Fair Exotics Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature, 1720-1850 Rajani Sudan "Offers impressive close readings which suggest how literary texts may help to shape dominant national ideologies."--Times Litterary Supplement "Rajani Sudan brilliantly unmasks the xenophobia lurking at the heart of British imperialist culture. Sudan's investigation is original in its attention to how xenophobia, the fear of the foreign, and xenodochy, the entertainment and attempted incorporation of the foreign, work together dynamically as shifting, historically specific phenomena."--Donna Landry, Wayne...

Shakespeare's Domestic Economies Gender and Property in Early Modern England Natasha Korda "This is a truly excellent book on Shakespeare's treatment of domestic economies, that is, his attention to the domain of household management increasingly seen as the women's sphere in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England."--Jean Howard, author of The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England "This exceptional study makes an important and most welcome contribution."--Ben Jonson Journal "Korda draws on the best aspects of a variety of recent critical approaches...

Contemporary feminist readers have argued that old French literary representations of women--from the excessively beautiful lady of courtly romance to the lascivious shrew of fabliau and farce--are the products of misogynous male imagination and fantasy. In Bodytalk, E. Jane Burns contends that female protagonists in medieval texts authored by men can be heard to talk back against the stereotyped and codified roles that their fictive anatomy is designed to convey. She investigates key moments in which the words of these medieval "women" dissent from and significantly restructure the...

Exotic Women Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancient Regime France Julia V. Douthwaite Julia V. Douthwaite describes the interrelated representations of cultural and sexual difference in key French works of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The heroines of this book are foreign women, brought to France through no will of their own, and forced into the margins of a new society. The author contends that their experience resonates with larger cultural beliefs about exotic and primitive peoples in ancien regime France and illuminates some of the blind spots in...

In Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England, Bruce Thomas Boehrer argues that a preoccupation with incest is built not the dominant social and cultural concerns of early modern England. Proceeding from a study of Henry III's divorce and succession legislation, through the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, this work examines the interrelation between family politics and literary expression in and around the English royal court.

Joseph Childers contends that novels such as Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke were in direct competition with other forms of public discourse for interpretive dominance of their age. Childers examines the interactions between the novel and a set of texts generated by parliamentary and radical politics, the sanitation reform movement, and religion. Reversing the position of earlier studies of this period, he argues that the novel was in fact constitutive of--and often provided the model for--texts as diverse...

To many of their contemporaries, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton were little more than artisanal craftsmen, "stage-wrights" who wrote plays for money, to be performed in common playhouses and in a manner often antithetical to what Jonson himself viewed as the higher calling of poetry. In response to the conflicting pressures of censorship and commercialism, Paul Yachnin contends, players and dramatists alike had promulgated the idea of drama's irrelevance, creating a recreational theater that failed to influence its audience in any purposeful way. In Stage-Wrights...