Books published by University of Delaware Press

The original edition of Salonnires, Furies, and Fairies was a work of early modern literary history, exploring women's use of the fairy tale to carve out roles as contributors to the literature of their time. This new edition, with a new introduction by Allison Stedman, emphasizes the scholarly legacy of Anne Duggan's original work.

Brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association.

The first book to study and compare the concept of celebrity in France and Britain from 1750 to 1850, offering a transnational perspective. It places in dialogue the growing field of celebrity studies in the two countries, especially by engaging with Antoine Lilti's seminal work, The Invention of Celebrity.

Presents a reconsideration of literary production in post-Tridentine Italy. With particular attention to the much-maligned tradition of spiritual literature, the volume's contributors weave literary analysis together with religion, theatre, art, music, science, and gender to demonstrate that the literature of this period is positively innovative.

Presents a reconsideration of literary production in post-Tridentine Italy. With particular attention to the much-maligned tradition of spiritual literature, the volume's contributors weave literary analysis together with religion, theatre, art, music, science, and gender to demonstrate that the literature of this period is positively innovative.

Examines how new ideas about friendship were enacted in the lives of artists in the eighteenth century. This study provides a deeper understanding of how artists took advantage of changing conceptions of social relationships and used portraiture to make visible new ideas about friendship that were driven by Enlightenment thought.

The habdbook to accompany a major university-led public educational outreach and community engagement initiative. This statewide master naturalist certification program is designed to train hundreds of citizen scientists, K-12 environmental educators, ecological restoration volunteers, and habitat managers each year.

Focuses on the Russian literary and folkloric treatment of five rivers - the Dnieper, Volga, Neva, Don, and Angara. Each chapter traces, within a geographical and historical context, the evolution of the literary representation of one river.

Drawing from a wealth of recent historicist and materialist Austen scholarship, this timely work explores Austen's ironic use of art and artifact to probe selfhood, alienation, isolation, and community in ways that defy simple labels and acknowledge the complexity of Austen's thought.

Firmly grounded in literary studies but drawing on religious studies, translation studies, drama, and visual art, Milton Among Spaniards is the first book-length exploration of the afterlife of John Milton in Spanish culture, illuminating underexamined Anglo-Hispanic cultural relations.

In sixteenth-century France, the level of jokes, irony, and ridicule found in pamphlets and plays became aggressively hostile. In Hostile Humor in Renaissance France, Bruce Hayes investigates this period leading up to the French Wars of Religion, when a deliberately harmful and destructive form of satire appeared.

Brayton Polka takes both a textual and theoretical approach to seven plays of Shakespeare: Macbeth, Othello, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. He calls upon the Bible and the ideas of major European thinkers, above all, Kierkegaard and Spinoza, to argue that the concept of interpretation that underlies both Shakespeare's plays and our own lives as moderns is the golden rule of the Bible: the command to love your neighbor as yourself. What you will (the alternative title of Twelfth Night ) thus captures the idea that interpretation is the very act by which we constitute our lives. For it is only in willing what others will-in loving relationships-that we enact a concept of interpretation that is adequate to our lives.Polka argues that it is the aim of Shakespeare, when representing the ancient world in plays like Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida, and also in his long narrative poem "The Rape of Lucrece," to dramatize the fundamental differences between ancient (pagan) values and modern (biblical) values or between what he articulates as contradiction and paradox. The ancients are fatally destroyed by the contradictions of their lives of which they remain ignorant. In contrast, we moderns in the biblical tradition, like those who figure in Shakespeare's other works, are responsible for addressing and overcoming the contradictions of our lives through living the interpretive paradox of "what you will," of treating all human beings as our neighbor. Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, notwithstanding their dramatically different form, share this interpretive framework of paradox. As the author shows in his book, texts without interpretation are blind and interpretation without texts is empty.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Technologies of Empire looks at the ways in which writers of the long eighteenth century treat writing and imagination as technologies that can produce rather than merely portray empire. Authors ranging from Adam Smith to William Wordsworth consider writing not as part of a larger logic of orientalism that represents non-European subjects and spaces in fixed ways, but as a dynamic technology that organizes these subjects and transforms these spaces. Technologies of Empire reads the imagination as an instrument that works in tandem with writing, expanding and consolidating the networks of empire. Through readings across a variety of genres, ranging from Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France to Maria Edgeworth's Irish fiction and Wordsworth's epic poetry, this study offers a new account of writing's role in empire-building and uncovers a genealogy of the romantic imagination that is shot through by the imperatives of imperialism.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

In this book the author reveals how medicine shows, both ancient and modern, galvanized Jonathan Swift's imagination and inspired his wittiest satiric voices. Swift dubbed these multifaceted traveling entertainments his Stage-itinerant or "Mountebank's Stage." In the course of arguing that the stage-itinerant formed an irresistible model for A Tale of a Tub, Ormsby-Lennon also surmises that the mountebank's stage will disclose that missing link, long sought, which connects the twin objects of Swift's ire: gross corruptions in both religion and learning. In the early modern medicine show, the quack doctor delivered a loquacious harangue, infused with magico-mysticism and pseudoscience, high-astounding promises, and boastful narcissism. To help him sell his panaceas and snake-oil, he employed a Merry Andrew and a motley troupe of performers. From their stages, many quacks also peddled their own books, almanacs, and other ephemera, providing Grub Street with many of its best-sellers. Hacks practiced, quite literally, as quacks. Merry Andrew and mountebank traded costumes, whiskers, and voices. Swift apes them all in the Tale.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism argues that early nineteenth-century women poets contributed some of the most daring work in modernizing the epic genre. The book examines several long poems to provide perspective on women poets working with and against men in related efforts, contributing together to a Romantic movement of large-scale genre revision. Women poets challenged longstanding categorical approaches to gender and nation in the epic tradition, and they raised politically charged questions about women's importance in moments of historical crisis.While Romantic epics did not all engage in radical questioning or undermining of authority, this study calls attention to some of the more provocative poems in their approach to gender, culture, and history. This study prioritizes long poems written by and about women during the Romantic era, and does so in context with influential epics by male contemporaries. The book takes its cue from a dramatic increase in the publication of epics in the early nineteenth-century. At their most innovative, Romantic epics provoked questions about the construction of ideological meaning and historical memory, and they centralized women's experiences in entirely new ways to reflect on defeat, loss, and inevitable transition. For the first time the epic became an attractive genre for ambitious women poets.The book offers a timely response to recent groundbreaking scholarship on nineteenth-century epic by Herbert Tucker and Simon Dentith, and should be of interest to Romanticists and scholars of 18th- and 19th-century literature and history, gender and genre, and women's studies.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in covers the arc of the first half of Jonathan Swift's life, offering fresh details of the contentment and exuberance of his childhood, of the support he received from his grandmother, of his striking affection for Esther Johnson from the time she was ten years old (his pet name for her in her twenties was "saucebox"), of his precocious entry into English politics with his Contests and Dissensions pamphlet, of his brilliant and much misunderstood Tale of a Tub, and of his naive determination to do well both as a vicar of the small parish of Laracor in Ireland and as a writer for the Tory administration trying to pull England out of debt by ending the war England was engaged in with France.I do not share with past biographers the sense that Swift had a deprived childhood. I do not share the suspicion that most of Swift's enmities were politically motivated. I do not feel critical of him because he was often fastidious with his money. I do not think he was insincere about his religious faith. His pride, his sexual interests, his often shocking or uninhibited language, his instinct for revenge - emphasized by many previous biographers - were all fundamental elements of his being, but elements that he either used for rhetorical effect, or that he tried to keep in check, and that he felt that religion helped him to keep in check. Swift had as firm a conviction as did Freud that we are born with wayward tendencies; unlike Freud, though, he saw both religion and civil society as necessary and helpful checks on those wayward tendencies, and he (frequently, but certainly not always) acknowledged that he shared those tendencies with the rest of us.This biography, in two books, Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in and Jonathan Swift: Our Dean, will differ from most literary biographies in that it does not aim to show how Swift's life illuminates his writings, but rather how and why Swift wrote in order to live the life he wanted to live. I have liberally quoted Swift's own words in this biography because his inventive expression of ideas, both in his public works and in his private letters, was what has made him a unique and compelling figure in the history of literature. I hope in these two books to come closer than past biographies to capturing how it felt to Swift himself to live his life.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France was inspired by the observation that small slips of the flesh (involuntary confessions of the flesh) are omnipresent in early modern texts of many kinds. These slips (which bear similarities to what we would today call the Freudian slip) disrupt and destabilize readings of body, self, and text-three categories whose mutual boundaries this book seeks to soften-but also, in their very messiness, participate in defining them. Involuntary Confessions capitalizes on the uncertainty of such volatile moments, arguing that it is instability itself that provides the tools to navigate and understand the complexity of the early modern world. Rather than locate the body within any one discourse (Foucauldian, psychoanalytic), this book argues that slips of the flesh create a liminal space not exactly outside of discourse, but not necessarily subject to it, either. Involuntary confessions of the flesh reveal the perpetual and urgent challenge of early modern thinkers to textually confront and define the often tenuous relationship between the body and the self. By eluding and frustrating attempts to contain it, the early modern body reveals that truth is as much about surfaces as it is about interior depth, and that the self is fruitfully perpetuated by the conflict that proceeds from seemingly irreconcilable narratives.Interdisciplinary in its scope, Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France pairs major French literary works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (by Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne, Madame de Lafayette) with cultural documents (confession manuals, legal documents about the application of torture, and courtly handbooks). It is the first study of its kind to bring these discourses into thematic (rather than linear or chronological) dialog. In so doing, it emphasizes the shared struggle of many different early modern conversations to come to terms with the body's volatility.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

This volume presents in-depth and contextualized analyses of a wealth of visual materials. These documents provide viewers with a mesmerizing and informative glimpse into how the early modern world was interpreted by image-makers and presented to viewers during a period that spans from manuscript culture to the age of caricature. The premise of this collection responds to a fundamental question: how are early modern texts, objects, and systems of knowledge imaged and consumed through bimodal, hybrid, or intermedial products that rely on both words and pictures to convey meaning? The twelve contributors to this collection go beyond traditional lines of inquiry into word-and-image interaction to deconstruct visual dynamics and politics-to show how images were shaped, manipulated, displayed, and distributed to represent the material world, to propagate official and commercial messages, to support religious practice and ideology, or to embody relations of power. These chapters are anchored in various theoretical and disciplinary points of departure, such as the history of collections and collecting, literary theory and criticism, the histories of science, art history and visual culture, word-and-image studies, as well as print culture and book illustration. Authors draw upon a wide range of visual material hitherto insufficiently explored and placed in context, in some cases hidden in museums and archives, or previously assessed only from a disciplinary standpoint that favored either the image or the text but not both in relation to each other. They include manuscript illuminations representing compilers and collections, frontispieces and other accompanying plates published in catalogues and museographies, astronomical diagrams, mixed pictographic-alphabetic accounting documents, Spanish baroque paintings, illustrative frontispieces or series inspired by or designed for single novels or anthologies, anatomical drawings featured in encyclopedic publications, visual patterns of volcanic formations, engravings representing the New World that accompany non-fictional travelogues, commonplace books that interlace text and images, and graphic satire. Geographically, the collection covers imperial centers (Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain), as well as their colonial periphery (New France; Mexico; Central America; South America, in particular Brazil; parts of Africa; and the island of Ceylon). Emblematic and thought-provoking, these images are only fragments of the multifaceted and comprehensive visual mosaic created during the early modern period, but their consideration has far reaching implications.

This book features an extraordinary album of ornament designs by the French architect Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672-1742). In charge of the buildings and grounds of Philippe, duke of Orléans, regent of France during the minority of Louis XV, Oppenord was at the center of the architectural practice of his time. As made evident by this album, his consummate draftsmanship, praised by his contemporaries and coveted by collectors, exceeded by far the practical demands usually required of architects.On a copy of the first French edition of Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, published by Jean Baudoin in 1636 with engravings by Jacques de Bié, Oppenord drew vignettes, head and tail pieces, borders and other ornamental motifs. For the first time, this publication reproduces Oppenord's album in its initial state. Today's reassembled and rebound album of sixty sheets bears little resemblance to Oppenord's original copy. A bibliographic analysis of the Ripa-Baudoin book, based on a copy kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and confirmed by a previously unnoticed numbering by Oppenord, guided this first reconstitution. In lieu of a haphazard succession of sketches, it reveals Oppenord's fascinating interplay between text, engraved and drawn images.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Selected contributions to the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, which took place in July 2011 in Prague, represent the contemporary state of Shakespeare studies in thirty-eight countries worldwide. Apart from readings of Shakespeare's plays and poems, more than forty chapters map Renaissance contexts of his art in politics, theater, law, or material culture and discuss numerous cases of the impact of his works in global culture from the Americas to the Far East, including stage productions, book culture, translations, film and television adaptations, festivals, and national heritage. The last section of the book focuses on the afterlife of Shakespeare in the work of the leading British dramatist Tom Stoppard.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Shakespeare without Boundaries: Essays in Honor of Dieter Mehl offers a wide-ranging collection of essays written by an international team of distinguished scholars who attempt to define, to challenge, and to erode boundaries that currently inhibit understanding of Shakespeare, and to exemplify how approaches that defy traditional bounds of study and criticism may enhance understanding and enjoyment of a dramatist who acknowledged no boundaries in art.The Volume is published in tribute to Professor Dieter Mehl, whose critical and scholarly work on authors from Chaucer through Shakespeare to D. H. Lawrence has transcended temporal and national boundaries in its range and scope, and who, as Ann Jennalie Cook writes, has contributed significantly to the erasure of political boundaries that have endangered the unity of German literary scholarship and, more broadly, through his work for the International Shakespeare Association, to the globalization of Shakespeare studies.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.