Quantitative Literary Analysis of the Works of Aphra Behn


Book Description

Aphra Behn (1640–1689), prolific and popular playwright, poet, novelist, translator, has a fascinating and extensive corpus of literature that plays a key role in literary history. Quantitative Literary Analysis of the Works of Aphra Behn: Words of Passion offers what no book has done to date, an analysis of all Behn’s literary output. It examines the author’s use of words in terms of frequencies and distributions and stacks the words in context to read Behn’s word usage synchronically. Using this experimental method, the book brings digital humanities into literary criticism, to enhance our understanding and appreciation of literature beyond what is possible in diachronic reading and scholarship less supported by digital means. The empirical approach works in collaboration with existing scholarship to understand Behn’s distinct language of love and extreme passions across her genres.




A Study Guide for Aphra Behn's "The Forc'd Marriage"


Book Description

A Study Guide for Aphra Behn's "The Forc'd Marriage," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.




Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage


Book Description

In Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage, Cynthia Lowenthal explores identity--especially masculinity and femininity, English and "foreign," middle-class and aristocratic--as it is enacted, idealized, deployed, and redefined on the late-seventeenth-century British stage. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways the theatre contributed to new and often shifting early modern definitions of the boundaries of nation, status, and gender. The first portion of the book focuses on the playwrights' presentations of idealized men and the comic ridicule of male bodies and behaviors that fall short of the ideal. Of special interest are those moments when playwrights use stereotypes of national character, particularly the Spaniards and Turks, as examples of the worst in male behavior, judgments that are always inflected with elements of class or status inconsistency. The second portion of Lowenthal's discussion focuses on playwrights' attempts to redefine the idealized woman. Lowenthal investigates the ways that an extratheatrical discourse surrounding the actresses, one that essentialized them as sexual bodies demanding scrutiny and requiring containment, also serves to secure for them an equally essential aristocratic status. Anchored by Manley's Royal Mischief, Lowenthal's reading reveals that even a woman playwright's attempts to represent female subjectivity or interiority at odds with the surfaces of the body are doomed to return to those same surfaces. By focusing on a new, early modern lability of identity and by reading less canonical women playwrights, such as Manley and Pix, alongside established male playwrights such as Dryden and Wycherley, Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage yields both a more accurate and a more compelling picture of the cultural dynamics at work on the early modern stage.




The Works of Aphra Behn: v. 1: Poetry


Book Description

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the most successful dramatists of the Restoration theatre and a popular poet. This is the first volume in a set of seven which comprises a complete edition of all her works. This volume is a collection of her poetry.




The World of Elizabeth Inchbald


Book Description

This collection includes essays on the literary, theatrical and cultural conditions in Britain during the long eighteenth century, centered on the life, work, and world of the writer/actor Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821).




Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery


Book Description

The reconfiguration and relinquishing of one's conviction in a world system long held to be finite required for many in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a compromise in one's beliefs and the biblical authority on which he or she had relied - and this did not come without serious and complex challenges. Advances in astronomy, such as the theories of Copernicus, the development of the telescope, and Galileo's discoveries and descriptions of the moon sparked intense debate in Early Modern literary discourse. The essays in this collection demonstrate that this discourse not only stimulated international discussion about lunar voyages and otherworldly habitation, but it also developed a political context in which these new discoveries and theories could correspond metaphorically to New World exploration and colonization, to socio-political unrest, and even to kingship and regicide.




The Dutch Lover


Book Description

Sil. Why-I would have thee do-I know not what- Still to be with me-yet that will not satisfie; To let me-look upon thee-still that's not enough. I dare not say to kiss thee, and imbrace thee; That were to make me wish-I dare not tell thee what.Lo. Dear Alonzo! I shall love a Church the better this Month for giving me a sight of thee, whom I so little expected in this part of the World, and less in so sanctifi'd a Place. What Affair could be powerful enough to draw thee from the kind obliging Ladies of Brabant?Alon. First the sudden Orders of my Prince Don John, and next a fair Lady. Lo. A Lady! Can any of this Country relish with a Man that has been us'd to the Freedom of those of Bruxels, from whence I suppose you are now arriv'd?Alon. This morning I landed, from such a Storm, as set us all to making Vows of Conversion, (upon good Conditions) and that indeed brought me to Church.Lo. In that very Storm I landed too, but with less Sense of Danger than you, being diverted with a pleasant Fellow that came along with me, and who is design'd to marry a Sister of mine against my Will- And now I think of him, Gload, where hast thou left this Master of thine?Glo. At the Inn, Sir, in as lamentable a Pickle, as if he were still in the Storm; recruiting his emptyed Stomach with Brandy, and railing against all Women-kind for your Sister's sake, who has made him undertake this Voyage. Lo. Well, I'll come to him, go home before. [Ex. Gload.Alon. Prithee what thing is this?Lo. Why, 'tis the Cashier to this Squire I spoke of, a Man of Business, and as wise as his Master, but the graver Coxcomb of the two. But this Lady, Alonzo, who is this Lady thou speak'st of? shall not I know her? We were wont to divide the Spoils of Beauty, as well as those of War between us.Alon. O but this is no such Prize, thou wouldst hardly share this with the Danger, there's Matrimony in the Case.Lo. Nay, then keep her to thy self, only let me know who 'tis that can debauch thee to that scandalous way of Life; is she fair? will she recompense the Folly?Alon. Faith, I know not, I never saw her yet, but 'tis the Sister of Marcel, whom we both knew last Summer in Flanders, and where he and I contracted such a Friendship, that without other Consideration he promis'd me Hippolyta, for that's his Sister's Name.Lo. But wo't thou really marry her?Alon. I consider my Advantage in being allied to so considerable a Man as Ambrosio, her Father; I being now so unhappy as not to know my Birth or Parents.Lo. I have often heard of some such thing, but durst not ask the Truth of it.




The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature begins by asking if there was a distinctive literature of the Restoration. For a long time, the answer seemed obvious: heroic drama, libertine comedy, scandalous lyrics, and the short but brilliant career of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester. Could there be an age when the coincidence of literary culture and political rule were any more obvious? But as this Handbook will remind us, some of the most wonderful literature of this Restoration came from writers who had lived across the decades of turbulence and into an age when the Stuart kings returned, when the Church and House of Lords were restored, a world made safe for bishops and for the memory of divine right rule. Of course, these returns and restorations did not meet with uniform celebration. John Milton wrote his great epic poems not in quiet submission but in a kind of resistance to the dominant culture of the 1660s, and Andrew Marvell produced his most brilliant satiric verse by holding up a looking glass to court corruption and Anglican intolerance. So we begin with the most obvious conclusion: Restoration literature does and does not fit to the categories that so long defined the late Stuart age. This book explores and contests, challenges and reimagines the experience embodied by the writing of the late Stuart world and invites readers new to this world and those who have often read its literatures to the pleasures but as well to the challenges and discomforts of its texts.




Perspectives on Restoration Drama


Book Description

This book introduces students to drama from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the early 18th Century. Susan Owen offers representative coverage of new forms of drama in this period, and of ways in which old forms are altered. Her study covers heroic drama, comedy, tragedy, tragi-comedy, and Shakespeare adaptations, by focusing on specific 'dramatic highlights' and giving close reading of particular plays.