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Explores the profound influence of multilingual dictionaries, dialogues, and grammars on English Renaissance playwrights

In Theaters of Translation, Andrew S. Keener offers a fascinating account of the ways that plays by Thomas Kyd, Mary Sidney Herbert, Ben Jonson, and their fellow English contemporaries were shaped by and part of a multilingual Europe where dictionaries, grammars, and language-learning materials circulated widely. He proposes a fresh, multilingual approach to English Renaissance drama that challenges the histories of early modern European languages as sites of national and linguistic cohesion.

Covering the period between 1570 and 1640, when England’s drama and the English language itself were evolving, Keener uses the term “cosmopolitan vernaculars” to examine how nonclassical European languages modeled transnational forms of belonging for playgoers, readers, and authors in Renaissance England. Combining recent contributions to cosmopolitan theory and transnational studies of early modern literature and culture, Keener highlights both the ways in which cosmopolitanism manifests through Europe’s vernacular languages—in print and performance—and the ways languages themselves can exhibit cosmopolitanism for those who encounter them on the page or on the stage.

Theaters of Translation opens up new transnational interpretations of English Renaissance plays and casts fresh light on historical anecdotes, such as Jonson inscribing a copy of Pietro Aretino’s scandalous Italian dialogues or Shakespeare’s First Folio being advertised for sale in Germany before its London publication. It offers much of interest to readers and scholars of Renaissance Europe, early modern drama, and the development of national European languages.

Thomas P. Harrison here combines a lifelong interest in birds with a professional study of literature. This book, a study of birds as they are presented by four great English poets, inquires into the extent and sources of their knowledge of birds and analyzes the methods by which they adapted that knowledge for poetic purposes. The interrelationships of their poetry are also discussed, providing a new basis for comparison of four poets whose work is closely linked on other grounds remote from natural history.

The first chapter reviews representative figures and works of the centuries preceding the Renaissance and illustrates the medieval poetic conventions about birds that influenced the four poets. The remaining chapters treat each poet and his works in detail, comparing their use of this area of the natural world. The book concludes with an index of bird allusions in the works of the four poets, with occasional quotations illustrating the manner in which the traditional or observed habits of particular birds were put to poetic use. The book is illustrated with medieval and Renaissance illustrations of birds.

In this careful treatment of an important element of the poets’ works, Harrison has indicated the larger picture of their attitudes toward and use of the natural world about them. Accordingly, it might be said to constitute a chapter on the relationship of poetry and science at a crucial period in the history of thought.

For much of his material, Harrison journeyed to England, where, among other research activities, he visited museums of natural history and bird sanctuaries throughout the country.

Primarily intended for students of literature, They Tell of Birds will also be of interest to ornithologists in its presentation of the beliefs of antiquity and the Middle Ages about particular birds. For, as the distinguished ornithologist E. M. Nicholson has said: “We owe to poets a wealth of records of living wild birds long before scientific ornithology had started.”

Thine Own Self investigates Stein's account of human individuality and her mature philosophical positions on being and essence. Sarah Borden Sharkey shows how Stein's account of individual form adapts and updates the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition in order to account for evolution and more contemporary insights in personality and individual distinctiveness.

How the form of the case history became an important way of studying the individual as an exemplary case in medicine, psychoanalysis, law, and the novel.

What does it mean when we address ourselves to a specific problem and treat it as a “case” that needs resolution, a resolution that may in turn offer us more general lessons? The “case history” has become a central form of thought and analysis in our culture, but rarely has it been studied on its own. In Thinking in Cases, the distinguished critic Peter Brooks zeroes in on a kind of thinking that we all know—and often use—without understanding its dimensions and its history.

This book ponders what we do and mean when we think in cases—when we take up specific instances with a view to making them exemplary. Brooks brings to this study decades of reflection on the psychoanalytic case history, on the rhetoric of the legal case, and on novels that unfold as cases seeking solutions. Brooks focuses on the case-history’s emergence in the late nineteenth century: first, he examines how Henry James’s uses of narrative parallel case-study methods in law, medicine, and psychoanalysis. Elsewhere, he traces the case history from Hippocratic medicine through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction to a startling legal case from Victorian England involving shipwreck and cannibalism. Other chapters discuss a tale of madness by Balzac and Freud’s most speculative works, especially Moses and Monotheism. A final chapter examines recent novels—Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Modiano’s Dora Bruder, and Erpenbeck’s Kairos—as case studies.

Third Wave gathers writings by contemporary Russian poets whose linguistic and conceptual experimentation represents what critics have termed a “third wave” of literary innovation. The work of this new generation of poets, having gained impetus and audience in the era of perestroika, reflects an experimental spirit that has not surfaced in the USSR since the avant-garde surge of the 1920s and the poetic revival that accompanied the liberalization of the 1950s and 1960s.This historic collection will appeal to the general reader eager for a glimpse into contemporary Soviet literature and culture as well as to scholars working in the areas of comparative literature, Soviet studies, modern literature, poetics, and the avant-garde.

Thomas James Wise (1859–1937), though destined to receive in his own lifetime practically every honor the world of letters could bestow, is remembered today as perhaps the greatest malefactor in all of literary history. From 1934 to 1957 various enquiries have implicated him first in the manufacture of more than fifty predated "original" editions of eminent Victorian authors, then in seven additional forgeries, later in countless piracies of other nineteenth-century work, and finally in repeated acts of vandalism upon forty-one seventeenth-century plays. It is fitting that Wise himself appears as a contributor to this volume. Included are his original introduction to the Browning Library, his letters to bookseller J. E. Cornish, his extraordinary letter to Sir Edmund Gosse, and a note to H. Buxton Forman.

These Centenary Studies review the course of research over twenty-five years, designate topics requiring further investigation, and assess new evidence of Wise's villainies. One more forgery is identified, the provenance of others reexamined, the forger's method of purveying his wares closely appraised, his association with H. Buxton Forman and Sir Edmund Gosse more precisely defined, and the range of his activities summarized in an annotated handlist. The record includes at least 400 printings directly attributed to Wise, as well as 23 suppressed or abortive issues, and 29 others in which he seems to be somewhat involved. Through these perspectives the culprit appears even more contemptible and, possibly for this very reason, ever more intriguing as a cause célèbre in literary scholarship.

The illustration on the cover of this book reproduces, through a magnifying glass, the peculiar question mark appearing in certain forgeries printed for Wise by the firm of Richard Clay & Sons. The mark may also implicate Wise in other irregular printings, including The Death of Balder.

Many writers, from Aristophanes to Joseph Heller, have written about politics. But at certain periods in history, often at times of conflict and turmoil, writers have consciously used their literary talents to support or oppose a specific cause. The 1930s, a decade of widespread social and political breakdown, was such a period.

Today the Struggle examines the political involvement of those leading British writers who dedicated their talents to the defense of Nationalists or Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War and who saw that war as symbolic of their own Right-Left dialogue.

Conservatives like William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot and Roman Catholics like Evelyn Waugh were passionately anti-Communist. They viewed fascism as a bulwark against communism but were unwilling to support the Franco cause actively. Other pro-Nationalists were not so hesitant: Roy Campbell and Wyndham Lewis were ardent participants in the fight against the British left wing.

Pro-Loyalists, united only in their antifascism, ranged from conservative to anarchist in political commitment. Their literary contributions included fine poems by W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, experimental drama by Auden and Christopher Isherwood, and impassioned prose by Rex Warner, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley.

Katharine Hoskins’s principal interest in Today the Struggle is to discover how and why certain writers supported specific political actions, to ascertain the effectiveness of their efforts, and to evaluate the influence of these efforts on their work.

Book sales of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien keep pace with those of the Koran and the Bible. TV companies pay hundreds of millions to the Tolkien Trust to make adaptations of his work. In the UK, he routinely tops the list of the nation’s favorite authors. An estimated 2 million war gamers use The Lord of the Rings figurines in their RPG. It is incontestable that Tolkien is the most influential Catholic writer of the last century. Tolkien, Philosopher of War fills a gap in the scholarship. It is the first book addressing the philosophical and theological understanding of war in Tolkien and will interest readers of Catholic Studies, the philosophy and theology of literature, war studies, Tolkien Studies, English studies, political theory, and aesthetics. In popular imagination, Tolkien is a Luddite, but recent scholarship has identified Tolkien’s extensive modern sympathies. Tolkien, Philosopher of War contributes to this growing literature. His is a modern critique of Enlightenment thinking, specifically those philosophies of history that wrest the initiative from God in divinizing man. His worry is apocalyptic politics, those political movements that take Christ’s "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5: 48) out of the realm of grace and make it a platform for political action. Tolkien, Philosopher of War has three core theses: metaphysical, political, and aesthetic. In this, Tolkien is comparable to Cormac McCarthy, especially his Blood Meridian. Tolkien took note of a tight analytical connection between the vanity driving commercial civilization – which Hume, Smith, and Ferguson all identified – and the vanity driving the Promethean fantasies of apocalyptic politics. War – indeed, total war – is a predictable outcome of this analytical connection. The three theses run: 1) metaphysical: the apocalyptic anxiety of Tolkien’s lore is traceable to the gnostic rejection of the analogy of being typical of the philosophies of history that dominated his day; 2) political: in the English context, Tolkien sided with the Tories against Whiggery, defending monarchy as a counterweight to the vanity driving progressive philosophy of history; 3) aesthetic: Futurism’s philosophy of history celebrated the Machine; inverting the value order, the Futurism art movement encoded anti-Christianity, fascist politics, and apocalyptic war. Tolkien’s “cosmogonical drama,” with its pastoralism and portraits of angels (Gandalf) and gods (Nienna), dramatizes an aesthetic resistance to Futurism.

The mauve life and times of Edmund Gosse glow warmly in these letters, delightful to even the most casual reader, engrossing to one with an interest in the distinguished correspondents or in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras.

An obscure figure today to all but literary connoisseurs, Gosse was, in his day, a near giant in both England and the United States. Max Beerbohm, that discriminating man, in a mural of prominent figures who were also his friends, sketched Edmund Gosse large among George Bernard Shaw, John Masefield, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, and Lytton Strachey.

This volume consists primarily of a selection of the letters exchanged between Gosse and a number of American writers, notably William Dean Howells, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard Watson Gilder, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. The letters, most of them previously unpublished, contain much of biographical and general historical interest, but the main theme of the book is the exploration of Anglo-American literary relations during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth.

The letters that passed between Gosse and Stedman provide valuable evidence for the study of literary taste on the two sides of the Atlantic and also show how each man sought to enhance the other's transatlantic reputation; the correspondence between Gosse and Gilder, particularly during the period when Gosse was London editor of Gilder's Century magazine, is especially revealing of cultural attitudes and antagonisms. A central thread is provided by the warm and long-sustained friendship between Gosse and Howells, the leading American man of letters of his day.

The long introduction to the book deals with such topics as Gosse's American reputation, his immensely successful visit to the United States in the winter of 1884–1885 (based on the manuscript diary that Gosse kept during the visit), and his American friendships, with particular attention to the relationship with Howells. The thoroughness and vitality of the annotation are extremely effective in familiarizing the reader with the people and events in the book.

This important new collection explores representations of late seventeenth- through mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic women travelers across a range of historical and literary works. While at one time transatlantic studies concentrated predominantly on men’s travels, this volume highlights the resilience of women who ventured voluntarily and by force across the Atlantic—some seeking mobility, adventure, knowledge, wealth, and freedom, and others surviving subjugation, capture, and enslavement. The essays gathered here concern themselves with the fictional and the historical, national and geographic location, racial and ethnic identities, and the configuration of the transatlantic world in increasingly taught texts such as The Female American and The Woman of Colour, as well as less familiar material such as Merian’s writing on the insects of Surinam and Falconbridge’s travels to Sierra Leone. Intersectional in its approach, and with an afterword by Eve Tavor Bannet, this essential collection will prove indispensable as it provides fresh new perspectives on transatlantic texts and women’s travel therein across the long eighteenth century.
 

How did Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein give rise to the iconic green monster everyone knows today? In 1823, only five years after publication, Shelley herself saw the Creature come to life on stage, and this performance shaped the story’s future. Suddenly, thousands of people who had never read Shelley’s novel were participating in its cultural animation. Similarly, early adaptations magnified the reception and renown of all manner of nineteenth-century literary creations, from Byron and Keats to Dickens and Tennyson and beyond. Yet, until now, adaptation has been seen as a largely modern phenomenon.
 
In Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, Lissette Lopez Szwydky convincingly historicizes the practice of adaptation, drawing on multiple disciplines to illustrate narrative mobility across time, culture, and geography. Case studies from stage plays, literature, painting, illustration, chapbooks, and toy theaters position adaptation as a central force in literary history that ensures continued cultural relevance, accessibility, and survival. The history of these forms helps to inform and put into context our contemporary obsessions with popular media. Finally, in upending a traditional understanding of canon by arguing that adaptation creates canon and not the other way around, Szwydky provides crucial bridges between nineteenth-century literary scholarship, adaptation studies, and media studies, thus identifying new stakes for all.
 

Alison Carey brings the confusion and mischief of Shakespeare’s comedy into the twenty-first century. 
 
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night centers on power and love. One of the most perennially produced of Shakespeare’s comedies, it talks about shipwrecked twins, gender-bending romance, and a bumper crop of fools, from the wise to the ridiculous. Modernizing the language of the play, Alison Carey’s translation revives the joy of this comedy, taking the archaic humor and renewing it for a contemporary audience. 
 
This translation of Twelfth Night was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain examines torture across the fiction, periodicals, and government documents of the British Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Placing acts of torture and words about torture in relation to changing definitions of citizenship and human rights, Katherine Judith Anderson argues that torture—as a technique of state terrorism—evolved in relation to nineteenth-century liberalism, combining the traditional definition of exceptional acts of cruelty with systemic, banal, or everyday violence. Analyzing canonical novels by George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith alongside an impressive array of lesser-known fiction through the lenses of critical terrorism studies and political, legal, and phenomenological theory, Anderson rethinks torture as a mode of reclaiming an embodied citizenship and demonstrates how the Victorians ushered in our modern definition of torture. Furthermore, she argues that torture is foundational to Western modernity, since liberalism was, and continues to be, dependent on state-sanctioned––and at times state-sponsored—torture, establishing parallels between Victorian liberal thought and contemporary (neo)imperialism and global politics.