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Convent Autobiography explores the ways in which cloistered women articulated their senses of self through genres such as letters, chronicles, accounts, guidance and devotional manuals, and conversion narratives. The book explores writings by early modern English women who elected a double self-exile from home and ‘from the world’, undertakings that shaped and informed so much of their self-writing. These nuns sometimes composed under their own names, but many composed anonymously. Using a combination of close reading, palaeography, manuscript evidence and other data, this book reveals the identities of half a dozen women, including descendants of Sir Thomas More, whose contributions to English literature and history were hitherto unknown. Although anonymous composition was in keeping with monastic norms of humility, Convent Autobiography argues anonymity offered paradoxical freedoms, such as enabling an author to write extensively about her own family, and herself, or to present institutional narratives through the lens of her own experiences. Three case studies devoted to anonymous chronicling reveal the complexity of authorial strategies of self and communal representation. On the basis of these, two new genres of autobiography are proposed: anonymous and subsumed autobiography. These definitions have wider application beyond convent and early modern literature. The book includes a complete edition of the vibrant conversion narrative, lists, and prayers of Catherine Holland, who defied her Protestant father by running away to join the convent of Nazareth where she could practise Catholicism and ‘escape the slavery of marriage’.

It has become common to build an opposition between prudish Victorian England and permissive nineteenth-century France. The lack of a full-length study of nineteenth-century Anglo-French literary relations means that both English reserve and French license have been greatly exaggerated, as French writers frequently met with far greater support in England than at home. French Novels and the Victorians aims to shed new light on these relations by exploring the enormous impact of French fiction on the Victorian reading public. The work considers the many different ties built between the two countries in the publishing industry, identifying how French novels could be accessed and by whom, as well as who promoted and who resisted the importation of Continental works in England and why. The book reflects on what ‘immorality’ meant to both critics and the readers they sought to warn, and how the notion was subjected to scrutiny through censorship debates as well as the fictional representations of readers. It also tackles the contemporary preoccupation with literary influence, and explores how the extensive circulation of French fiction in England affected the concept of a ‘national’ literature. Rather than a study of the (considerable) influence of novelists such as Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, or Sand on individual works of English literature, this book uncovers the networks and mediums that enabled French novels to cross the Channel, and looks at how the concept of the ‘French novel’ was elaborated, interpreted, and challenged.

This volume aims to rethink critical assumptions about a particular type of medieval manuscript: the miscellany. A miscellany is a multi-text manuscript, made up of mixed contents, often in a mixture of languages; such a volume might be the work of one compiler or several, and might have been put together over a short period of time or over many years (even over several generations). Such variety proves problematic when attempting to form critical judgements, particularly in terms of terminology and definitions. These issues are explored in the introduction, and the fifteen essays that follow discuss a great number of manuscript miscellanies produced in Britain in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Some of the chapters offer new insights into very well-known miscellanies, whilst others draw attention to little-known volumes. Whilst previous studies of the miscellany have restricted themselves to disciplinary or linguistic boundaries, this collection uniquely draws on the expertise of specialists in the rich range of vernacular languages used in Britain in the later Middle Ages (Anglo-French, Middle English, Older Scots, Middle Welsh). As a result, illuminating comparisons are drawn between miscellany manuscripts that were the products of different geographical areas and cultures. Collectively the chapters in Insular Books explore the wide range of heterogeneous manuscripts that may be defined as miscellanies, and model approaches to their study that will permit a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the production of these assemblages, as well as their circulation and reception in their own age and beyond.

This volume offers a series of fresh explorations of the life, writing, and reputation of John Milton. The ten papers take us inside Milton's verse and prose, into the context of the events and the intellectual debates within which they were written, and into the later worlds within which his reputation evolved and fluctuated. Key topics discussed include: his political beliefs and career; the characteristics of his poetry – especially Paradise Lost; the literary influences upon his verse; his perception of women; and the ways he has been seen since his death.

This is the first critical biography of Xavier Marmier. The celebrity of Marmier was such that his death made headline news in most major newspapers in France. Marmier earned his reputation by being a traveller, travel writer, translator, literary critic, comparatist, journalist, novelist, poet, lecturer, linguist, ethnologist, social historian, and latterly as an outspoken member of the Académie Française. His work had a great deal of influence, both direct and indirect, on literary and intellectual developments in France, and also had a significant impact in a number of the countries he visited. Although his name still figures in studies of comparative literature or the history of travel writing, Marmier's innovations have gradually been eclipsed by his successors in various fields, resulting in the neglect of his overall achievements. Marmier's numerous and diverse achievements are assessed in their intellectual and historical context, and within the framework of his colourful and somewhat controversial private life. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of the history of nineteenth-century French literature and intellectual life, the history of literary criticism, travel writing, the introduction of foreign literature to France, and those with an interest in the intellectual, social, and cultural history of the regions Marmier visited.

This is the first dedicated study of the classical-style, Latin didactic poetry produced by the Society of Jesus in the early modern period. The Jesuits were the most prolific composers of such poetry, teaching all manner of arts and sciences: meteorology and magnetism, raising chickens and children, the arts of sculpture and engraving, writing and conversation, the social and medicinal benefits of coffee and chocolate, the pious life and the urbane life. The book accounts for this investment in so secular a genre by considering the Society's educational and ideological values and practices. Extensive quotation from the poems reveals their literary qualities, compositional methods, and traditions. The poems also command scholarly attention for what they reveal about social, cultural, and intellectual life in this period.

Why biography? This collection of chapters on the problems and functions of biography, and particularly the biography of writers, thinkers, and artists, investigates a subject of enduring importance for those interested in culture and society. In the last century, it has been a controversial subject, as old models of biographical writing were attacked and superseded, while critics and theorists questioned the once self-evident value of the biography of writers. Yet the genre continues to attract notable authors and is unfailingly popular with readers. The present volume, while containing chapters by practising biographers, is intended primarily as a stimulus to critical thinking. It focuses on the diverse functions assumed by life-writing in different European countries at different periods, challenging both the notion of a genre with constant characteristics and aims and the view of modern biography as the happy culmination of centuries of progress.

This book offers an introduction to one of the most fascinating and little-known song traditions in Europe, the Breton gwerz or ballad. These narrative songs, collected in Western Brittany from the 19th century to the present day, recount a wealth of stories based on tragic local events (shipwrecks, abductions, accidents and murders) or legends (miraculous rescues, penitent souls, strange journeys). Two of the foremost scholars in the field present a selection of thirty-five ballads in the original Breton with English translations and musical notation. An accompanying CD showcases some of the most famous Breton traditional singers, and a comprehensive introductory essay explores the nature of the songs and the contexts in which they have been performed. These are strikingly dramatic, often deeply moving stories of violence, love and grief, which will touch listeners and readers of all interests.

This volume of essays arose from a conference which marked the 80th birthday of prizewinning British poet Tony Harrison on 30 April 2017 and with his agreement constitutes his ‘official’ Festschrift. The contributors include practising poets, playwrights, specialists in Classics, Theatre, Translation Studies, English and World Literature, and professionals in media (radio, newspapers, TV and film) where Harrison’s extensive work has been least researched. The aim of the volume is to open up new approaches to the understanding of the work of one of our most important poets. Although it is indeed intended to provide the substantial and sufficiently comprehensive contribution to Harrison scholarship that his official eight-decades-alive merit, and the Editor’s Introduction to the volume is sensitive to the needs of the reader in terms of bibliographical signposts, the four sections focus primarily on areas that have been hitherto little explored: (1) his more recent poems; (2) the continuation of his relationship with ancient theatre after the landmark Oresteia and Trackers of the 1980–1990 decade, his evolving dramatic relationship with Euripides, and with French authors (Hugo, Molière, Racine); (3) the international angle. This entails both the profound contribution made to his work by his periods of residence abroad, in Africa, North America, Moscow and Prague, and his popularity in French and Italian translation (both European translators have agreed to speak); (4) his extensive body of poems (about which almost nothing has been published) written specifically for delivery in the media of film, television and radio.

Petrarch was Italy's second most famous writer (after Dante), and indeed from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries he was much better known and more influential in English literature than Dante. His Italian love lyrics constituted the major influence on European love poetry for at least two centuries from 1400 to 1600, and in Britain he was imitated by Chaucer, the Elizabethans, and other lyric poets up until the end of the eighteenth century. With Romanticism Dante ousted Petrarch from his pre-eminent position, but in our post-Romantic age, attention has now started to swing back to Petrarch. This volume is a survey of Petrarch's literary legacy in Britain. Starting with his own views of those whom he called the ‘barbari Britanni’, the volume then explores a number of key topics: Petrarch's analysis of the self; his dialogue with other classical and Italian authors; Petrarchism and anti-Petrarchism in Renaissance Italy; Petrarchism in England and Scotland; and Petrarch's modern legacy in both Italy and Britain. Many important texts and poets are considered, including Giordano Bruno, Leopardi, Foscolo, Ascham, Sidney, Spenser, and Walter Savage Landor.

The Popish plot was an alleged Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and re-introduce the Catholic faith to England. Despite it being a fiction, belief in the plot became widespread and many innocent Catholics were sent to their deaths. Moving away from the focus of recent histories of the plot, which remain predominately in the realms of parliamentary discussion, courts of law and the councils of the King, this volume considers how details of the plot circulated more broadly. It investigates the many media used, primarily print, but also manuscript and word-of-mouth, for instance in books, pamphlets, newspapers, and ballads. The most prolific commentator on the Popish plot was Roger L'Estrange, the press censor during the reigns of Charles II and James II. L'Estrange was interested in the working of the London book trade at this time, and as one who did not believe there was a Popish plot, wrote prolifically in order publicly to cast doubt upon it. L'Estrange's writings provide us with valuable insights into the production, dissemination, and reception of political opinion in this period. Drawing on the insights of literary studies, political history, and the history of the book, reading this volume will further understanding in how belief in such an extraordinary plot took hold amongst so many.

This book is an examination of a poet whose career offers a case study in the complexities facing Soviet writers in the Stalin era. Ol′ga Berggol′ts (1910–1975) was a prominent Russian Soviet poet, whose accounts of heroism in wartime Leningrad brought her fame. This book addresses her position as a writer whose Party loyalties were frequently in conflict with the demands of artistic and personal integrity. Writers who pursued their careers under the restrictions of the Stalin era have been categorized as ‘official’ figures whose work is assumed to be drab, inept and opportunistic; but such assumptions impose a uniformity on the work of Soviet writers that the censors and the Writers Union could not achieve. An exploration of Berggol′ts's work shows that the borders between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ literature were in fact permeable and shifting. This book draws on unpublished sources such as diaries and notebooks to reveal the range and scope of her work, and to show how conflict and ambiguity functioned as a creative structuring principle. The text discusses how Berggol′ts's lyric poetry constructs the subject from multiple, conflicting discourses, and examines the poet's treatment of genres such as narrative verse, verse tragedy and prose in the changing cultural context of the 1950s. Berggol′ts's use of inter-textual, and especially intra-textual, reference is also investigated; the intensively self-referential nature of her work creates a web of allusion that connects texts of different genres, ‘official’ as well as ‘unofficial’ writing.