University of Delaware Press
The University of Delaware Press publishes approximately 15–20 books per year in Literary Studies, especially Renaissance and Early Modern literature; Eighteenth-Century Studies; French literature and culture; Art History and Material Culture Studies; and cultural studies of Delaware and the Eastern Shore. 
Showing 37-48 of 124 items.

The Idea of the Sciences in the French Enlightenment

A Reinterpretation

University of Delaware Press

This book traces the development of the idea that the sciences were morally enlightening through an intellectual history of the secrétaires perpétuels of the French Royal Academy of Sciences and their associates from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century.

  • Copyright year: 2014
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Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century

University of Delaware Press

This book deals with changing conditions and conceptions of authorship in the long eighteenth century, a period often said to have witnessed the birth of the modern author. It focuses not on authorial self-presentation or self-revelation but on an author’s interactions with booksellers, collaborators, rivals, correspondents, patrons, and audiences. Challenging older accounts of the development of authorship in the period as well as newer claims about the “public sphere” and the “professional writer,” it engages with recent work on print culture and the history of the book.

  • Copyright year: 2014
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Pastiche, Fashion, and Galanterie in Chardin’s Genre Subjects

Looking Smart

University of Delaware Press

Pastiche, Fashion and Galanterie in Chardin’s Genre Subjects seeks to understand how Chardin’s genre subjects were composed and constructed to communicate certain things to the elites of Paris in the 1730s and 1740s. The book argues against the conventional view of Chardin as the transparent imitator of bourgeois life and values so ingrained in art history since the nineteenth century. Instead, it makes the case that these pictures were crafted to demonstrate the artist’s wit (esprit) and taste, traits linked to conventions of seventeenth-century galanterie.

  • Copyright year: 2014
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Renaissance Shakespeare/Shakespeare Renaissances

Proceedings of the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress

University of Delaware Press

Selected contributions to the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, which took place in July 2011 in Prague, represent the contemporary state of Shakespeare studies in thirty-eight countries worldwide. 

  • Copyright year: 2014
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Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama

Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy

University of Delaware Press

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama: Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy studies instantiations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside such fraught questions as the history of Renaissance subjectivity and individualism on the one hand and Shakespearean exceptionalism on the other, we can find that in some plays, by a range of different authors and collaborators, a conception has been evidenced of who a particular person is, and has been used to drive the action. 

  • Copyright year: 2014
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Shopping

Material Culture Perspectives

University of Delaware Press

The degree to which shopping, or, more broadly, consumerism, is both critiqued and defended in American society confirms the role that commercial goods play in our daily lives. This collection of essays provides case studies depicting selected aspects of this engaging activity.

  • Copyright year: 2015
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Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts

Watching, Reading, Changing Plays

University of Delaware Press

Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts (selections from plays and masques) into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays is the first to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays. As this under-examined archival evidence shows, play readers and playgoers viewed plays as malleable and modular texts to be altered, appropriated, and, most importantly, used. 

  • Copyright year: 2015
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Shakespeare's Folktale Sources

University of Delaware Press

Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources argues that seven plays—The Taming of the ShrewTitus AndronicusThe Merry Wives of WindsorThe Merchant of VeniceAll’s Well that Ends WellMeasure for Measure, and Cymbeline—derive one or more of their plots directly from folktales. In most cases, scholars have accepted one literary version of the folktale as a source.

  • Copyright year: 2015
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Jonathan Swift

Irish Blow-In

University of Delaware Press

Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in covers the arc of the first half of Jonathan Swift’s life, offering fresh details of the contentment and exuberance of his childhood, of the support he received from his grandmother, of his striking affection for Esther Johnson from the time she was ten years old (his pet name for her in her twenties was “saucebox”), of his precocious entry into English politics with his Contests and Dissensions pamphlet, of his brilliant and much misunderstood Tale of a Tub, and of his naive determination to do well both as a vicar of the small parish of Laracor in Ireland and as a writer for the Tory administration trying to pull England out of debt by ending the war England was engaged in with France.

  • Copyright year: 2016
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Jonathan Swift

Our Dean

University of Delaware Press

Jonathan Swift: Our Dean details the political climax of his remarkable career—his writing and publication of The Drapier’s Letters (1724), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729)—stressing the relentless political opposition he faced and the numerous ways, including through his sermons, that he worked from his political base as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, psychologically as well as physically just outside the Dublin city walls, to attempt to rouse the Irish people to awareness of the ways that England was abusing them.

  • Copyright year: 2016
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Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France

University of Delaware Press

Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France was inspired by the observation that small slips of the flesh (involuntary confessions of the flesh) are omnipresent in early modern texts of many kinds. These slips (which bear similarities to what we would today call the Freudian slip) disrupt and destabilize readings of body, self, and text—three categories whose mutual boundaries this book seeks to soften—but also, in their very messiness, participate in defining them.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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The Theatre of Death

Rituals of Justice from the English Civil Wars to the Restoration

University of Delaware Press

This book discusses some rituals of justice—such as public executions, printed responses to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s execution speech, and King Charles I’s treason trial—in early modern England. Focusing on the ways in which genres shape these events’ multiple voices, I analyze the rituals’ genres and the diverse perspectives from which we must understand them.

  • Copyright year: 2017
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