Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
About the Book Series
From Shakespeare to Jonson, Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture looks at both the literature and culture of the early modern period. This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering literature alongside theatre, popular culture, race, gender, ecology, space, and other subjects, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Milton's Italy: Anglo-Italian Literature, Travel, and Connections in Seventeenth-Century England
1st Edition
By Catherine Martin
May 21, 2019
This book joins a growing trend toward transnational literary studies and revives a venerable tradition of Anglo-Italian scholarship centering on John Milton. Correcting misperceptions that have diminished the international dimensions of his life and work, it broadly surveys Milton’s Italianate ...
Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other “Other”
1st Edition
By Matthieu Chapman
January 17, 2019
This is the first book to deploy the methods and ensemble of questions from Afro-pessimism to engage and interrogate the methods of Early Modern English studies. Using contemporary Afro-pessimist theories to provide a foundation for structural analyses of race in the Early Modern Period, it engages...
Early Modern Constructions of Europe: Literature, Culture, History
1st Edition
Edited
By Florian Kläger, Gerd Bayer
January 17, 2019
Between the medieval conception of Christendom and the political visions of modernity, ideas of Europe underwent a transformative and catalytic period that saw a cultural process of renewed self-definition or self-Europeanization. The contributors to this volume address this process, analyzing how ...
Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Wonder, the Sacred, and the Supernatural
1st Edition
Edited
By Nandini Das, Nick Davis
January 17, 2019
This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary...
Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations
1st Edition
By Simone Chess
January 17, 2019
This volume examines and theorizes the oft-ignored phenomenon of male-to-female (MTF) crossdressing in early modern drama, prose, and poetry, inviting MTF crossdressing episodes to take a fuller place alongside instances of female-to-male crossdressing and boy actors’ crossdressing, which have long...
Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama: Domestic Identity on the Renaissance Stage
1st Edition
By Ariane M. Balizet
August 23, 2018
In this volume, the author argues that blood was, crucially, a means by which dramatists negotiated shifting contours of domesticity in 16th and 17th century England. Early modern English drama vividly addressed contemporary debates over an expanding idea of "the domestic," which encompassed the ...
Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature
1st Edition
By Alison Chapman
May 31, 2017
This book visits the fact that, in the pre-modern world, saints and lords served structurally similar roles, acting as patrons to those beneath them on the spiritual or social ladder with the word "patron" used to designate both types of elite sponsor. Chapman argues that this elision of patron ...
Androids and Intelligent Networks in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Artificial Slaves
1st Edition
By Kevin LaGrandeur
February 16, 2017
Awarded a 2014 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Prize Honourable Mention. This book explores the creation and use of artificially made humanoid servants and servant networks by fictional and non-fictional scientists of the early modern period. Beginning with an investigation of the roots ...
Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America: Circles in the Sand
1st Edition
By Jess Edwards
April 27, 2016
The early modern map has come to mark the threshold of modernity, cutting through the layered customs of Medieval parochialism with its clean, expansive geometries. Re-thinking the role played by mathematics and cartography in the English seventeenth century, this book argues that the cultural ...
Prophecy and Sibylline Imagery in the Renaissance: Shakespeare’s Sibyls
1st Edition
By Jessica L. Malay
April 23, 2015
This book restores the rich tradition of the Sibyls to the position of prominence they once held in the culture and society of the English Renaissance. The sibyls — figures from classical antiquity — played important roles in literature, scholarship and art of the period, exerting a powerful ...
The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe
1st Edition
Edited
By Andrea Brady, Emily Butterworth
April 23, 2015
Is modernity synonymous with progress? Did the Renaissance really break with the cyclical, agrarian time of the Middle Ages, inaugurating a new concept of irreversible time in a secular culture defined by development? How does methodology affect scholarly responses to the idea of the future in the ...
Narrative Developments from Chaucer to Defoe
1st Edition
Edited
By Gerd Bayer, Ebbe Klitgard
November 10, 2014
This collection analyzes how narrative technique developed from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the 18th century. Taking Chaucer’s influential Middle English works as the starting point, the original essays in this volume explore diverse aspects of the formation of early modern prose ...