Bücher veröffentlicht von University of Delaware Press

The degree to which shopping, or, more broadly, consumerism, is both critiqued and defended in American society confirms the role that commercial goods play in our daily lives. This collection of essays provides case studies depicting selected aspects of this engaging activity.

Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts (selections from plays and masques) into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays is the first to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays. As this under-examined archival evidence shows, play readers and playgoers viewed plays as malleable and modular texts to be altered, appropriated, and, most importantly, used. These records provide information that is not available in other forms about the popularity and importance of early modern plays, the reasons plays appealed to their audiences, and the ideas in plays that most interested audiences. Tracing the course of dramatic extracting from the earliest stages in the 1590s, through the prolific manuscript circulation at the universities, to the closure and reopening of the theatres, Estill gathers these microhistories to create a comprehensive overview of seventeenth-century dramatic extracts and the culture of extracting from plays. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays explores new archival evidence (from John Milton's signature to unpublished university plays) while also analyzing the popularity of perennial favorites such as Shakespeare's The Tempest. The study of dramatic extracts is the study of particulars: particular readers, particular manuscripts, particular plays or masques, particular historic moments. As D. F. McKenzie puts it, ';different readers [bring] the text to life in different ways.' By providing careful analyses of these rich source texts, this book shows how active play-viewing and play-reading (that is, extracting) ultimately led to changing the plays themselves, both through selecting and manipulating the extracts and positioning the plays in new contexts.

Shakespeare's Folktale Sources argues that seven playsThe Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, All's Well that End's Well, Measure for Measure, and Cymbelinederive one or more of their plots directly from folktales. In most cases, scholars have accepted one literary version of the folktale as a source. Recognizing that the same story has circulated orally and occurs in other medieval and early modern written versions allows for new readings of the plays. By acknowledging that a play's source story circulated in multiple forms, we can see how the playwright was engaging his audience on common ground, retelling a story that may have been familiar to many of them, even the illiterate. We can also view the folktale play as a Shakespearean genre, defined by source as the chronicle histories are, that spans and traces the course of Shakespeare's career. The fact that Shakespeare reworked folktales so frequently also changes the way we see the history of the literary folk- or fairy-tale, which is usually thought to bypass England and move from Italian novella collections to eighteenth-century French salons. Each chapter concludes with a bibliography listing versions of each folktale source as a resource for further research and teaching.

Explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English retellings of the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the way they informed and were informed by religious and political developments. The siege functioned as a touchstone for writers who sought to locate their own national drama of civil and religious tumult within a larger biblical context.

This captivating biography traces the life of Eliza Fenwick, an extraordinary woman who paved her own unique path throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as she made her way from country to country as writer, teacher, and school owner.

Explores how authors and readers are represented in printed editions of three major literary figures: Jean Lemaire de Belges, Clement Marot, and Francois Rabelais. Print culture is marked by an anxiety of reception that became much more pronounced with increasingly anonymous and unpredictable readerships in the sixteenth century.

The essays collected in The Circuit of Apollo attest to the vital practice of commemorating women's artistic and personal relationships. In doing so, they illuminate the complexity of female friendships and honour as well as the robust creativity and intellectual work contributed by women to culture in the long eighteenth century.

The essays collected in The Circuit of Apollo attest to the vital practice of commemorating women's artistic and personal relationships. In doing so, they illuminate the complexity of female friendships and honour as well as the robust creativity and intellectual work contributed by women to culture in the long eighteenth century.

Examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. Andrea Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres.