Frances Brooke (1724-1789), journalist, translator, playwright, novelist, and even co-manager of a theater, was described as "perhaps the first female novel-writer who attained a perfect purity and polish of style." Today, Brooke is known primarily for The History of Emily Montague, one of the earliest novels about Canada, where she lived for a number of years. But it is her third novel, The Excursion, that is an important example of the fashionable and popular English novels of the late 1770s. Written for the very audience it portrays, this novel introduces the heroine, Maria Villiers, to London's "gentle" society and its glittering pastimes. Brooke drew upon the English courtship novel in the tradition of Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney for her novel's overarching plot structure. But instead of concentrating on Maria's romantic adventures, she experiments with unusual treatments of subplots and unconventional characters.The most interesting aspect of her story is the development of Maria's ambition to win fame and fortune as a writer; it is one of the few portraits of a woman with literary ambitions by an early woman writer. Brooke's wry narrative voice foreshadows that of Jane Austen.The editors' introduction places The Excursion firmly in the tradition of the English novel, provides a fresh biography of Brooke, and brings together the most important eighteenth- and twentieth-century criticism of Brooke's work.The second volume in the series Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women, The Excursion contributes to our understanding of the development of the novel and offers a lively view of women's position in eighteenth-century English society.

This volume of twelve original essays is the first comprehensive study of feminist issues in Restoration drama. The late seventeenth century marks a pivotal era in the history of feminism, when Renaissance assumptions about gender and patriarchy were being directly challenged. For the first time, women appeared onstage as actresses, made their presence felt as spectators and patrons, and wrote a number of the plays produced in theaters. In an unusually direct and probing way, drama of the Restoration period raised radical questions about the place of women in the family and in society, and about the essential nature of men and women. The essays examine feminist issues from a variety of historical and theoretical approaches across a spectrum of plays -- comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies, and heroic drama. By addressing the acute questions of gender raised in the drama, Broken Boundaries presents a vivid portrait of the uncertainties and changing perceptions in all areas of intellectual, political, and social life during the last decades of the seventeenth century.

The Conversational Circle offers a model for exploring a range of novels that experiment with narrative patterns. It makes a compelling case that teleological approaches to novel history that privilege the conflict between the individual and society are, quite simply, ahistorical. Twentieth-century historians of the early novel, most prominently Ian Watt, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Terry Castle, have canonized fictions that portray the individual in sustained tension with the social environment. Such fictions privilege a strongly linear structure. Recent reexaminations of the canon, however, have revealed a number of early novels that do not fit this mold.Betty Schellenberg identifies another kind of plot, one that focuses on the social group -- the "conversational circle" -- as a model that can affirm traditional values but just as often promotes an alternative sense of community. Schellenberg selects a group of mid-eighteenth-century novels that experiment with this alternative plot structure, embodied by the social circle. Both satirical and sentimental, canonical and non-canonical, these novels demonstrate a concern that individualistic desire threatened to destabilize society. Writing that reflects a circular structure emphasizes conversation and consensus over individualism and conquest. As a discourse that highlights negotiation and harmony, conversation privileges the social group over the individual.These fictions of the conversation circle include lesser-known works by canonical authors (Henry Fielding's Amelia and Richards's Sir Charles Grandison as well as his sequel to Pamela), long-neglected novels by women (Sarah Fielding's David Simple and its sequel Volume the Last, and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall), and Tobias Smollet's last novel, Humphrey Clinker. Because they do not fit the linear model, such works have long been dismissed as ideologically flawed and irrelevant.

Voces Femeninas de Hispanoamerica presents in one volume a selection of the most representative and outstanding writing by Latin American women writers from the seventeenth century to the present. Designed as a text for third and fourth-year students, the selections, writers\u2019 biographies, historical introduction, and appendixes are entirely in Spanish, with notes to help students with difficult words or passages.

American literary history of the nineteenth-century as a conflict between individualistic writers and a conformist society. In The Social Self, Joseph Alkana argues that such a dichotomy misrepresents the views of many authors.Sudden changes caused by the industrial revolution, urban development, increased immigration, and regional conflicts were threatening to fragment the community, and such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, William James, and William Dean Howells were deeply concerned about social cohesion. Alkana persuasively reintroduces Common Sense philosophy and Jamesian psychology as ways to understand how the nineteenth-century self/society dilemma developed.All three writers believed that introspection was the proper path to the discovery of truth. They also felt, Alkana argues, that such discoveries had to be validated by society. In these sophisticated readings of Hawthorne's short stories and The Scarlet Letter, Howells's utopian Altrurian romances, and James's The Principles of Psychology, it becomes obvious that characters who isolate themselves from the community do so at considerable psychological risk.The Social Self links these writers' interest in contemporary psychology to their concern for history and society. Alkana's argument that nineteenth-century expressions of individualism were defensive responses to the fear of social chaos radically revises the traditional narrative of American literary culture.

Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other's creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars. Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other's novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity, the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by undercutting someone else's -- usually Charles Dickens's.Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside. Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for expressing too negative a world view.For his part, Dickens -- determined to remain inimitable -- replied to all of his rivals by redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and situations to make their own statements and to discredit his.Thus Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelist read and rewrote each other's work, this innovative study alters present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as Felix Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, The Woman in White, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Lady Mary Wroth (c. 1587-1653) wrote the first sonnet sequence in English by a woman, one of the first plays by a woman, and the first published work of fiction by an Englishwoman. Yet, despite her status as a member of the distinguished Sidney family, Wroth met with disgrace at court for her authorship of a prose romance, which was adjudged an inappropriate endeavor for a woman and was forcibly withdrawn from publication. Only recently has recognition of Wroth's historical and literary importance been signaled by the publication of the first modern edition of her romance, The Countess of Mountgomeries Urania.Naomi Miller offers an illuminating study of this significant early modern woman writer. Using multiple critical/theoretical perspectives, including French feminism, new historicism, and cultural materialism, she examines gender in Wroth's time. Moving beyond the emphasis on victimization that shaped many previous studies, she considers the range of strategies devised by women writers of the period to establish voices for themselves.Where previous critics have viewed Wroth primarily in relation to her male literary predecessors in the Sidney family, Miller explores Wroth's engagement with a variety of discourses, reading her in relation to a broad range of English and continental authors, both male and female, from Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare to Aemilia Lanier, Elizabeth Cary, and Marguerite de Navarre. She also contextualizes Wroth's writing in relation to a variety of nonliterary texts of the period, both political and domestic. Thanks to Miller's sensitive readings, Wroth's writings provide a lens through which to view gender relations in the early modern period.

Of the great epic poets in the Western tradition, Luis Vaz de Camões (c. 1524- 1580) remains perhaps the least known outside his native Portugal, and his influence on literature in English has not been fully recognized. In this major work of comparative scholarship, George Monteiro thus breaks new ground, focusing on English-language writers whose vision and expression have been sharpened by their varied responses to Camões. Introduced to English readers in 1655, Camões's work from the beginning appealed strongly to writers. The young Elizabeth Barrett's Camonean poems, for example, inspired Edgar Allan Poe to appropriate elements from Camões. Herman Melville's reading of Camões bore fruit in his career-long borrowings from the Portuguese poet. Longfellow, T.W. Higginson, and Emily Dickinson read and championed Camões. AndCamões as epicist and love poet is an éminence grise in several of Elizabeth Bishop's strongest Brazilian poems. Southern African writers have interpreted and reinterpreted Adamastor, Camões's Spirit of the Cape, as both a symbol of a dangerous and mysterious Africa and an emblem of European imperialism.Recognizing the presence of Camões leads Monteiro to provocative rereadings of such texts as Dickinson's "Master" letters, Poe's "Raven," Melville's late poetry, and Bishop's Questions of Travel.

Readers in the sixteenth century read (that is, interpreted) texts quite differently from the way contemporary readers do; they were trained to notice different aspects of a text and to process them differently.Using educational works of Erasmus, Ascham, and others, commentaries on literary works, various kinds of religious guides and homilies, and self-improvement books, Kintgen has found specific evidence of these differences and makes imaginative use of it to draw fascinating and convincing conclusions about the art and practice of reading. Kintgen ends by situating the book within literary theory, cognitive science, and literary studies. Among the writers covered are Gabriel Harvey, E. K. (the commentator on The Shepheardes Calendar), Sir John Harrington, George Gascoigne, George Puttenham, Thomas Blundeville, and Angel Day.

The nature of Gertrude Buck, professor of English at Vassar College from 1897 until her death in 1922, is well-known to anyone interested in the history of composition. Her writing is less well-known, much of it now out of print. JoAnn Campbell gathers together for the first time the major work of this innovative thinker and educator, including her most important articles on rhetorical theory; The Social Criticism of Literature, a forerunner of reader-response literary theory; selections from her textbooks on argumentative and expository writing; poetry; fiction; her play Mother-Love, and unpublished reports and correspondence from the English department at Vassar. In her introduction, Campbell describes the masculine rhetorical tradition within which Buck wrote and taught. Her theories of language and composition quietly challenged the dominant rhetorics issuing from Harvard and Amherst. An unusually productive scholar, Buck wrote textbooks for her female students that affirmed women\u2019s intellectual abilities and trained them to participate in political debate. In the Vassar English Department she found a community of women among whom she could practice and develop her theories regarding rhetoric, pedagogy, and the role of the individual in society.

By Southern Playwrights is a rare assemblage of works from the 1980s and 1990s by writers continuing the tradition of Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, and Beth Henley, among others. This book makes available for the first time in print Marsha Norman's romantic comedy Loving Daniel Boone, novelist Harry Crews's only play, Blood Issue, and humorist Ray Blount Jr.'s ventures into one-act comedy, Five Ives Gets Named and That Dog Isn't Fifteen. Also included are novelist Elizabeth Dewberry's first play, Head On, Kentucky novelist and essayist Wendell Berry's The Cool of the Day, and Digging In, a remarkable array of Kentucky farm voices adapted for the stage by Julie Crutcher and Vaughn McBride.Southern playwriting is a distinctive voice in the American theater, a point eloquently made in the foreword by Jon Jory. The literary works of the South, he writes, are dominated by "great language, family, strong women, religion, the land, and the past," all of which makes them wonderful for acting -- and for reading. This entertaining book honors southern playwrights in a collection of works that have premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Translated texts are often either uncritically consumed by readers, teacher, and scholars or seen to represent an ineluctable loss, a diminishing of original texts. Translation, however, is a cultural practice, influenced also by social and political imperatives, which can open more doors than it closes. The essays in this book show how the act of translation, when vigilantly and critically attended to, becomes a means for active interrogation.

This volume describes the formative years of English composition courses in college through a study of the most prominent documents of the time: magazine articles, scholarly reports, early textbooks, teachers' testimonies-and some of the actual student papers that provoked discussion. Includes writings by leading scholars of the era such as Adams Sherman Hill, Gertrude Buck, William Edward Mead, Lane Cooper, William Lyon Phelps, and Fred Newton Scott.

This bilingual anthology brings together a representative selection from more than a half century of this distinguished Brazilian poet's lifetime work. Along with previously translated poems are many others in English for the first time. The remarkable group of poets and translators includes Elizabeth Bishop, Alastair Reid, Galway Kinnell, Louis Simpson, and W. S. Merwin.

In this wide-ranging study E. Michael Gerli shows how Cervantes and his contemporaries ceaselessly imitated one another -- glossing works, dismembering and reconstructing them, writing for and against one another -- while playing sophisticated games of literary one-upmanship.The result was that literature in late Renaissance Spain was often more than a simple matter of source and imitation. It must be understood as a far more subtle, palimpsest-like process of forging endless series of texts from other texts, thus linking closely the practices of reading, writing, and rewriting. Like all major writers of the age, Cervantes was responding not just to specific literary traditions but to a broad range of texts and discourses. He expected his well-read audience to recognize his sources and to appreciate their transformations.The notion of writing as reading and reading as writing is thus central to an understanding of Cervantes' literary invention. As he created his works, he constantly questioned and reconfigured the authority of other texts, appropriating, combining, naturalizing, and effacing them, displacing them with his own themes, images, styles, and beliefs.Modern literary theory has confirmed what Cervantes and his contemporaries intuitively knew -- that reading and writing are closely linked dimensions of the literary enterprise. Reading Cervantes and his contemporaries in this way enables us to cojnprehend the craft, wit, irony, and subtle conceit that he at the heart of seventeenth-century Spanish literature.

Language scholars have traditionally agreed that the development of the English language was largely unplanned. John H. Fisher challenges this view, demonstrating that the standardization of writing and pronunciation was, and still is, made under the control of political and intellectual forces. In these essays Fisher chronicles his gradual realization that Standard English was not a popular evolution at all but was the direct result of political decisions made by the Lancastrian administrations of Henry IV and Henry V. To achieve standardization and acceptance of the vernacular, these kings turned to their Chancery scribes, who were responsible for writing and copying legal and royal documents.Chaucer, a relative of the king, began to be labeled by the government as a master of the language, and it was Henry V who inspired the fifteenth-century tradition of citing Chaucer as the "maker" of English. An even more important link between language development and government practice is the fact that Chaucer himself composed in the English of the Chancery scribes.Fisher discusses the development of Chancery practices, royal involvement in promoting use of the vernacular, Chaucer's use of English, Caxton's use of Chancery Standard, and the nineteenth-century phenomenon of a standard, or "received," pronunciation of English. This engaging and clearly written work will change the way scholars understand the development of English and think about the intentional shaping of our language.