The historical construction of authorship is of enormous interest to scholars and critics. Yet an important aspect of the historical emergence of the author--the literary biography or "life of the poet"--has received scant attention. In The Emergence of the English Author, Kevin Pask offers the first full-scale history of the cultural construction of literary authority in early modern England, and studies the early life-narratives of major English poets Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Donne and Milton.

Wendy Wall argues that representations of housework in the early modern period helped to forge conceptions of national identity. With a detailed account of household practices, this study interprets plays on the London stage in reference to the first printed cookbooks in England. Working from original historical sources, Wall reveals that domesticity was represented as "familiar" as well as "exotic." She analyzes a wide range of plays including some now little-known as well as key works of the early modern period.

This book analyzes the discourses and practices that defined Renaissance theater, as related to the development of encyclopedic texts and vice versa. Looking at what "theater" meant to medieval and Renaissance writers and critics, William West sets Renaissance drama within one of its cultural and intellectual contexts. Although the study focuses on the Renaissance, it also draws on and analyzes substantial classical and medieval material. It is of equal interest to intellectual historians, theater historians and students of early literature.

Christopher Highley's book explores the most serious crisis the Elizabethan regime faced: its attempts to subdue and colonize the native Irish. Through a range of literary representations from Shakespeare and Spenser, and contemporaries such as John Hooker, John Derricke, George Peele and Thomas Churchyard he shows how these writers produced a complex discourse about Ireland that cannot be reduced to a simple ethnic opposition. Highley argues that the confrontation between an English imperial presence and a Gaelic "other" was a profound factor in the definition of an English poetic self.

An impressive exploration of the poet Edmund Spenser's second career as a political secretary.

The Poetics of English Nationhood is a study of the formation of English national identity during the early modern period. Claire McEachern shows how the representation of faith, fatherland and crown in Tudor texts continually personified English political institutions. Those texts we traditionally label literary, she argues, already encode and personify power relations, thereby reinforcing the idea of the nation as an imaginary force. McEachern's study revises our understanding of the term "literary" through an examination of Spenser, Shakespeare and Drayton, tracing the means by which an...

Examines Shakespeare's deployment of Virgil, Ovid and other classical sources in the creation of a national myth.

Profoundly original study of Ovid's troubling presence in Renaissance representations of gender and desire.

This innovative study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period. These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Leinwand discusses plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Heywood and Massinger, pairing them with writings about the finances of royalty and aristocrats, privateers, theatrical entrepreneurs and debtors.

Celia Daileader explores the paradoxes of eroticism in early modern English drama, where women and their bodies (represented by boy actors) were materially absent and yet symbolically central. Accounting for the significance of the space offstage, where most sexual acts take place, Daileader looks to the suppression of religious drama in England and the resulting secularization of the stage. She draws together questions about sexuality and the sacred, in the bodies--of Christ and of woman--banished from the early modern English stage.