Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800 Books

Elements of Criticism (1762) is a philosophical work by Henry Home, Lord Kames. Published at the height of his career as a leading legal and cultural figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Elements of Criticism has been credited as a crucial academic work...

The hardness of stone, the pliancy of wood, the fluidity of palm oil, the crystalline nature of salt, and the vegetable qualities of moss each describes a way of being in and understanding the world. These substances are both natural objects hailed in...

Cervantes' Architectures is the first book dedicated to architecture in Cervantes' prose fiction. At a time when a pandemic is sweeping the world, this book reflects on the danger outside by concentrating on the role of enclosed structures as places...

From its modern origins in seventeenth-century France, encyclopedic compilations met the need for the dissemination of information in a more flexible format, one that eschewed the limits of previous centuries of erudition. The rise of vernacular...

Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination explores how the cognitive and physical landscapes in which scholars conduct research, write, and teach have shaped their understandings of medieval and Renaissance English literary "oecologies." The...

Renaissance readers perceived the print book as both a thing and a medium - a thing that could be broken or reassembled, and a visual medium that had the power to reflect, transform, or deceive. At the same historical moment that print books remediated...

Advocating a revised history of the eighteenth-century novel, Novel Cleopatras showcases the novel's origins in ancient mythology, its relation to epic narrative, and its connection to neoclassical print culture. Novel Cleopatras also rewrites the...

In the 1790s, while across the Channel a political revolution raged, Britain was struck by a reading revolution, a taste for terror fiction that seemed to know no bounds. Ann Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis were only the most celebrated of a host of writers...

For Jacobean society, witchcraft was a potent and very real force, an area of sharp controversy in which King James I himself participated and a phenomenon that attracted many dramatists and writers. The three plays in this volume reflect the variety of...