Books published by University of Delaware Press

Works between Burney's Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney's four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer.

Textiles have long provided metaphors for storytelling. To what extent, however, should we take these metaphors seriously? Arras Hanging reveals that in the early modern period, when cloth-making was ubiquitous and high-quality tapestries called arras hangings were the most valuable objects in England, such metaphors were literal.

Traces the development of the idea that the sciences were morally enlightening through an intellectual history of the secretaires perpetuels of the French Royal Academy of Sciences and their associates from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century.

Explores the changing conditions and conceptions of authorship in the long eighteenth century, a period often said to have witnessed the birth of the modern author. This study focuses not on authorial self-presentation or self-revelation but on an author's interactions with booksellers, collaborators, rivals, correspondents, patrons, and audiences.

Examines how Chardin's genre subjects were composed and constructed to communicate certain things to the elites of Paris in the 1730s and 1740s. The book argues against the conventional view of Chardin as the transparent imitator of bourgeois life and values so ingrained in art history since the nineteenth century.

Studies instantiations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. The book argues that we can find in some plays a conception has been evidenced of who a particular person is, and has been used to drive the action.

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 is the firstbook to examine these often overlooked texts.

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.