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What was the purpose of representing foreign lands for writers in the English Renaissance? This book argues that writers often used their works as vehicles to reflect on the state of contemporary English politics, particularly their own lack of representation in public institutions. Sometimes such analyses took the form of displaced allegories, whereby writers contrasted the advantages enjoyed, or disadvantages suffered, by foreign subjects with the political conditions of Tudor and Stuart England. Elsewhere, more often in explicitly colonial writings, authors meditated on the problems of government when faced with the possibly violent creation of a new society. If Venice was commonly held up as a beacon of republican liberty which England would do well to imitate, the fear of tyrannical Catholic Spain was ever present—inspiring and haunting much of the colonial literature from 1580 onwards. This book examines fictional and non-fictional writings, illustrating both the close connections between the two made by early modern readers and the problems involved in the usual assumption that we can make sense of the past with the categories available to us. The book explores representations of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Far East, selecting pertinent examples rather than attempting to embrace a total coverage. It also offers fresh readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe, More, Lyly, Hakluyt, Harriot, Nashe, and others.

This book explores how the publication of women's life writing influenced the reputation of its writers and of the genre itself during the long nineteenth century. It provides case studies of Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson and Mary Hays, four writers whose names were caught up in debates about the moral and literary respectability of publishing the 'private'. Focusing on gender, genre and authorship, this study examines key works of life writing by and about these women, and the reception of these texts. It argues for the importance of life writing-a crucial site of affective and imaginative identification-in shaping authorial reputation and afterlife. The book ultimately constructs a fuller picture of the literary field in the long nineteenth century and the role of women writers and their life writing within it.

This collection explores British attitudes to Continental Europe that explain the Brexit decision. Addressing British-European entanglements and the impact of British Euroscepticism, the book argues that Britain is in denial about the strength of its ties to Europe. The volume brings together literary and cultural studies, history, and political science in an integrated analysis of views and practices that shape cultural memory. Part one traces the historical and political relationship between Britain and Europe, whilst Part two is devoted to exemplary case studies of films as well as popular Eurosceptic and historical fiction. Part three engages with border mindedness and Britain’s island story. The book is addressed both to specialists in cultural studies, and a wider audience interested in Brexit.

Literature of the Stuart Successionsis an anthology of primary material relating to the Stuart successions. The six Stuart successions (1603, 1625, 1660, 1685, 1688-9, 1702) punctuate this turbulent period of British history. In addition, there were two accessions to the role of Lord Protector (those of Oliver and Richard Cromwell). Each succession generated an outpouring of publications in a wide range of forms and genres, including speeches, diary-entries, news reports, letters and sermons. Above all, successions were marked in poems, by some of the greatest writers of the age. By gathering together some of the very best Stuart succession writing, Literature of the Stuart Successions offers fresh perspectives upon the history and culture of the period. It includes fifty texts (or extracts), selected to demonstrate the breadth and significance of succession writing, as well as introductory and explanatory material.

This book explores the political co-operations and textual connections which linked anti-colonial, nationalist, and modernist groups and individuals in the empire in the years 1890-1920. By developing the key motifs of lateral interaction and colonial interdiscursivity, this book builds a picture of the imperial world as an intricate network of surprising contacts and margin-to-margin interrelationships, and of modernism as a far more constellated cultural phenomenon than previously understood. Individual case studies consider Irish support for the Boers in 1899-1902, the path-breaking radical partnership of the Englishwoman Sister Nivedita and the Bengali extremist Aurobindo Ghose, Sol Plaatje's conflicted South African nationalism, and the cross-border, cosmopolitan involvements of W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, and Leonard Woolf. Underlining Frantz Fanon's perception that ‘a colonized people is not alone’, the book significantly questions prevailing postcolonial paradigms of the self-defining nation, syncretism and mimicry, and dismantles still-dominant binary definitions of the colonial relationship.

Looks at the nineteenth-century convergence of a new kind of excessive, habitual drinking, and a new way of thinking about the self, which we came to label 'existential'.Drinking to excess has been a striking problem for industrial and post-industrial societies - who is responsible when an individual opts for a slow suicide? The causes of such drinking have often been blamed on genes, moral weakness, 'disease' (addiction), hedonism, and Romantic illusion. Yet there is another reason: the drinker may act with sincere philosophical intent, exploring the edges of self, consciousness, will, ethics, authenticity and finitude. Beginning with Jack London'sJohn Barleycorn: alcoholic memoirs the book goes on to cover novels such as Jean Rhys'sGood morning, midnight, Malcolm Lowry's Under the volcano, Charles Jackson'sThe lost weekend and John O'Brien's Leaving Las Vegas, and less familiar works such as Frederick Exley's A fan's notes, Venedikt Yerofeev's Moscow-Petushki, and A. L. Kennedy's Paradise.

This book is a unique study of a neglected period of English writing. It places mid-Tudor literature within the context of important debates about English nationhood, the nature of the English Reformation and English humanism, the growth of the political nation, and how Renaissance writers constructed authorial identities in manuscript and print.

In The Great War and the Language of Modernism, Vincent Sherry reopens long unanswered questions regarding the influence of the 1914 war on the verbal experiments of modernist poetry and fiction. Sherry recovers the political discourses of the British campaign and establishes the language to which literary modernism responds with its boldest initiatives. In its wholly new reading of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound, this book restores the historical content and depth of this literature and reveals its most daring import.