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1. | | Title: Inscribing the time: Shakespeare and the end of Elizabethan England Author: Mallin, Eric Scott Published: University of California Press, 1995 Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance LiteraturePublisher's Description: Combining the resources of new historicism, feminism, and postmodern textual analysis, Eric Mallin reveals how contemporary pressures left their marks on three Shakespeare plays written at the end of Elizabeth's reign. Close attention to the language of Troilus and Cressida , Hamlet , and Twelfth Night reveals the ways the plays echo the events and anxieties that accompanied the beginning of the seventeenth century. Troilus reflects the rebellion of the Earl of Essex and the failure of the courtly, chivalric style. Hamlet resonates with the danger of the bubonic plague and the difficult succession history of James I. Twelfth Night is imbued with nostalgia for an earlier period of Elizabeth's rule, when her control over religious and erotic affairs seemed more secure. [brief]Similar Items | 2. | | Title: Trials of authorship: anterior forms and poetic reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare Author: Crewe, Jonathan V Published: University of California Press, 1990 Subjects: Literature | Renaissance Literature | English LiteraturePublisher's Description: For more than a decade, the English Renaissance has been the scene of trial for the critical methodologies of deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, psychoanalytic poststructuralism, and cultural studies. Jonathan Crewe argues that the commitment in the prevailing criticism to innovation, transgression, and radical change has increasingly obscured some powerfully conservative elements both in Renaissance culture and in these critical discourses themselves.In a reading of the poets Wyatt, Surrey, and Gascoigne, and of the biographies of Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey, Crewe focuses on the relatively stable poetic and cultural forms operative in the Renaissance. He argues that these established forms, which shape poetic composition, social interaction, and individual identity, are subject to only limited reconstruction by English authors in the sixteenth century. They both facilitate and limit literary and social expression and result in more sharply conflicted literary production than contemporary critics have been willing to acknowledge. Crewe concentrates on authors whose canonical status is somewhat precarious and intentionally shifts the emphasis away from the Elizabethan period and toward that of Henry VIII. Trials of Authorship redraws the existing picture of the English Renaissance in the sixteenth century. [brief]Similar Items | 3. | | Title: An empire nowhere: England, America, and literature from Utopia to The tempest Author: Knapp, Jeffrey Published: University of California Press, 1991 Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | United States History | Renaissance Literature | European HistoryPublisher's Description: What caused England's literary renaissance? One answer has been such unprecedented developments as the European discovery of America. Yet England in the sixteenth century was far from an expanding nation. Not only did the Tudors lose England's sole remaining possessions on the Continent and, thanks to the Reformation, grow spiritually divided from the Continent as well, but every one of their attempts to colonize the New World actually failed.Jeffrey Knapp accounts for this strange combination of literary expansion and national isolation by showing how the English made a virtue of their increasing insularity. Ranging across a wide array of literary and extraliterary sources, Knapp argues that English poets rejected the worldly acquisitiveness of an empire like Spain's and took pride in England's material limitations as a sign of its spiritual strength. In the imaginary worlds of such fictions as Utopia , The Faerie Queene , and The Tempest , they sought a grander empire, founded on the "otherworldly" virtues of both England and poetry itself. [brief]Similar Items | 4. | | Title: Writing and rebellion: England in 1381Author: Justice, Steven 1957- Published: University of California Press, 1994 Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies | Medieval History | European HistoryPublisher's Description: In this compelling account of the "peasants' revolt" of 1381, in which rebels burned hundreds of official archives and attacked other symbols of authority, Steven Justice demonstrates that the rebellion was not an uncontrolled, inarticulate explosion of peasant resentment but an informed and tactical claim to literacy and rule.Focusing on six brief, enigmatic texts written by the rebels themselves, Justice places the English peasantry within a public discourse from which historians, both medieval and modern, have thus far excluded them. He recreates the imaginative world of medieval villagers - how they worked and governed themselves, how they used official communications in unofficial ways, and how they produced a disciplined insurgent ideology. [brief]Similar Items | 5. | | Title: The making of the English middle class: business, society, and family life in London, 1660-1730 Author: Earle, Peter 1937- Published: University of California Press, 1989 Subjects: HistoryPublisher's Description: This is the first major study of a neglected yet extremely significant subject: the London middle classes in the period between 1660 and 1730, a period in which they created a society and economy that can be seen with hindsight to have ushered in the modern world. Using a wealth of material from contemporary sources - including wills, business papers, inventories, marriage contracts, divorce hearings, and the writings of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys - Peter Earle presents a fully rounded picture of the "middling sort of people," getting to the hearts of their lives as men and women struggling for success in the biggest, richest, and most middle-class city in contemporary Europe.He examines in fascinating and convincing detail the business life of Londoners, from apprenticeship through the problems and potential rewards of different occupational groups, going on to look at middle-class family, social, political and material life - from relationships with spouses, children, servants, and neighbors, to food and clothes and furniture, to sickness, death, and burial.Stimulating, scholarly, and constantly illuminating, this book is an important and impressive contribution to English social history. [brief]Similar Items | 6. | | Title: The rest is silence: death as annihilation in the English Renaissance Author: Watson, Robert N Published: University of California Press, 1995 Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance LiteraturePublisher's Description: How did the fear of death coexist with the promise of Christian afterlife in the culture and literature of the English Renaissance? Robert Watson exposes a sharp edge of blasphemous protest against mortality that runs through revenge plays such as The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet , and through plays of procreation such as Measure for Measure and Macbeth . Tactics of denial appear in the vengefulness that John Donne directs toward female bodies for failing to bestow immortality, and in the promise of renewal that George Herbert sets against the threat of closure.Placing these literary manifestations in the context of specific Jacobean deathbed crises and modern cultural distortions, Watson explores the psychological roots and political consequences of denying that death permanently erases sensation and consciousness. [brief]Similar Items | 7. | | Title: A very social time: crafting community in antebellum New England Author: Hansen, Karen V Published: University of California Press, 1994 Subjects: History | United States History | Gender Studies | Social TheoryPublisher's Description: Karen Hansen's richly anecdotal narrative explores the textured community lives of New England's working women and men - both white and black - n the half century before the Civil War. Her use of diaries, letters, and autobiographies brings their voices to life, making this study an extraordinary combination of historical research and sociological interpretation.Hansen challenges conventional notions that women were largely relegated to a private realm and men to a public one. A third dimension - the social sphere - also existed and was a critical meeting ground for both genders. In the social worlds of love, livelihood, gossip, friendship, and mutual assistance, working people crossed ideological gender boundaries.The book's rare collection of original writings reinforces Hansen's arguments and also provides an intimate glimpse into antebellum New England life. [brief]Similar Items | 8. | | Title: The three-piece suit and modern masculinity: England, 1550-1850Author: Kuchta, David 1960- Published: University of California Press, 2002 Subjects: History | European History | Men and MasculinityPublisher's Description: In 1666, King Charles II felt it necessary to reform Englishmen's dress by introducing a fashion that developed into the three-piece suit. We learn what inspired this royal revolution in masculine attire--and the reasons for its remarkable longevity--in David Kuchta's engaging and handsomely illustrated account. Between 1550 and 1850, Kuchta says, English upper- and middle-class men understood their authority to be based in part upon the display of masculine character: how they presented themselves in public and demonstrated their masculinity helped define their political legitimacy, moral authority, and economic utility. Much has been written about the ways political culture, religion, and economic theory helped shape ideals and practices of masculinity. Kuchta allows us to see the process working in reverse, in that masculine manners and habits of consumption in a patriarchal society contributed actively to people's understanding of what held England together. Kuchta shows not only how the ideology of modern English masculinity was a self-consciously political and public creation but also how such explicitly political decisions and values became internalized, personalized, and naturalized into everyday manners and habits. [brief]Similar Items | 9. | | Title: The trauma of gender: a feminist theory of the English novelAuthor: Moglen, Helene 1936- Published: University of California Press, 2001 Subjects: Literature | Gender Studies | Women's Studies | European Studies | European History | Literary Theory and Criticism | English LiteraturePublisher's Description: Helene Moglen offers a revisionary feminist argument about the origins, cultural function, and formal structure of the English novel. While most critics and historians have associated the novel's emergence and development with the burgeoning of capitalism and the rise of the middle classes, Moglen contends that the novel princi- pally came into being in order to manage the social and psychological strains of the modern sex-gender system. Rejecting the familiar claim that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition, she shows that, from its inception in the eighteenth century, the English novel has contained both realistic and fantastic narratives, which compete for primacy within individual texts. [brief]Similar Items | 10. | | Title: Dryden in revolutionary England Author: Bywaters, David A Published: University of California Press, 1991 Subjects: Literature | English Literature | European HistoryPublisher's Description: In 1681, when he wrote Absalom and Achitophel , John Dryden was poet laureate and historiographer royal at the court of his patron Charles II, and the acknowledged champion of a successful political cause. Only a few years later, Dryden's conversion to Roman Catholicism, followed by James II's deposition for favoring Catholics, had cost the poet both his honors and his public. In no way, however, did Dryden accept the status of a political has-been. David Bywaters argues convincingly that this post-revolutionary phase of Dryden's career reveals a polemic as consistent as that of earlier periods.Dryden not only lived on in the country that had metaphorically cast him out but also remained a public literary figure, responding in his work to contemporary political changes. Between 1687 and 1700 he developed a subtle and powerful rhetoric in order to reconstruct his political and literary authority. Discussing both major and less-studied works, Dryden in Revolutionary England tells us much about the relation between politics and literature during a crucial, formative moment. [brief]Similar Items | 11. | | Title: Resistant structures: particularity, radicalism, and Renaissance texts Author: Strier, Richard Published: University of California Press, 1997 Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance Literature | English LiteraturePublisher's Description: Taking Wittgenstein's "Don't think, but look" as his motto, Richard Strier argues against the application of a priori schemes to Renaissance (and all) texts. He argues for the possibility and desirability of rigorously attentive but "pre-theoretical" reading. His approach privileges particularity and attempts to respect the "resistant structures" of texts. He opposes theories, critical and historical, that dictate in advance what texts must - or cannot - say or do.The first part of the book, "Against Schemes," demonstrates, in discussions of Rosemond Tuve, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Fish among others, how both historicist and purely theoretical approaches can equally produce distortion of particulars. The second part, "Against Received Ideas," shows how a variety of texts (by Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and others) have been seen through the lenses of fixed, mainly conservative ideas in ways that have obscured their actual, surprising, and sometimes surprisingly radical content. [brief]Similar Items | 12. | | Title: The custom of the castle: from Malory to Macbeth Author: Ross, Charles Stanley Published: University of California Press, 1997 Subjects: Literature | European History | English Literature | Medieval Studies | Renaissance LiteraturePublisher's Description: The "custom of the castle" imposes strange ordeals on knights and ladies seeking hospitality - daunting, mostly evil challenges that travelers must obey or even defend. This seemingly fantastic motif, first conceived by Chrètien de Troyes in the twelfth century and widely imitated in medieval French romance, flowered again when Italian and English authors adopted it during the century before Shakespeare's plays and the rise of the novel. Unlike other scholars who have dismissed it as pure literary convention, Charles Ross finds serious social purpose behind the custom of the castle.Ross explores the changing legal and cultural conceptions of custom in France, Italy, and England to uncover a broad array of moral issues in the many castle stories. He concentrates on single scenes that are common to a series of epics, showing how their nuanced narratives reflect real social limits of order, violence, justice, civility, and political conformity. His investigation of masterpieces from the thirteenth-century Lancelot to The Faerie Queene - by way of Malory, Boiardo, and Ariosto - demonstrates for the first time the impact on Shakespeare's plays, particularly Macbeth , of an earlier way of thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of social customs. [brief]Similar Items | 13. | | Title: Evolution's rainbow: diversity, gender, and sexuality in nature and peopleAuthor: Roughgarden, Joan Published: University of California Press, 2004 Subjects: Gender Studies | EcologyEvolutionEnvironment | Anthropology | Evolution | Health Care | Social Problems | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Social ProblemsPublisher's Description: In this innovative celebration of diversity and affirmation of individuality in animals and humans, Joan Roughgarden challenges accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation. A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science - and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary science in light of feminist, gay, and transgender criticism and redefines our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. Witty, playful, and daring, this book will revolutionize our understanding of sexuality. Roughgarden argues that principal elements of Darwinian sexual selection theory are false and suggests a new theory that emphasizes social inclusion and control of access to resources and mating opportunity. She disputes a range of scientific and medical concepts, including Wilson's genetic determinism of behavior, evolutionary psychology, the existence of a gay gene, the role of parenting in determining gender identity, and Dawkins's "selfish gene" as the driver of natural selection. She dares social science to respect the agency and rationality of diverse people; shows that many cultures across the world and throughout history accommodate people we label today as lesbian, gay, and transgendered; and calls on the Christian religion to acknowledge the Bible's many passages endorsing diversity in gender and sexuality. Evolution's Rainbow concludes with bold recommendations for improving education in biology, psychology, and medicine; for democratizing genetic engineering and medical practice; and for building a public monument to affirm diversity as one of our nation's defining principles. [brief]Similar Items | 14. | | Title: Building a better race: gender, sexuality, and eugenics from the turn of the century to the baby boomAuthor: Kline, Wendy 1968- Published: University of California Press, 2001 Subjects: History | United States History | Gender Studies | American Studies | History and Philosophy of SciencePublisher's Description: Wendy Kline's lucid cultural history of eugenics in America emphasizes the movement's central, continuing interaction with popular notions of gender and morality. Kline shows how eugenics could seem a viable solution to problems of moral disorder and sexuality, especially female sexuality, during the first half of the twentieth century. Its appeal to social conscience and shared desires to strengthen the family and civilization sparked widespread public as well as scientific interest. Kline traces this growing public interest by looking at a variety of sources, including the astonishing "morality masque" that climaxed the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition; the nationwide correspondence of the influential Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena, California; the medical and patient records of a "model" state institution that sterilized thousands of allegedly feebleminded women in California between 1900 and 1960; the surprising political and popular support for sterilization that survived initial interest in, and then disassociation from, Nazi eugenics policies; and a widely publicized court case in 1936 involving the sterilization of a wealthy young woman deemed unworthy by her mother of having children. Kline's engaging account reflects the shift from "negative eugenics" (preventing procreation of the "unfit") to "positive eugenics," which encouraged procreation of the "fit," and it reveals that the "golden age" of eugenics actually occurred long after most historians claim the movement had vanished. The middle-class "passion for parenthood" in the '50s had its roots, she finds, in the positive eugenics campaign of the '30s and '40s. Many issues that originated in the eugenics movement remain controversial today, such as the use of IQ testing, the medical ethics of sterilization, the moral and legal implications of cloning and genetic screening, and even the debate on family values of the 1990s. Building a Better Race not only places eugenics at the center of modern reevaluations of female sexuality and morality but also acknowledges eugenics as an essential aspect of major social and cultural movements in the twentieth century. [brief]Similar Items | 15. | | Title: The private orations of ThemistiusAuthor: Themistius Published: University of California Press, 1999 Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Classical History | Classical Politics | Classical Religions | Ancient HistoryPublisher's Description: Themistius was a philosopher, a prominent Constantinopolitan senator, and an adviser to Roman emperors during the fourth century A.D. In this first translation of Themistius's private orations to be published in English, Robert J. Penella makes accessible texts that shed significant light on the culture of Constantinople and, more generally, the eastern Roman empire during the fourth century. The sixteen speeches translated here are equipped with ample annotations and an informative introduction, making them a valuable resource on the late antique period, as well as on Greek intellectual history and oratory.In Themistius's public orations, he played the role of imperial panegyrist, but in the "private" or unofficial orations presented here, the senator concerns himself with apologetics, rhetorical and philosophical programs, material of autobiographical interest, and ethical themes. The speeches are valuable as evidence for the political, social, philosophical, religious, and literary history of fourth century Byzantium, and as examples of pagan ideology and eloquence in the newly Christianized court. Themistius argues, among other things, that the philosopher should be involved in public affairs, that the lessons of philosophy should be broadcast to the masses, and that it is appropriate for the philosopher to be an effective orator in order to circulate his teachings. [brief]Similar Items | 16. | | Title: Death before dying: the Sufi poems of Sultan BahuAuthor: Sult̤ān Bāhū 1630-1691 Published: University of California Press, 1998 Subjects: Literature | Religion | Poetry | Middle Eastern Studies | Literature in Translation | Islam | South AsiaPublisher's Description: These 115 poems introduce readers in English to Sultan Bahu (d. 1691), a Sufi mystical poet who continues to be one of the most beloved writers in Punjabi. Bahu, whose name translates as "With God," remains highly popular in Pakistan and India today - even illiterate Punjabis can recite his poetry b . . . [more]Similar Items | 17. | | Title: Another kind of love: male homosexual desire in English discourse, 1850-1920 Author: Craft, Christopher 1952- Published: University of California Press, 1994 Subjects: Literature | Sociology | Literary Theory and Criticism | Gender Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual StudiesPublisher's Description: In a study that will be of interest to all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading, Christopher Craft investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities. How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part does literature play in the development of such categories, or in a culture's resistance to them? And what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject? How has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a bulwark against the attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that condemns it?Craft examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and Tennyson's In Memoriam , Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest , Stoker's Dracula , and Lawrence's Women In Love . [brief]Similar Items | 18. | | | 19. | | Title: The other economy: pastoral husbandry on a medieval estate Author: Biddick, Kathleen Published: University of California Press, 1989 Subjects: History | European History | Medieval StudiesPublisher's Description: While the cereal agriculture of medieval Europe has been studied exhaustively, the pastoral resources and livestock husbandry of medieval estates have been seriously neglected. Kathleen Biddick's examination of one estate, Peterborough Abbey, during several decades before and after 1100 and the first decade after 1300, brings a new balance to the subject of the medieval economy. Her pioneering methodology and the conclusions she reaches will interest archaeologists and agricultural historians as well as anthropologists, economists, and historians of early European development.Drawing on the archival records of the abbey, an estate that straddled the "classic" open-field agriculture of the English Midlands and the more pastorally-oriented farming of the English peat fens, Biddick describes in great detail how these farmers managed their herds and consumed and marketed livestock products such as meat, wool, hides, milk, and cheese. Commitment to conserving consumption strategies did not mean that the Abbey resisted market involvement and technological innovation. Large numbers of work and cart horses indicate the estate's economic interest in speedy haulage. Cereal yields, where they are calculable, compare favorably to the high-yielding demesnes of parts of Norfolk, the most agriculturally advanced region of medieval England. By showing how the Abbey coordinated its resources to enhance diversity and flexibility, The Other Economy enlarges our understanding of agrarian lordship and political control over resources in the medieval economy. [brief]Similar Items | 20. | | Title: Religion and society in a Cotswold vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780-1865 Author: Urdank, Albion M Published: University of California Press, 1990 Subjects: History | European HistoryPublisher's Description: During the English Industrial Revolution, the Vale of Nailsworth was a rural-industrial settlement and a center of evangelical Nonconformity. Why did the transition to the factory system bring deindustrialization and social decline rather than long-term advancement? Albion Urdank investigates the modernization of Nailsworth from many perspectives, revealing the experience and the mentalité of ordinary people in their ecological, economic, and social environments. His innovative approach, in the tradition of the Leicester and Annales schools, contributes to the historical literature on popular religion, secularization, local history, and European industrialization, and will appeal to a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary interests. [brief]Similar Items |
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