NEW TITLE

Three Renaissance usury plays

The Three Ladies of London, Englishmen for My Money, The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl

Edited by Lloyd Edward Kermode

This book provides for the first time modern-spelling, fully annotated editions of three important Elizabeth and Jacobean 'usury plays' - The Three Ladies of London, Englishmen for My Money, The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl. The edition includes an extensive scholarly introduction to the attitudes toward money-lending in early modern England, and to the authors, texts and historical contexts of this drama.

The plays included in this edition also represent examples of 'city plays' and 'alien plays', thus making them widely relevant to scholars and teachers in many areas of early modern studies. They are also gaining new appreciation in their own right.

As befits a volume in the Revels Plays Companions Library series, the edition is academically advanced to cater for specialised scholars. However, the introduction, editing and annotation remain accessible for undergraduates and theatregoers.

Please click on the title for more information, including details on how to order.

Just arrived into the office....

Second sight

The visionary imagination in late Victorian literature

by Catherine Maxwell

This challenging and important study, which examines a range of canonical and less well-known writers, is an innovative reassessment of late Victorian literature in its relation to visionary Romanticism.

It examines six late Victorian writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – to reveal their commitment to a Romantic visionary tradition which surfaces towards the end of the nineteenth century in response to the threat of a growing materialism. Offering detailed and imaginative readings of both poetry and prose, Second Sight shows the different ways in which late Victorian writers move beyond materiality, though without losing a commitment to it, to explore the mysterious relation between the seen and the unseen.

For more information, please click on the title above.

Frankfurt and new books

The offices are feeling empty this week as several of us have gone to the Frankfurt book fair; a very important time of the year for us. They'll be back next week, no doubt with a full report on everything from the world's largest book fair.

Meanwhile, these have just arrived into the office in fine duet form:-

Shakespeare and Spenser

Attractive opposites

by J. B. Lethbridge

A much-needed volume that brings together ten original papers by the experts, on the relations between Spenser and Shakespeare. There has been much noteworthy work on the linguistic borrowings of Shakespeare from Spenser, but the subject has never before been treated systematically, and the linguistic borrowings lead to broader-scale borrowings and influences which are treated here. An additional feature of the book is that for the first time a large bibliography of previous work is offered.

Shakespeare and Spenser presents new approaches, heralding a resurgence of interest in the relations between two of the greatest Renaissance English poets to a wider scholarly group and in a more systematic manner than before.

Click on the title for more information, including how to order.

-------------------------------------------

Shakespeare's book

Essays in reading, writing and reception

Edited by Richard Meek, Jane Rickard & Richard Wilson

This collection of essays is part of a new phase in Shakespeare studies. The traditional view of Shakespeare is that he was a man of the theatre who showed no interest in the printing of his plays, producing works that are only fully realised in performance. This view has recently been challenged by critics arguing that Shakespeare was a literary ‘poet-playwright’, concerned with his readers as well as his audiences.

Shakespeare’s Book offers a vital contribution to this critical debate, and examines its wider implications for how we conceive of Shakespeare and his works. Bringing together an impressive group of international Shakespeare scholars, the volume explores both Shakespeare’s relationship with actual printers, patrons, and readers, and the representation of writing, reading, and print within his works themselves.

Click on the title for more information, including how to order.

REVIEWED: Shakespeare and laughter by Indira Ghose

The Times Higher Education Supplement has done a great review of Indira Ghose's Shakespeare and laughter.

It begins:-

"Indira Ghose's adroit, engaging study begins with a moment of consternation. When invited by a newspaper to nominate the "funniest Brit of all time", the nation chose not Shakespeare but Eric Morecambe - and by a landslide. How could this be? For intelligent, reflective adults (or Daily Mirror readers, at least) to think more highly of the man who gave us "You can't see the join!" than the creator of Twelfth Night suggests misprision. But, as Ghose implies, the choice is hardly surprising. Laughter is a communal affair. We laugh more readily when in company than alone, and most of all when the source of the humour is present; and we do so as much to signal our willingness to share the fun as we do at anything intrinsically 'funny'. "

Read the full review here.

REVIEWED: Andrew Van der Vlies' South African textual cultures

The Times Literary Supplement published a full page review (p.23) of South African textual cultures in its September 5th issue. Reviewer Elizabeth Lowry writes:-

"What's white and black and read all over? The answer to this question, wittily posed and elegantly argued by Andrew van der Vlies in this original new study, is of course, 'South African literature'.... "

For more information on the book, including ordering details, visit the webpage.

Just arrived into the office...

States of suspense

The nuclear age, postmodernism and United States fiction and prose

Daniel Cordle

When the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, it precipitated a nuclear age that shaped the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. States of suspense is about the representation of this nuclear age in United States literature from 1945–2005.

The profound psychological and cultural impact of living in anticipation of the Bomb is apparent not only in end-of-the-world fantasies, but also in mainstream and postmodern literature. This book traces the ways in which key motifs – the fragility of reality; the fear of closure; the inadequacies of language to represent the world – move between nuclear and postmodern cultures of the Cold War era. Taking three symbolically threatened environments – the home, the city, the planet – the book explores their recasting as ‘nuclear places’ in literature, and shows how these nuclear concerns resonate with those of other cultures.

-----------------------------------

For more information, including how to order, click on the title above or here.

Get in touch if you are interested in an inspection or review copy.

Just arrived into the office...

Shakespeare and laughter

A cultural history

Indira Ghose

This book examines laughter in the Shakespearean theatre, and is the first study to focus specifically on laughter, not comedy. It looks at various strands of the early modern discourse on laughter, ranging from medical treatises and courtesy manuals to Puritan tracts and jestbook literature. It argues that few cultural phenomena have undergone as radical a change in meaning as laughter.

Laughter became bound up with questions of taste and class identity. At the same time, humanist thinkers revalorised the status of recreation and pleasure. These developments left their trace on the early modern theatre, where laughter was retailed as a commodity in an emerging entertainment industry. Shakespeare´s plays both reflect and shape these changes, particularly in his adaptation of the Erasmian wise fool as a stage figure, and in the sceptical strain of thought that is encapsulated in the laughter evoked in the plays.

For more information, click on the link in the title above.

-------------------------