What did Coleridge know about medicine and how did it influence the development of his critical thought? Neil Vickers sets out to answer this question in this radical reinterpretation of Coleridge's career between 1795 and 1806. Coleridge and the Doctors changes the way we look at Coleridge's intellectual development and reveals the richness of his involvement in the eighteenth-century tradition of "philosophical medicine" and its determining influence on his critical and philosophic stance. The book also contains a revisionary analysis of Coleridge's dealings with opiates and offers a...

Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy has long been taken as one of the seminal works of the Middle Ages, yet despite the study of many aspects of the Consolation's influence, the legacy of the figure of the writer in prison has not been explored. A group of late-medieval authors, Thomas Usk, James I of Scotland, Charles d'Orleans, George Ashby, William Thorpe, Richard Wyche, and Sir Thomas Malory, demonstrate the ways in which the imprisoned writer is presented, both within and outside the Boethian tradition. The presentation of an imprisoned autobiographical identity in each of these authors'...

Tracing evolving treatments of female adolescence through a host of long-forgotten women's fictions, the book reveals that representations of the girl in popular women's literature importantly anticipated depictions of the feminist in the fin de siecle New Woman writing; conservative portrayals of girls' hopes, dreams, and subsequent frustrations helped clear a literary and cultural space for the New Woman's "awakening" to disaffected consciousness.
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Royalist Women Writers aims to put women back on the map of seventeenth-century royalist literature from which they have habitually been marginalized. Looking in detail at the work of Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, it argues that their writings inaugurate a more assertive model of the Englishwoman as literary author, which is crucially enabled by their royalist affiliations. Chalmers reveals new political sub-texts in the three writers' work and shows how these inflect their representations of gender. In this way both their texts and manner of presenting themselves as...

This is the first book-length study of John Skelton (?1460-1529) for almost twenty years, and the first to link his poetic theory with his practice as a writer and translator. Reassessing Skelton's place in the English literary canon, it suggests the need to reconsider the conventional distinction between "Medieval" and "Renaissance" poetics.

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart is a significant and timely study of nineteenth-century poetry and poetics. It considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to act upon its readers. In the course of the nineteenth century, this study argues, increased doubt about the validity of feeling led to the depiction of the literary heart as alienated, distant, outside the control of mind and will. This coincided with...

Modernist texts and writings of protest have until now received most of the critical attention of literary scholars of the First World War. Popular literature with its penchant for predictable storylines, melodramatic prose, and patriotic rhetoric has been much-maligned or at the very least ignored. Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print redresses the balance. It turns the spotlight on the novels and memoirs of women writers--many of whom are now virtually forgotten--that appealed to a British reading public hungry for amusement, news, and above all, encouragement in the face of uncertainty and grief....

Authorship and Appropriation is the first full-length study of the cultural and economic status of playwriting in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and argues that the period was a decisive one in the transition from Renaissance conceptions of authorship towards modern ones. Kewes offers a fresh account of the dramatic canon, revealing how the moderns--Dryden, Otway, Lee, Behn, and then their successors Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar--acquired an esteem equal, even superior, to their illustrious predecessors Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher.

Texts and Traditions explores Shakespeare's thoroughgoing engagement with the religious culture of his time. In the wake of the recent resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's Catholicism, Groves eschews a reductively biographical approach and considers instead the ways in which Shakespeare's borrowing from both the visual culture of Catholicism and the linguistic wealth of the Protestant English Bible enriched his drama. Through close readings of a number of plays--Romeo and Juliet, King John, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, and Measure for Measure--Groves unearths and explains previously unrecognized...

Palfrey presents a new vision of character, metaphor, and politics in late Shakespeare. Closely analyzing Shakespeare's use of language and genre, he shows how the plays revamp theatrical decorums. The plays are not courtly, sober, and escapist, as their reputation suggests; rather, they are peculiarly sensitive to the turbulent, unfinished quality of Shakespeare's historical moment. In both court and wilderness, Shakespeare analyzes the violence of authority, the tensions in language, and the origin and prospects of both. Palfrey argues against a conventional sense of the plays' movement...