Early Modern Authorship and Prose Continuations


Book Description

The first in-depth account of fictional sequels in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this examines cases of prose fiction works being continued by multiple writers, reading them for evidence of Early Modern attitudes towards authorship, originality, and literary property.




Early Modern Literature in History


Book Description

Within the period 1520-1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures.




Old Style


Book Description

An aesthetic of unoriginality shaped literary style and reader taste for decades of the nineteenth century. While critics in the twentieth century and beyond have upheld originality and innovation as essential characteristics of literary achievement, they were not features particularly prized by earlier American audiences, Claudia Stokes contends. On the contrary, readers were taught to value familiarity, traditionalism, and regularity. Literary originality was often seen as a mark of vulgar sensationalism and poor quality. In Old Style Stokes offers the first dedicated study of a forgotten nineteenth-century aesthetic, explicating the forms, practices, conventions, and uses of unoriginality. She focuses in particular on the second quarter of the century, when improvements in printing and distribution caused literary markets to become flooded with new material, and longstanding reading practices came under threat. As readers began to prefer novelty to traditional forms, advocates openly extolled unoriginality in an effort to preserve the old literary ways. Old Style examines this era of significant literary change, during which a once-dominant aesthetic started to give way to modern preferences. If writing in the old style came to be associated with elite conservatism—a linkage that contributed to its decline in the twentieth century—it also, paradoxically provided marginalized writers—people of color, white women, and members of the working class—the literary credentials they needed to enter print. Writing in the old style could affirm an aspiring author's training, command of convention, and respectability. In dismissing unoriginality as the literary purview of the untalented or unambitious, Stokes cautions, we risk overlooking something of vital importance to generations of American writers and readers.




A Fan Studies Primer


Book Description

"The discipline of fan studies is famously undisciplined. But that doesn't mean it isn't structured. A Fan Studies Primer: Methods, Research, Ethics will be the first comprehensive primer for classroom use that shows students how to do fan studies, in practical terms. The expansion of fan studies as an academic field and the growing visibility of fandom and fan activities in popular culture have led to more instructors using students' fandom in the classroom, and teaching fan studies as a disciplinary focus. Teaching fandom and fan studies means drawing from a multidisciplinary spectrum of methodologies and foci. Yet, as fan studies itself is often a "moving target," it is imperative to have a volume that approaches the various contributions, methodologies, ethics, and lacunae of the field in a classroom setting. With contributions from many of the biggest names in fan studies, co-editors Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams pull together case studies that demonstrate the wide array of methodologies available to fan studies scholars, such as auto/ethnography, immersion, interviews, online data mining, historiography, and textual analysis. They also probe the ethical questions that are unique to fan studies work and that continue to crop up as the field develops, such as use of online fan content for research, interview methods, consent, and privacy. Both experienced scholars and new students alike will find a useful overview of the diverse research topics in fan studies, whether it's Harry Potter, superheroes, or celebrities, as well as a catalog of conscientious and effective techniques for those who want to join in"--




Blotted Lines


Book Description

Blotted Lines rebuffs centuries of mythologization about the creative process—the idea that William Shakespeare "never blotted out line"—to argue that by studying how early modern writers faced the challenges of writing poetry, instructors today can empower their students' approaches to critical writing. Adhaar Noor Desai offers deeply researched accounts of how poetic labor intersected with early modern rhetorical theory, material culture, and social networks. Tracing the productive struggles of such writers as George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, John Davies of Hereford, Lady Anne Southwell, and Shakespeare across their manuscripts, Desai identifies in their work instances of discomposition: frustration, hesitation, self-doubt, and insecurity. Inspired to unmake their poems so that they might remake them, these poets welcomed discomposition because it catalyzed ongoing thinking and learning. Blotted Lines brings literary scholarship into conversation with modern composition studies, challenging early modern literary studies to treat writing as both noun and verb and foregrounding the ways poetry and criticism alike can model for students the cultivation of patience, collaboration, and risk in their writing.




The Reformation of England's Past


Book Description

This book is a detailed examination of the sources and protocols John Foxe used to justify the Reformation, and claim that the Church of Rome had fallen into the grip of Antichrist. The focus is on the pre-Lollard, medieval history in the first two editions of the Acts and Monuments. Comparison of the narrative that Foxe writes to the possible sources helps us to better understand what it was that Foxe was trying to do, and how he came to achieve his aims. A focus on sources also highlights the collaborative circle in which Foxe worked, recognizing the essential role of other scholars and clerics such as John Bale and Matthew Parker.




Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel


Book Description

Recovers and analyzes novel manuscripts and post-publication revisions to construct a new narrative about eighteenth-century authorship.




Theorizing Adaptation


Book Description

From intertextuality to postmodern cultural studies, narratology to affect theory, poststructuralism to metamodernism, and postcolonialism to ecocriticism, humanities adaptation studies has engaged with a host of contemporary theories. Yet theorizing adaptation has been declared behind the theoretical times compared to other fields and charged with theoretical incorrectness by scholars from all theoretical camps. In this thorough and groundbreaking study, author Kamilla Elliott works to explain and redress the problem of theorizing adaptation. She offers the first cross-disciplinary history of theorizing adaptation in the humanities, extending back to the sixteenth century, revealing that until the late eighteenth century, adaptation was valued for its contributions to cultural progress, before its eventual and ongoing marginalization by humanities theories. The second half of the book offers ways to redress the troubled relationship between theorization and adaptation. Ultimately, Theorizing Adaptation proffers shared ground upon which adaptation scholars can debate productively across disciplinary, cultural, and theoretical borders.




Samuel Richardson in Context


Book Description

Since the publication of his novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded in 1740, Samuel Richardson's place in the English literary tradition has been secured. But how can that place best be described? Over the three centuries since embarking on his printing career the 'divine' novelist has been variously understood as moral crusader, advocate for women, pioneer of the realist novel and print innovator. Situating Richardson's work within these social, intellectual and material contexts, this new volume of essays identifies his centrality to the emergence of the novel, the self-help book, and the idea of the professional author, as well as his influence on the development of the modern English language, the capitalist economy, and gendered, medicalized, urban, and national identities. This book enables a fuller understanding and appreciation of Richardson's life, work and legacy, and points the way for future studies of one of English literature's most celebrated novelists.




The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan is the most extensive volume of original essays ever published on the seventeenth-century nonconformist preacher and writer, John Bunyan. Its thirty-eight chapters examine Bunyan's life and works, their religious and historical contexts, and the critical reception of his writings, in particular his allegorical narrative, The Pilgrim's Progress. Interdisciplinary and comprehensive, it provides unparalleled scope and expertise, ranging from literary theory to religious history and from theology to post-colonial criticism. The Handbook is structured in four sections. The first, 'Contexts', deals with the historical Bunyan in relation to various aspects of his life, background, and work as a nonconformist: from basic facts of biography to the nature of his church at Bedford, his theology, and the religious and political cultures of seventeenth-century Dissent. Part 2 considers Bunyan's literary output: from his earliest printed tracts to his posthumously published works. Offering discrete chapters on Bunyan's major works - Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), The Pilgrim's Progress, Parts I and II (1678; 1684); The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), and The Holy War (1682) - this section nevertheless covers Bunyan's oeuvre in its entirety: controversial and pastoral, narrative and poetic. Section 3, 'Directions in Criticism', engages with Bunyan in literary critical terms, focusing on his employment of form and language and on theoretical approaches to his writings: from psychoanalytic to post-secular criticism. Section 4, 'Journeys', tackles some of the ways in which Bunyan's works, and especially The Pilgrim's Progress, have travelled throughout the world since the late seventeenth century, assessing Bunyan's place within key literary periods and their distinctive developments: from the eighteenth-century novel to the writing of 'empire'.