Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama explores the fruitful and potentially unruly nature of metaphorical utterances in Shakespearean drama, with analyses of Othello, Titus Andronicus, King Henry IV Part 1, Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Tempest.

Edmund Spenser's censored attacks on Lord Burghley (Elizabeth I's powerful first minister) serve as the basis for a reassessment of the poet's mid-career, challenging the dates of canonical texts, the social and personal contexts for scandalous topical allegories, and the new historicist portrait of Spenser's 'worship' of power and state ideology.

The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society.

In 16th and 17th century England conversation was an embodied act that held the capacity to negotiate, manipulate and transform social relationships. Early Modern Women in Conversation illuminates the extent to which gender shaped conversational interaction and demonstrates the significance of conversation as a rhetorical practice for women.

An in-depth study of early modern women's modesty rhetoric from the English Reformation to the Restoration. This book provides new readings of modesty's gendered deployment in the works of Anne Askew, Katharine Parr, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet.

Focusing on how citizens of early modern England tried to locate themselves and their nation through geography and travel writing, Monica Matei-Chesnoiu explores theatrical representations of Western European space and ethnography. Geographic discourses share many features with drama in that they appeal to the readers' and audience's curiosity and imagination. Playwrights use information derived from geography treatises as vehicles to allegorize contemporary English issues in a dialogical mode. While geography and travel texts provide an objective synthesis in describing Western European...

Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature demonstrates that early modern women's rhetorical manipulations of privacy violate the public/private opposition and experiment with form and genre in ways that shaped the early modern discourse on privacy. This book reveals how authors inventively disrupt conventions about women's privacy and its proper limits in genres from household orders to fiction, poetry, and drama. Mary Trull traces the construction of privacy in Anne Lock's 'The Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, ' Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, Mary Wroth's Urania, and...

What does it mean to write the city? How could the myriad experiences of life in early modern London be translated into textual form? In a detailed study of works ranging from little known manuscript accounts to major canonical texts from the pen of Thomas Middleton and Isabella Whitney, Writing Early Modern London pursues these questions. Arguing that the impulse to record and reflect upon the early modern city was fuelled by the process of religious reformation, it traces the profound impact of these upheavals upon how community was experienced and imagined. The authors studied here show...

The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622 studies the conception of Persia in the literary, political and pedagogic writings of Renaissance England and Britain. It argues that writers of all kinds debated the means and merits of English empire through their intellectual engagement with the ancient Persian empire.