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 73-84 of 124 items.

French Women Authors

The Significance of the Spiritual, 1400–2000

University of Delaware Press

French Women Authors examines the importance afforded the spiritual in the lives and works of French women authors over the centuries, thereby highlighting both the significance of spiritually informed writings in French literature in general, as well as the specific contribution made by women writers. Eleven different authors have been selected for this collection, representing major literary periods from the medieval to the (post)modern.

  • Copyright year: 2013
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The Politics of Rape

Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage

University of Delaware Press

The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage is the first full-length study to examine representations of sexual violence on the Restoration stage. By reading theatrical depictions of sexual violence alongside political tracts, propaganda pamphlets, and circulating broadsides, this study argues that authors used dramatic representations of rape to respond to and engage with late-century upheavals in British political culture.

  • Copyright year: 2013
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Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature

Solitary Adventures

University of Delaware Press

Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary Adventures by Joseph Acquisto examines the many ways in which the castaway, particularly in the form of engagement with Robinson Crusoe, has been reinterpreted and appropriated in nineteenth through twenty-first century French literature. The book is not merely a literary history of the robinsonnade in France; rather, Acquisto demonstrates how what he calls the genre of “solitary adventure” becomes a vehicle for exploration of much larger questions about the reception of texts, modes of reading, and the relationship between popular and serious literary traditions.

  • Copyright year: 2012
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Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson

Resisting Secularism

Edited by Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy
University of Delaware Press

Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism contains seventeen essays exploring the complex relationships between literary intentions and theological concerns of authors writing in the second half of the eighteenth century. The diversity of literary forms and subjects, from Fielding and Richardson to Burke and Wollstonecraft, is matched by a diversity of approaches and theologies.

  • Copyright year: 2012
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Women as Translators in Early Modern England

University of Delaware Press

Women as Translators in Early Modern England offers a feminist theory of translation that considers both the practice and representation of translation in works penned by early modern women. It argues for the importance of such a theory in changing how we value women’s work. Because of England’s formal split from the Catholic Church and the concomitant elevation of the written vernacular, the early modern period presents a rich case study for such a theory. This era witnessed not only a keen interest in reviving the literary glories of the past, but also a growing commitment to humanist education, increasing literacy rates among women and laypeople, and emerging articulations of national sentiment.

  • Copyright year: 2012
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Citoyennes

Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France

University of Delaware Press

Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did.

  • Copyright year: 2012
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Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction

Theorizing Foundling and Lyric Plots

University of Delaware Press

In the first book to use fiction as theory, Barbara L. Estrin reverses chronological direction, beginning with contemporary novels to arrive at a re-visioned Shakespeare, uncovering a telling difference in the stories that script us and that influence our political unconscious in ways that have never been explored in literary-critical interpretations. Describing the animus against foreign blood, central to the dynamic of the foundling and lyric plots that form the nexus of her study, Estrin describes how late modern writers change those plots.

  • Copyright year: 2012
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Notorious Facts

Publicity in Romantic England, 1780–1830

University of Delaware Press

Notorious Facts examines the sensationalistic confounding of persons and principles in the public life of Romantic England (1780–1830). Its purview is limited to five decades straddling the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but its trajectory, moving from a politics rendered in personal terms to a politics of personality, describes a shift still in process today. The study’s chapters draw on a motley body of literature (pamphlets, secret histories, and the like) that at first glance seems uncharacteristic of what literary historians call the English Romantic period.

  • Copyright year: 2012
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Picturing Religious Experience

George Herbert, Calvin, and the Scriptures

University of Delaware Press

Little has been said about the relationship of Herbert’s writings to those of John Calvin, yet the latter were abundant and influential in Herbert’s Church of England. Accordingly Picturing Religious Experience studies Herbert’s poetry in relation to those writings, particularly regarding “spiritual conflicts,” which the poet himself said would be found depicted in his book of poems. Much more than is generally realized, Calvin wrote about the experience of living the Christian life—which is also Herbert’s subject in many of his poems.

  • Copyright year: 2012
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Hey Presto!

Swift and the Quacks

University of Delaware Press

In this book the author reveals how medicine shows, both ancient and modern, galvanized Jonathan Swift’s imagination and inspired his wittiest satiric voices. Swift dubbed these multifaceted traveling entertainments his Stage-itinerant or “Mountebank’s Stage.” In the course of arguing that the stage-itinerant formed an irresistible model for A Tale of a Tub, Ormsby-Lennon also surmises that the mountebank’s stage will disclose that missing link, long sought, which connects the twin objects of Swift’s ire: gross corruptions in both religion and learning.

  • Copyright year: 2011
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Shakespeare and Interpretation, or What You Will

University of Delaware Press

Brayton Polka takes both a textual and theoretical approach to seven plays of Shakespeare: MacbethOthelloTwelfth NightAll’s Well That Ends WellJulius CaesarTroilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. He calls upon the Bible and the ideas of major European thinkers, above all, Kierkegaard and Spinoza, to argue that the concept of interpretation that underlies both Shakespeare’s plays and our own lives as moderns is the golden rule of the Bible: the command to love your neighbor as yourself. What you will (the alternative title of Twelfth Night ) thus captures the idea that interpretation is the very act by which we constitute our lives.

  • Copyright year: 2011
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Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism

University of Delaware Press

Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism argues that early nineteenth-century women poets contributed some of the most daring work in modernizing the epic genre. The book examines several long poems to provide perspective on women poets working with and against men in related efforts, contributing together to a Romantic movement of large-scale genre revision. Women poets challenged longstanding categorical approaches to gender and nation in the epic tradition, and they raised politically charged questions about women’s importance in moments of historical crisis.

  • Copyright year: 2011
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