Oxford Textual Perspectives – serie

Locating Hercules is a study of the reception and significance of the hero-god Hercules in sixteenth-century England, and of the sources and poetics of classical mythology in English writing c. 1540–1600. Locating Hercules provides the first full account of the reception of Hercules in early modern England, and of the literary and cultural potentialities of this multi-dimensional figure, discussing a range of 'Herculeses' across genres and forms, including the works of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. The book provides a novel account of the early modern Hercules as a multiplex figure possessed of a range of overlapping and often contradictory generic, tonal, and geographical associations: potentially comic and/or tragic; hypermasculine and/or unmanned; part of British legendary history and/or peripheral to it. The book identifies for the first time a significant aspect of this Herculean plurality and its literary effects in a new set of texts: classical geographical writing. It shows that texts such as Strabo's Geography and Pausanias's Description of Greece circulated in early modern Britain and that these texts and their methods shape the use of classical mythology and figures in sixteenth-century literature. As such, the book reveals the distinctive status and importance of Hercules in early modern English culture and literature, and outlines a fresh way of reading mythological allusions more generally as flexible, topographically-informed elements within early modern writing.

Locating Hercules is a study of the reception and significance of the hero-god Hercules in sixteenth-century England, and of the sources and poetics of classical mythology in English writing c. 1540–1600. Locating Hercules provides the first full account of the reception of Hercules in early modern England, and of the literary and cultural potentialities of this multi-dimensional figure, discussing a range of 'Herculeses' across genres and forms, including the works of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. The book provides a novel account of the early modern Hercules as a multiplex figure possessed of a range of overlapping and often contradictory generic, tonal, and geographical associations: potentially comic and/or tragic; hypermasculine and/or unmanned; part of British legendary history and/or peripheral to it. The book identifies for the first time a significant aspect of this Herculean plurality and its literary effects in a new set of texts: classical geographical writing. It shows that texts such as Strabo's Geography and Pausanias's Description of Greece circulated in early modern Britain and that these texts and their methods shape the use of classical mythology and figures in sixteenth-century literature. As such, the book reveals the distinctive status and importance of Hercules in early modern English culture and literature, and outlines a fresh way of reading mythological allusions more generally as flexible, topographically-informed elements within early modern writing.

Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, this book considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the late Middle Ages. Brought into the broader stream of political consciousness by major baronial families from the March (the borderlands between England and Wales), this inventive history generated a new brand of literature interested in succession, land rights, and the origins of imperial power, as imagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth. These marcher families leveraged their ancestral, political, and ideological ties to Wales in order to strengthen their political power, both regionally and nationally, through the patronage of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined the Welsh past on their terms. In doing so, they brought ideas of Welsh history to a wider audience than previously recognized and came to have a profound effect on late medieval thought about empire, monarchy, and succession.

Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, this book considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the late Middle Ages. Brought into the broader stream of political consciousness by major baronial families from the March (the borderlands between England and Wales), this inventive history generated a new brand of literature interested in succession, land rights, and the origins of imperial power, as imagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth. These marcher families leveraged their ancestral, political, and ideological ties to Wales in order to strengthen their political power, both regionally and nationally, through the patronage of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined the Welsh past on their terms. In doing so, they brought ideas of Welsh history to a wider audience than previously recognized and came to have a profound effect on late medieval thought about empire, monarchy, and succession.

Seldom has a royal court invited such intensive study as that of Henry VIII, or become so prominent in popular culture. Nonetheless, Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry VIII is committed to offering a fresh perspective on Tudor court culture, by using continental sources to contextualize, nuance, and challenge long-held perspectives that have been formed through the use of well-studied, Anglophone sources.Using a wide variety of textual sources, from ambassadorial correspondence, account books, household étiquettes, legal records, royal warrants, and marital contracts, to play texts and travel accounts, this study presents original research in history, literature, and cultural history.The case studies in Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry VIII address specific questions that challenge what we know or think we know about Tudor court culture. For example: was it good taste to bring a jester to a royal deathbed? Was John Blanke really the first black musician to perform at the Tudor court, or did he follow the footsteps of another celebrated performer of African descent? When Charles V came to meet Henry VIII, did he eat from his own plate? And why did courtiers express themselves negatively about Anne of Cleves's appearance? By addressing such specific questions, Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry VIII will show that however quintessentially 'English' Henry VIII's court, it was essentially a place of cultural and intercultural encounters that is best understood when studied in dialogue across languages, geographical barriers, and scholarly disciplines.

Seldom has a royal court invited such intensive study as that of Henry VIII, or become so prominent in popular culture. Nonetheless, Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry VIII is committed to offering a fresh perspective on Tudor court culture, by using continental sources to contextualize, nuance, and challenge long-held perspectives that have been formed through the use of well-studied, Anglophone sources.Using a wide variety of textual sources, from ambassadorial correspondence, account books, household étiquettes, legal records, royal warrants, and marital contracts, to play texts and travel accounts, this study presents original research in history, literature, and cultural history.The case studies in Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry VIII address specific questions that challenge what we know or think we know about Tudor court culture. For example: was it good taste to bring a jester to a royal deathbed? Was John Blanke really the first black musician to perform at the Tudor court, or did he follow the footsteps of another celebrated performer of African descent? When Charles V came to meet Henry VIII, did he eat from his own plate? And why did courtiers express themselves negatively about Anne of Cleves's appearance? By addressing such specific questions, Intercultural Explorations and the Court of Henry VIII will show that however quintessentially 'English' Henry VIII's court, it was essentially a place of cultural and intercultural encounters that is best understood when studied in dialogue across languages, geographical barriers, and scholarly disciplines.

The Idea of the Book and the Creation of Literature explores the intersection of literary history and the history of the book. For several millennia, books have been the material embodiment of knowledge and culture, and an essential embodiment for any kind of knowledge involving texts. Texts, however, do not need to be books-they are not even necessarily written. The oldest poems were composed to be recited, and only written down centuries later. Much of the most famous poetry of the English Renaissance was composed in manuscript form to circulate among a small social circle. Plays began as scripts for performance. What happens to a play when it becomes a book, or to a collection of poems circulated among friends when it becomes a volume of sonnets? How do essays, plays, poems, stories, become Works? How is an author imagined? In this new addition to the Oxford Textual Perspectives series, Stephen Orgel addresses such questions and considers the idea of the book not simply as a container for written work, but as an essential element in its creation.

The Idea of the Book and the Creation of Literature explores the intersection of literary history and the history of the book. For several millennia, books have been the material embodiment of knowledge and culture, and an essential embodiment for any kind of knowledge involving texts. Texts, however, do not need to be books-they are not even necessarily written. The oldest poems were composed to be recited, and only written down centuries later. Much of the most famous poetry of the English Renaissance was composed in manuscript form to circulate among a small social circle. Plays began as scripts for performance. What happens to a play when it becomes a book, or to a collection of poems circulated among friends when it becomes a volume of sonnets? How do essays, plays, poems, stories, become Works? How is an author imagined? In this new addition to the Oxford Textual Perspectives series, Stephen Orgel addresses such questions and considers the idea of the book not simply as a container for written work, but as an essential element in its creation.

Every literary household in nineteenth-century Britain had a commonplace book, scrapbook, or album. Coleridge called his collection "Fly-Catchers", while George Eliot referred to one of her commonplace books as a "Quarry," and Michael Faraday kept quotations in his "Philosophical Miscellany." Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century commonplace book, along with associated traditions like the scrapbook and album, remain under-studied. This book tells the story of how technological and social changes altered methods for gathering, storing, and organizing information in nineteenth-century Britain. As the commonplace book moved out of the schoolroom and into the home, it took on elements of the friendship album. At the same time, the explosion of print allowed readers to cheaply cut-and-paste extractions rather than copying out quotations by hand. Built on the evidence of over 300 manuscripts, this volume unearths the composition practices of well-known writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and their less well-known contemporaries. Divided into two sections, the first half of the book contends that methods for organizing knowledge developed in line with the period's dominant epistemic frameworks, while the second half argues that commonplace books helped Romantics and Victorians organize people.Chapters focus on prominent organizational methods in nineteenth-century commonplacing, often attached to an associated epistemic virtue: diaristic forms and the imagination (Chapter Two); "real time" entries signalling objectivity (Chapter Three); antiquarian remnants, serving as empirical evidence for historical arguments (Chapter Four); communally produced commonplace books that attest to socially constructed knowledge (Chapter Five); and blank spaces in commonplace books of mourning (Chapter Six). Richly illustrated, this book brings an archive of commonplace books, scrapbooks, and albums to the reader.

Every literary household in nineteenth-century Britain had a commonplace book, scrapbook, or album. Coleridge called his collection "Fly-Catchers", while George Eliot referred to one of her commonplace books as a "Quarry," and Michael Faraday kept quotations in his "Philosophical Miscellany." Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century commonplace book, along with associated traditions like the scrapbook and album, remain under-studied. This book tells the story of how technological and social changes altered methods for gathering, storing, and organizing information in nineteenth-century Britain. As the commonplace book moved out of the schoolroom and into the home, it took on elements of the friendship album. At the same time, the explosion of print allowed readers to cheaply cut-and-paste extractions rather than copying out quotations by hand. Built on the evidence of over 300 manuscripts, this volume unearths the composition practices of well-known writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and their less well-known contemporaries. Divided into two sections, the first half of the book contends that methods for organizing knowledge developed in line with the period's dominant epistemic frameworks, while the second half argues that commonplace books helped Romantics and Victorians organize people.Chapters focus on prominent organizational methods in nineteenth-century commonplacing, often attached to an associated epistemic virtue: diaristic forms and the imagination (Chapter Two); "real time" entries signalling objectivity (Chapter Three); antiquarian remnants, serving as empirical evidence for historical arguments (Chapter Four); communally produced commonplace books that attest to socially constructed knowledge (Chapter Five); and blank spaces in commonplace books of mourning (Chapter Six). Richly illustrated, this book brings an archive of commonplace books, scrapbooks, and albums to the reader.

This book tells the material and intellectual history of several translations of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, from Lorenzo Valla's first Latin rendering in 1452, to the publication of Thomas Hobbes' English version in 1629. As Valla's manuscript passed through the hands of several editors and publishers who rendered it into print, the History of the Peloponnesian War also underwent a series of significant adaptations and changes, most telling in the vernacular versions in French (Claude de Seyssel, 1527), Italian (Francesco Strozzi, 1545), English (Thomas Nicholls, 1550), and Spanish (Diego Gracián, 1564) that eventually emerged. These translations were often motivated by various political or expedient uses, which the format of the printed manuscripts reveals. The book concludes with an in-depth look at the debut in print of one the most relevant political philosophers of modernity, Thomas Hobbes' Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre. Readers will come away understanding the profound extent to which the material history of a text conditions its reception and status, and our very sense of history itself.

Guilty But Insane takes an historical approach to golden age detective fiction by Margery Allingham, Christianna Brand, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Gladys Mitchell. It examines how writers and readers of detective fiction during the 1920s to 1940s understood guilt, responsibility, and the workings of the mind as they related to the commission, the investigation, and the punishment of crime. Under the lens of psychology, the detective novel is revealed as a site for the negotiation of competing interpretations of sanity and insanity. An unexplored depth and subtlety is revealed in detective novels that address major controversies in legal and psychiatric theory and practice, while significant resonances with specific concerns of modernist fiction come into focus for the first time. During the interwar years, proponents of competing psychological schools challenged legal concepts of responsibility and free will. In response, golden age writers began to reflect on the genre's promise to accomplish true and just solutions in a social order in which the relationship between law and justice was being problematized on several fronts. By making connections between high modernism and popular culture, and by tracing the impact of psychological discourses across a range of different cultural outputs, this book makes a persuasive case for reading detective fiction historically. It aims to demonstrate the richness of these texts and their value for scholarship, not only as historical documents or residues of discourse, but as literary texts which challenge, subvert, toy with and test the prevailing values and prejudices of interwar Britain.

Guilty But Insane takes an historical approach to golden age detective fiction by Margery Allingham, Christianna Brand, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Gladys Mitchell. It examines how writers and readers of detective fiction during the 1920s to 1940s understood guilt, responsibility, and the workings of the mind as they related to the commission, the investigation, and the punishment of crime. Under the lens of psychology, the detective novel is revealed as a site for the negotiation of competing interpretations of sanity and insanity. An unexplored depth and subtlety is revealed in detective novels that address major controversies in legal and psychiatric theory and practice, while significant resonances with specific concerns of modernist fiction come into focus for the first time. During the interwar years, proponents of competing psychological schools challenged legal concepts of responsibility and free will. In response, golden age writers began to reflect on the genre's promise to accomplish true and just solutions in a social order in which the relationship between law and justice was being problematized on several fronts. By making connections between high modernism and popular culture, and by tracing the impact of psychological discourses across a range of different cultural outputs, this book makes a persuasive case for reading detective fiction historically. It aims to demonstrate the richness of these texts and their value for scholarship, not only as historical documents or residues of discourse, but as literary texts which challenge, subvert, toy with and test the prevailing values and prejudices of interwar Britain.

The Reader in the Book is concerned with a particular aspect of the history of the book, an archeology and sociology of the use of margins and other blank spaces. One of the most commonplace aspects of old books is the fact that people wrote in them, something that, until very recently, has infuriated modern collectors and librarians. But these inscriptions constitute a significant dimension of the book's history, and what readers did to books often added to their value. Sometimes marks in books have no relation to the subject of the book, merely names, dates, prices paid; blank spaces were used for pen trials and doing sums, and flyleaves are occasionally the repository of records of various kinds. The Reader in the Book deals with that special class of books in which the text and marginalia are in intense communication with each other, in which reading constitutes an active and sometimes adversarial engagement with the book. The major examples are works that are either classics or were classics in their own time; but they are seen here as contemporaries read them, without the benefit of centuries of commentary and critical guidance. The underlying question is at what point marginalia, the legible incorporation of the work of reading into the text of the book, became a way of defacing it rather than of increasing its value-why did we want books to lose their history?

The Reader in the Book is concerned with a particular aspect of the history of the book, an archeology and sociology of the use of margins and other blank spaces. One of the most commonplace aspects of old books is the fact that people wrote in them, something that, until very recently, has infuriated modern collectors and librarians. But these inscriptions constitute a significant dimension of the book's history, and what readers did to books often added to their value. Sometimes marks in books have no relation to the subject of the book, merely names, dates, prices paid; blank spaces were used for pen trials and doing sums, and flyleaves are occasionally the repository of records of various kinds. The Reader in the Book deals with that special class of books in which the text and marginalia are in intense communication with each other, in which reading constitutes an active and sometimes adversarial engagement with the book. The major examples are works that are either classics or were classics in their own time; but they are seen here as contemporaries read them, without the benefit of centuries of commentary and critical guidance. The underlying question is at what point marginalia, the legible incorporation of the work of reading into the text of the book, became a way of defacing it rather than of increasing its value-why did we want books to lose their history?

The aim of this book is to restore to the story of Englishness the lively material interactions between words, bodies, plants, stones, metals, and soil, among other things, that would have characterized it for the early medieval English themselves. In particular, each chapter demonstrates how a productive collapse, or fusion, between place and history happens not only in the intellectual realm, in ideas, but is also a material concern, becoming enfleshed in encounters between early medieval bodies and a host of material entities. Through readings of texts in a wide variety of genres including hagiography, heroic poetry, and medical and historical works, the book argues that Englishness during this period is an embodied identity emergent at the frontier of material and textual interactions that serve productively to occlude history, religion, and geography. The early medieval English body thus results from the rich encounter between the lived environment--climate, soil, landscape features, plants--and the textual-discursive realm that both determines what that environment means and is also itself determined by the material constraints of everyday life.

The aim of this book is to restore to the story of Englishness the lively material interactions between words, bodies, plants, stones, metals, and soil, among other things, that would have characterized it for the early medieval English themselves. In particular, each chapter demonstrates how a productive collapse, or fusion, between place and history happens not only in the intellectual realm, in ideas, but is also a material concern, becoming enfleshed in encounters between early medieval bodies and a host of material entities. Through readings of texts in a wide variety of genres including hagiography, heroic poetry, and medical and historical works, the book argues that Englishness during this period is an embodied identity emergent at the frontier of material and textual interactions that serve productively to occlude history, religion, and geography. The early medieval English body thus results from the rich encounter between the lived environment--climate, soil, landscape features, plants--and the textual-discursive realm that both determines what that environment means and is also itself determined by the material constraints of everyday life.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works.Imagining Spectatorship offers a new discussion of how spectators witnessed early drama in the various spaces and places in which those works were performed. It combines broad historical and theoretical reflection with closely analysed case studies to produce a comprehensive account of the ways in which individuals encountered early drama, how they were cued to respond to it, and how we might think about those issues today.It addresses the practical matters that conditioned spectatorship, principally those concerned with the location and configuration of the spaces in which a performance occurred, but also suggests how these factors intersected with social status, gender, religious commitment and affiliation, degrees of real or felt personal agency, and the operation of the cognitive processes themselves. It considers both real witnesses and those 'imagined' spectators which are seemingly figured by both dramatic and quasi-dramatic works, and whose assumed attitudes play-makers sought to second-guess. It also looks at the spectatorial experience itself as a subject of representation in a number of early texts. Finally, it examines the complex contract entered into by audiences and players for the duration of a performance, looking at how texts cued spectators to respond to specific dramaturgical tropes and gambits and how audience response was itself a cause of potential anxiety for writers.The book resists the conventional divide between 'medieval' and 'early-modern' drama, using its focus on the spectators' experience to point connections and continuities across a diverse range of genres, such as processions and tourneys as well as scripted plays, pageants, and interludes; a variety of different venues, such as city streets, great halls, and playhouses, and a period of about 150 years to the Shakespearean stage of the 1590s and 1600s. It seeks to offer routes by which inferences about early spectatorship can be made despite the relative absence of personal testimony from the period.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works.Imagining Spectatorship offers a new discussion of how spectators witnessed early drama in the various spaces and places in which those works were performed. It combines broad historical and theoretical reflection with closely analysed case studies to produce a comprehensive account of the ways in which individuals encountered early drama, how they were cued to respond to it, and how we might think about those issues today.It addresses the practical matters that conditioned spectatorship, principally those concerned with the location and configuration of the spaces in which a performance occurred, but also suggests how these factors intersected with social status, gender, religious commitment and affiliation, degrees of real or felt personal agency, and the operation of the cognitive processes themselves. It considers both real witnesses and those 'imagined' spectators which are seemingly figured by both dramatic and quasi-dramatic works, and whose assumed attitudes play-makers sought to second-guess. It also looks at the spectatorial experience itself as a subject of representation in a number of early texts. Finally, it examines the complex contract entered into by audiences and players for the duration of a performance, looking at how texts cued spectators to respond to specific dramaturgical tropes and gambits and how audience response was itself a cause of potential anxiety for writers.The book resists the conventional divide between 'medieval' and 'early-modern' drama, using its focus on the spectators' experience to point connections and continuities across a diverse range of genres, such as processions and tourneys as well as scripted plays, pageants, and interludes; a variety of different venues, such as city streets, great halls, and playhouses, and a period of about 150 years to the Shakespearean stage of the 1590s and 1600s. It seeks to offer routes by which inferences about early spectatorship can be made despite the relative absence of personal testimony from the period.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works.Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690-1840 argues that between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries manual writing was a dynamic technology. It examines script in relation to becoming a writer; in constructions of the author; and in emerging ideas of the human. Revising views of print as displacing script, Work in Hand argues that print reproduced script, print generated script; and print shaped understandings of script. In this, the double nature of print, as both moveable type and rolling press, is crucial. During this period, the shapes of letters changed as the multiple hands of the early-modern period gave way to English round hand; the denial of writing to the labouring classes was slowly replaced by acceptance of the desirability of universal writing; understandings of script in relation to copying and discipline came to be accompanied by ideas of the autograph. The work begins by surveying representations of script in letterpress and engraving. It discusses initiation into writing in relation to the copy-books of English writing masters, and in the context of colonial pedagogy in Ireland and India. The middle chapters discuss the physical work of writing, the material dimensions of script, and the autograph, in constructions of the author in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in relation to Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, William Blake, Isaac D'Israeli, and Maria Edgeworth. The final chapter considers the emerging association of script with ideas of the human in the work of the Methodist preacher Joseph Barker.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works.Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690-1840 argues that between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries manual writing was a dynamic technology. It examines script in relation to becoming a writer; in constructions of the author; and in emerging ideas of the human. Revising views of print as displacing script, Work in Hand argues that print reproduced script, print generated script; and print shaped understandings of script. In this, the double nature of print, as both moveable type and rolling press, is crucial. During this period, the shapes of letters changed as the multiple hands of the early-modern period gave way to English round hand; the denial of writing to the labouring classes was slowly replaced by acceptance of the desirability of universal writing; understandings of script in relation to copying and discipline came to be accompanied by ideas of the autograph. The work begins by surveying representations of script in letterpress and engraving. It discusses initiation into writing in relation to the copy-books of English writing masters, and in the context of colonial pedagogy in Ireland and India. The middle chapters discuss the physical work of writing, the material dimensions of script, and the autograph, in constructions of the author in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in relation to Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, William Blake, Isaac D'Israeli, and Maria Edgeworth. The final chapter considers the emerging association of script with ideas of the human in the work of the Methodist preacher Joseph Barker.

No medieval text was designed to be read hundreds of years later by an audience unfamiliar with its language, situation, and author. By ascribing to these texts intentional anonymity, we romanticise them and misjudge the social character of their authors. Instead, most medieval poems and manuscripts presuppose familiarity with their authorial or scribal maker. Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England attempts to recover this familiarity and understand the literary motivation behind some of most important fifteenth-century texts and authors.Last Words captures the public selves of such social authors when they attempt to extract themselves from the context of a lived life. Driven by archival research and literary inquiry, this book reveals where John Gower kept the Trentham manuscript in his final years, how John Lydgate wished to be remembered, and why Thomas Hoccleve wrote his best-known work, the Series. It includes documentary breakthroughs and archival discoveries, and introduces a new life record for Hoccleve, identifies the author of a significant political poem, and reveals the handwriting of John Gower and George Ashby.Through its investments in archival study, book history, and literary criticism, Last Words charts the extent to which medieval English literature was shaped by the social selves of their authors.

No medieval text was designed to be read hundreds of years later by an audience unfamiliar with its language, situation, and author. By ascribing to these texts intentional anonymity, we romanticise them and misjudge the social character of their authors. Instead, most medieval poems and manuscripts presuppose familiarity with their authorial or scribal maker. Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England attempts to recover this familiarity and understand the literary motivation behind some of most important fifteenth-century texts and authors.Last Words captures the public selves of such social authors when they attempt to extract themselves from the context of a lived life. Driven by archival research and literary inquiry, this book reveals where John Gower kept the Trentham manuscript in his final years, how John Lydgate wished to be remembered, and why Thomas Hoccleve wrote his best-known work, the Series. It includes documentary breakthroughs and archival discoveries, and introduces a new life record for Hoccleve, identifies the author of a significant political poem, and reveals the handwriting of John Gower and George Ashby.Through its investments in archival study, book history, and literary criticism, Last Words charts the extent to which medieval English literature was shaped by the social selves of their authors.

How does one know a whore is a whore? Upon what terms, standards, interpretive logics, and material practices does such knowledge depend? In Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom, Stephen Spiess pursues these questions and, in so doing, discovers the extraordinary cultural labor necessary to produce and sustain the fiction of the “whore” as a fixed, coherent, and readily apprehensible category of sexual knowledge. This work, he shows, unfolds across a variety of historically situated social, textual, and linguistic processes, from the writing of dictionary entries, character sketches, and lyric poems to public proclamations, conversion rituals, and dramatic representations. It also extends into the present era, where scholars continue to shore up whoredom's incoherences and to reproduce moralized distinctions between “real” prostitutes and “discursive” whores. Charting a different approach in this book, Spiess argues that the ambiguities, incoherences, and impasses that attend the meanings and makings of English whoredom are essential to understanding how that category operates, both in that historical culture and our own. Establishing whoredom as a knowledge relation and a material process, he reveals the analytical benefits of lingering in sites where sexual knowledge breaks down, and of tarrying with the complexities and consequences of the material practices, cultural logics, and social affects that emerge to mediate these impasses. Applying the methods and insights of queer epistemology to a topic of vital feminist concern, Spiess locates new sites for discursive contestation while resisting the identitarian or ontological logics that disciplinary categories seek to install in the first place. Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom thus delivers a new analytical framework for understanding the social, textual, and representational histories of illicit sexual figures in early modern England.

How does one know a whore is a whore? Upon what terms, standards, interpretive logics, and material practices does such knowledge depend? In Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom, Stephen Spiess pursues these questions and, in so doing, discovers the extraordinary cultural labor necessary to produce and sustain the fiction of the “whore” as a fixed, coherent, and readily apprehensible category of sexual knowledge. This work, he shows, unfolds across a variety of historically situated social, textual, and linguistic processes, from the writing of dictionary entries, character sketches, and lyric poems to public proclamations, conversion rituals, and dramatic representations. It also extends into the present era, where scholars continue to shore up whoredom's incoherences and to reproduce moralized distinctions between “real” prostitutes and “discursive” whores. Charting a different approach in this book, Spiess argues that the ambiguities, incoherences, and impasses that attend the meanings and makings of English whoredom are essential to understanding how that category operates, both in that historical culture and our own. Establishing whoredom as a knowledge relation and a material process, he reveals the analytical benefits of lingering in sites where sexual knowledge breaks down, and of tarrying with the complexities and consequences of the material practices, cultural logics, and social affects that emerge to mediate these impasses. Applying the methods and insights of queer epistemology to a topic of vital feminist concern, Spiess locates new sites for discursive contestation while resisting the identitarian or ontological logics that disciplinary categories seek to install in the first place. Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom thus delivers a new analytical framework for understanding the social, textual, and representational histories of illicit sexual figures in early modern England.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works.This is the first book to explore the dramatic impact of genetics on literary fiction over the past four decades. After James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 and the subsequent cracking of the genetic code, a gene-centric discourse developed which had a major impact not only on biological science but on wider culture. As figures like E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins popularised the neo-Darwinian view that behaviour was driven by genetic self-interest, novelists were both compelled and unnerved by such a vision of the origins and ends of life. This book maps the ways in which Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro wrestled with the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of human nature and with the challenge it posed to humanist beliefs about identity, agency, and morality. It argues that these novelists were alienated to varying degrees by neo-Darwinian arguments but that the recent shift to postgenomic science has enabled a greater rapprochement between biological and (post)humanist concepts of human nature. The postgenomic view of organisms as agentic and interactive is echoed in the life-writing of Margaret Drabble and Jackie Kay, which also explores the ethical implications of this holistic biological perspective. As advances in postgenomics, especially epigenetics, provoke increasing public interest and concern, this book offers a timely analysis of debates that have fundamentally altered our understanding of what it means to be human.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works.This is the first book to explore the dramatic impact of genetics on literary fiction over the past four decades. After James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 and the subsequent cracking of the genetic code, a gene-centric discourse developed which had a major impact not only on biological science but on wider culture. As figures like E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins popularised the neo-Darwinian view that behaviour was driven by genetic self-interest, novelists were both compelled and unnerved by such a vision of the origins and ends of life. This book maps the ways in which Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro wrestled with the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of human nature and with the challenge it posed to humanist beliefs about identity, agency, and morality. It argues that these novelists were alienated to varying degrees by neo-Darwinian arguments but that the recent shift to postgenomic science has enabled a greater rapprochement between biological and (post)humanist concepts of human nature. The postgenomic view of organisms as agentic and interactive is echoed in the life-writing of Margaret Drabble and Jackie Kay, which also explores the ethical implications of this holistic biological perspective. As advances in postgenomics, especially epigenetics, provoke increasing public interest and concern, this book offers a timely analysis of debates that have fundamentally altered our understanding of what it means to be human.

World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture explores the ways in which a range of modern textual cultures have continued to engage creatively with the medieval past in order to come to terms with the global present. Building its argument through four case studies--from the Middle East, France, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous Australia--it shows that to understand medievalism as a cultural idiom with global reach, we need to develop a more nuanced grasp of the different ways 'the Middle Ages' have come to signify beyond Europe as well as within a Europe that has been transformed by multiculturalism and the global economy. The book's case studies are explored within a conceptual framework in which medievalism itself is formulated as 'world-disclosing' a transhistorical encounter that enables the modern subject to apprehend the past 'world' opened up in medieval and medievalist texts and objects. The book analyses the cultural and material conditions under which its texts are produced, disseminated, and received, and examines literature alongside films, television programs, newspapers and journals, political tracts, as well as such material and artefactual texts as photographs, paintings, statues, buildings, rock art, and fossils. While the case studies feature distinctive localised forms of medievalism, taken together they reveal how imperial and global legacies have ensured that the medieval period continues to be perceived as a commonly held past that can be retrieved, reclaimed, or revived in response to the accelerated changes and uncertainties of global modernity.

World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture explores the ways in which a range of modern textual cultures have continued to engage creatively with the medieval past in order to come to terms with the global present. Building its argument through four case studies--from the Middle East, France, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous Australia--it shows that to understand medievalism as a cultural idiom with global reach, we need to develop a more nuanced grasp of the different ways 'the Middle Ages' have come to signify beyond Europe as well as within a Europe that has been transformed by multiculturalism and the global economy. The book's case studies are explored within a conceptual framework in which medievalism itself is formulated as 'world-disclosing' a transhistorical encounter that enables the modern subject to apprehend the past 'world' opened up in medieval and medievalist texts and objects. The book analyses the cultural and material conditions under which its texts are produced, disseminated, and received, and examines literature alongside films, television programs, newspapers and journals, political tracts, as well as such material and artefactual texts as photographs, paintings, statues, buildings, rock art, and fossils. While the case studies feature distinctive localised forms of medievalism, taken together they reveal how imperial and global legacies have ensured that the medieval period continues to be perceived as a commonly held past that can be retrieved, reclaimed, or revived in response to the accelerated changes and uncertainties of global modernity.