In the decades leading up to England's first permanent American colony, the literature that emerged needed to establish certain realities against a background of skepticism, and it also had to find ways of theorizing the enterprise. The voyage narratives evolved almost from the outset as a genre concerned with recuperating failure--as noble, strategic, even as a form of success. Reception of these texts since the Victorian era has often accepted their claims of heroism and mastery; this study argues for a more complicated, less glorious history.

Howard Marchitello's study of narrative techniques in Renaissance discourse analyzes imaginative conjunctions of literary texts, such as those by Shakespeare and Thomas Browne, with developments in scientific and technical writing. Narrative was used in the Renaissance as both a mode of discourse and an epistemology; it produced knowledge, but also dictated how that knowledge should be understood. Marchitello uses a wide range of cultural documents to illustrate the importance of narrative in constructing the Renaissance understanding of time and identity.

Tracing the cultural legacy of the Norman Conquest in England from 1350 to 1600, Deanne Williams demonstrates how English literature emerged out of a simultaneous engagement with, and resistance to, the presence of French language and culture in medieval and early modern England. Chapters on Chaucer, the Corpus Christi Plays, William Caxton, early Tudor poetry, and Shakespeare examine a variety of English responses to, and representations of, France and "the French."

This monograph documents the development of two cultures and disciplines: science and literature--through a shared aesthetic of knowledge. It brings together key works in early modern science and imaginative literature, ranging from the anatomy of William Harvey and the experimentalism of William Gilbert to the fiction of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Margaret Cavendish.

Writing before the institution of copyright, Renaissance authors were not recognized as owning their works. Yet, in an environment in which the written word could be variously marketed by printers or by acting companies, and in which authors could be held uncomfortably responsible for their writings, we can discover complex stirrings of possessiveness among such writers as Bacon, Heywood, Daniel, Shakespeare, Wither, and--most powerfully and interestingly--Ben Jonson. This book probes the literary and institutional history, the politics, and the psychology of possessive authorship.

What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? And how did it operate in the literary and social worlds? The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World brings together ten new essays by leading scholars of the literatures of England, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and the colonial Americas, to answer these questions in wide-ranging ways. Several of the essays shed new light on landmark prose works of the period; some discuss what lesser-known writings reveal about the medium; others move between the literary and the...

This book describes both theoretical and experimental aspects of optical soliton generation and of soliton properties. The basic theory of soliton generation in fiber is described, numerical studies of nonlinear propagation effects in fibers are considered, as well as soliton-soliton interactions, the effects of high order dispersion and birefringence on soliton propagation as well as limiting effects of femtosecond soliton generation. Technical aspects are concerned with long distance transmission systems and the implementation of high bit rate semiconductor laser based soliton systems in...

Valerie Traub analyzes the representation of female-female love, desire, and eroticism in a range of early modern discourses, including poetry, drama, visual arts, pornography, and medicine. Contrary to the silence ascribed to lesbianism in the Renaissance, Traub argues that the early modern period witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of representations of such desire. As a contribution to the history of sexuality and to feminist and queer theory, the book addresses current theoretical preoccupations through the lens of historical inquiry.

Examines Shakespeare's engagement with forms of deprivation which threatened domestic security in early modern England.

Here the author explores the dynamics of imitation among early modern European powers in literary and historiographical texts from sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Spain, Italy, England, and the New World. The book considers a broad sweep of material, including European representations of New World subjects and of Islam. It supplements the transatlantic perspective on early modern imperialism with an awareness of the situation in the Mediterranean and considers problems of reading and literary transmission; imperial ideology and colonial identities; counterfeits and forgery; and piracy.