place writing? By extension, how do such creative nonfictional texts – rooted, as they are, in the articulation of actual geographical experience – complicate the understanding of what it means for a reader to be imaginatively immersed in a literary work? Reading Place Writing explores these critical questions through an interdisciplinary enlacing of geographical thought, cognitive linguistics, narrative theory, and a series of creative-critical interventions.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.As the era of high globalization has given way to a time of resurgent nationalisms, the discourse of travel has undergone significant change. The previous era’s keywords of freedom, mobility and connection increasingly vie with a language of borders, security and national identity. In this study of the politics of modern travel and migration, John Culbert shows how today’s contradictions of global mobility are an abiding feature of modernity and an outgrowth of coloniality as an ongoing practice of land theft, displacement and dispossession.Focussing on English, American, and Anglophone literary writing on travel, and spanning early twentieth-century tourism to present-day refugee narratives, Proximities examines contexts and situations in which travellers of discrepant rights and privileges meet, arguing that such scenes of 'proximity' yield unforeseen prospects for ethical rapports and political solidarity. In so doing, Culbert makes a strong case for humanistic and interdisciplinary critical study at a time when research on mobility and migration is dominated by social-scientific knowledge. Pointing out that the contradictions of global mobility are reflected in the academy itself, Culbert advocates for a reflexive, decolonial critique of the conditions of knowledge production today. Proximities is a vital contribution to current debates on citizenship, human rights, decoloniality and the right to move.

With the pressing work of decolonising our reading lists gaining traction in UK higher educational contexts, Decolonising the Conrad Canon shows how those author-Gods most associated with the colonial literary canon can also be retooled through decolonial, queer, feminist readings. This book finds pockets of powerful anti-colonial resistance and queer dissonance in Joseph Conrad’s lesser-known works – breathing spaces from the colonial rhetoric that dominates his novels – and traces the female characters who voice them off the page and into their transmedia (digital/illustrative/cinematic) afterlives. From Immada and Edith’s queer gaze in The Rescue and the periodicalillustrations that accompanied its initial serialization, to Aïssa’s sustained critique of imperialism in An Outcast of the Islands and her portrayal on mass-market paperback book covers, to the structural female bonds of Almayer’s Folly and Nina’s embodiment in Chantal Akerman’s adaptation La Folie Almayer, this book centres Conrad’s female characters as viable, meaning-making citizens of the canon. Through this intervention, Decolonising the Conrad Canon proposes an innovative model for teaching, reading and studying not just Joseph Conrad’s work but the colonial literary canon more broadly.

This book is about the intertextual relationships between the works of the Shelleys and the Brownings. While a lot of research has been done on the relationship between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Browning, virtually nothing has been said about the links between Mary Shelley and Robert Browning, and very little on the connections between the Shelleys and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Rieko Suzuki seeks to address this blind spot by focusing on three areas in particular: firstly, the way that Browning’s later poems reflect back on and re-engage with Shelley’s work; secondly, Mary Shelley’s influence on Browning’s early poems; and thirdly, Shelley’s presence in and influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s writing. In mapping out the various ways in which texts relate to other texts, the book also identifies a number of important thematic threads that run throughout the work of all four writers. These include theories of history and historical consciousness, providing a further dimension to the question of ‘influence’. They also include ideas about exile, gender, liberal politics and cultural heritage, central to almost all the texts discussed here, as the Shelleys and the Brownings, in different ways and in varying contexts, tried to negotiate the possibility of a more tolerant and resilient social, political and cultural environment.

Elizabethan Occult Poetics argues that occult tradition influenced the development of vernacular poetics during the sixteenth century and explores the ways in which discourses from the occult tradition, ranging from the scientific to the magical, were actively absorbed into both the theory and practice of English poetics. This study examines the absorption of occult discourses into the theory and practice of poetry as well as their presence in poetic content. Beginning with John Dee’s fascination with the geometrical foundation of alphabets and language, Elizabethan Occult Poetics goes back to ‘tittles and jots’ and the building blocks of affective language, before turning to the attempts of Philip Sidney and his contemporaries to create an efficacious English poetic tradition. The second part of the book focuses on the incorporation of occult discourses as content and writers’ negotiations of competing theories between the arcane and the scientific through chapters on cosmology and light in the work of Giordano Bruno and Fulke Greville, optics in George Chapman’s vernacular poetry, and magnetism in Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene. This study shows that sixteenth-century poets pursued an affective and efficacious poetic tradition via the incorporation of occult discourses in theory, practice, and content.

Honourable Mention in the 2023 British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph PrizeThe Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.

In 1617, Rachel Speght caused a sensation when, at the age of nineteen, she published a polemic in defence of women under her own name. Daring to identify herself as a ‘forward’ woman, she repudiated the prevailing misogyny of her day. However, the power of her words died with her, and, for over 350 years, she was lost from view. Since the rediscovery of her works in the 1980s, Speght has become a familiar name in Renaissance literature. Nevertheless, almost fifty years after her re-emergence, the woman behind the works remains little known.This book explores Speght’s life, from her formation in the turbulent world of Jacobean London to her last years as a displaced person within a Suffolk community torn apart by religious strife. Considering her as a writer and polemicist but also as a ‘public housewife’, the book reveals a courageous thinker and protagonist. One of the defining authors of what Christina Luckyj has described as the ‘radical politics of the female voice’ in early-Stuart England, and one of the few clergy wives to speak out in defence of her faith amid the chaos of the Civil War, Rachel Speght emerges as one of the most compelling female personalities of her age.