Books published by Duquesne University Press

Seminal forum for Milton scholarship and criticism, published annually

Following the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, the seventeenth century witnessed an explosion of print culture in England, including an unprecedented boom in biographical writing. Andrea Walkden offers a case-study examination of this fascinating trend, bringing together texts that generations of scholars have considered piecemeal and primarily as sources for their own research.Private Lives Made Public: The Invention of Biography in Early Modern England contributes an incisive, fresh take on life-writing-a catch-all label that, in contemporary discourse, encompasses biography, autobiography, memoirs, letters, diaries, journals, and even blogs and examines why the writing of life stories appeared somehow newly necessary and newly challenging for political discourse in the late seventeenth century. Walkden engages readers in a compelling discussion of what she terms biographical populism, arguing that the biographies of this period sought to replace political argument with life stories, thus conducting politics by another means. The modern biography, then, emerges after 1649 as a cultural weapon designed to reorient political discourse away from the analysis of public institutions and practices toward a less threatening, but similarly meaningful, conversation about the unfolding of an individual''s life in the realm of private experience.Unlike other recent studies, Walkden moves toward a consideration of widely consumed works-the Eikon Basilike, Izaak Walton''s Lives, John Aubrey''s Brief Lives, and Daniel Defoe''s Memoirs of a Cavalier-and gives particular attention to their complex engagement with that political and literary moment.

"Essays discuss food and drink in Shakespeare's plays, reframing questions about cuisine, eating, and meals in early modern drama and emphasizing the aesthetic, communal, and philosophical aspects of food; many issues in Shakespeare studies are thus considered in terms of the cultural marker of culinary dynamics"--

Explores Milton's creative power to create a desire for a unified resolution that we are never meant to actually reach--at least in this world

Rooted in the interpretive field of ecocriticism, this collection asks what we can learn from representations of soil in early modern literature

Crosses the traditional medieval/early modern boundary to focus on reading Renaissance texts in light of earlier poetic forms

Milton Studies, volume 56, features ten original and timely essays that explore relationships within Miltonic narratives, intertextual relationships, and Milton's own relation to philosophy and to history. Specifically, contributors examine satanic interpretation and Eve's fall; divine, satanic, and shifting human vocatives in Paradise Lost; Milton's Son of God and the complexities of familial relationships; monsters, heroes, and the relation of the 1671 poems; Margaret Atwood's dystopian rewriting of Milton and the Fall; philosophical models of freedom in Paradise Lost; epistemology and contrasting agency in Milton's Eden and hell; the camera obscura and vision in Paradise Lost; handbooks for holy living and Paradise Regained; and Miltonic history as wandering and episodic romance. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

"This collection of essays devoted to Interregnum and Restoration poet Katherine Philips explores cultural poetics and the courtly coterie, innovation and influence in poetic and political form, and articulations of female friendship, homoeroticism, and retreat"--

"Eleven essays explore the ways in which English drama reinforces, revises, resists, and reacts against the religious doctrine of the Reformation, and investigates how early modern drama was shaped by the religion of its producers and audiences"--

"Places Shakespeare's sonnets and plays, including Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Antony and Cleopatra, within the context of the literary history of praise poetry and explores the underlying influence of early modern skepticism on Shakespeare's writing"--

This is the first full-length study of the relation between Milton and Homer, arguably Milton's most important precursor. It is also the first study of a major interpoetic relationship that is responsive to the historicist critical enterprise, which has been dominant within literary study for the past 30 years, and engages the work of theorists of canon formation such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith and John Guillory. Most studies of the relation between one poet and another are wholly diachronic, examining the way in which brief, verbal recollections of the earlier poet?allusions?enhance or qualify the significance of passages in the later, alluding poet's work. But this study goes beyond that, considering its focal poets within a synchronic framework that allows us to respond to the Homer of mid-seventeenth century England specifically rather than to some transhistorically unvarying Homer, thus revealing that Homer is important not only to the significance but also to the canonical status of Paradise Lost. Machacek not only examines the ways in which Homer enriches our understanding of Paradise Lost, but also argues that Milton was guided by the ways that Homeric epics were being reproduced in his time to leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die. The Homeric poems influenced Milton in his own ambition of composing an enduring work of literature, as Machacek details in chapters on the war in heaven as moral exemplum; on Milton's negotiation of the contradictions inherent in the genre of Christian epic; on the relation of Paradise Lost to the emerging critical categories of originality and the sublime; and on the institution of the school, to which Milton entrusted the perpetuation of his epic. Milton's approach to (and success at) securing canonical status for Paradise Lost provides important insights not only into his own artistry, but into the dynamics of literary canon formation in general. Milton and Homer will appeal to Miltonists, classicists, scholars of early modern literature, and those interested in the debate over the formation of the literary canon.

Published annually by Duquesne University Press as an important forum for Milton scholarship and criticism, Milton Studies focuses on various aspects of John Milton's life and writing, including biography; literary history; Milton's work in its literary, intellectual, political, or cultural contexts; Milton's influence on or relationship to other writers; and the history of critical response to his work. The eight essays in this volume offer a variety of fresh subjects and cutting-edge approaches to Milton's prose and poetry. Topics in this issue include Macbeth and the uncanny in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; murmuring, blindness, and the service of God in Sonnet 19; the androgyny of Milton's epic self-presentation; the politics of heavenly and infernal triumphs in Paradise Lost; the literary history of satanic envy; Milton's fully dramatic (and sometimes unreliable) narrator in Paradise Lost; the fetishism of Milton's body in the biographical and critical heritage; and John Collier's provocative screenplay adaptation of Paradise Lost. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Forgiving the Gift challenges the tendency to reflexively understand gifts as exchanges, negotiations, and circulations. Lawrence reads plays by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as informed by an early modern belief in the possibility and even necessity of radical generosity, of gifts that break the cycle of economy and self-interest.The prologue reads Marlowe's Dr. Faustus to show how the play aligns gift and grace, depicting Faustus's famous bond as the instrument simultaneously of reciprocal exchange and of damnation. In the introduction, the author frames his argument theoretically by placing Marcel Mauss's classic essay, ?The Gift,? into dialogue with Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur to sketch two very different understandings of gift-giving. In the first, described by Mauss, the gift becomes a covert form of exchange. Though Mauss contrasts the gift economy with the market economy, his description of the gift economy nevertheless undermines his own project of discovering in it a basis for social solidarity. In the second understanding of gift exchange, derived from the philosophy of Levinas, the gift expresses the radical asymmetry of ethical concern.Literature and philosophy scholars alike will benefit from the original readings of The Merchant of Venice, Edward II, King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and The Tempest, which constitute the body of the text. These readings find in the plays a generosity that exceeds the social practice of gift-giving, because extraordinarily generous acts of friendship or filial affection survive the collapse of social norms. Antonio in Merchant and the title character in Edward II practice a friendship whose extravagance marks its excess. Lear, on the other hand, brings about his tragedy by attempting to reduce filial love to debt. Titus also discovers a love excessive to social convention when rape and mutilation annihilate his daughter's cultural value. Finally, Prospero in The Tempest sacrifices power and even his own life for the love of his daughter, giving a gift rendered asymmetrical by both its excess and its secrecy.While proposing new readings of works of Renaissance drama, Forgiving the Gift also questions the model of human life from which many contemporary readings, especially those characterized as new historicist or cultural materialist, grow. In so doing, it addresses questions of how we are to understand literary texts?and how we are to live with others in the world.

In Suffering in Paradise, Rebecca Totaro provides a unique and timely discussion of the bubonic plague as it shaped Literary Studies in England from 1500 through the first half of the eighteenth century. Within the experience and accounts of bubonic plague, men and women found their own understanding of the body, of the human relationship with nature, and of the degree to which they had faith in their nation and their God. An early modern writer''s reading of the plague shows us in detail what he or she believes to be the parameters within which life is lived. Focusing on the broadest of these parameters, Totaro examines hope and despair as displayed within a range of imaginary realms designed to include and control the bubonic plague. Each of the works in this study-Thomas More''s Utopia, William Shakespeare''s Timon of Athens, Ben Jonson''s The Alchemist, Francis Bacon''s The New Atlantis, Margaret Cavendish''s The Blazing World, and John Milton''s Paradise Lost-provides literary and English answers that cohere in stunning form and resonate today.