Considering a wide range of early modern texts, performances and artworks, the essays in this collection demonstrate how attention to the senses illuminates the literature, art and culture of early modern England.

Drawing on important new editions of Marvell's poetry and of his prose, scholars of both history and literature examine Marvell's work in the contexts of Restoration politics and religion, and of the seventeenth-century publishing world in both manuscript and print. The essays, individually and collectively, address Marvell within his literary and cultural traditions and communities; his almost prescient sense of the economy and ecology of the country; his interest in visual arts and architecture; his opaque political and spiritual identities; his manners in controversy and polemic; the character of his erotic and transgressive imagination and his biography, still full of intriguing gaps.

Nigel Smith's biography provides a look into Marvell's life, from his early employment as a tutor and gentleman's companion to his suspicious death, reputedly a politically fueled poisoning.

Selected (by Harold Bloom) critical essays on Marvell's works and cultural context.

Fifteen short, accessible essays exploring the most important topics and themes in John Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost. Part I introduces the characters who frame the poem's story and set its plot and theological dynamics in motion. Part II deals with contextual issues raised by the early books, while Part III examines the epic's central and final episodes. The volume concludes with a meditation on the history of the poem's reception and a detailed guide to further reading.

This volume investigates the various ways in which Milton's works and experiences emerged from the culture and events of his time. In a series of concise essays, an international group of scholars examines both the social conditions of Milton's life and the broader intellectual currents that shaped his writings and reputation.

This volume brings John Milton's Paradise Lost into dialogue with the challenges of cosmology and the world of Galileo, whom Milton met and admired: a universe encompassing space travel, an earth that participates vibrantly in the cosmic dance, and stars that are "world[s] / Of destined habitation."

Features more than 30 newly commissioned chapters by noted scholars writing in their areas of specialization Illuminates various aspects of Ovid's work, such as production, genre, and style Presents interpretive essays on key poems and collections of poems Includes detailed discussions of Ovid's primary literary influences and his reception in English literature.

Reveals the rich diversity of critical engagement with Ovid's poetry that spans the Western tradition from antiquity to the present day.

Provides insights into how Shakespeare's plays and poems were understood to affect bodies, minds and emotions. Contemporary criticism has had surprisingly little to say about the early modern period's investment in imagining literature's impact on feeling. Shakespearean Sensations brings together scholarship from a range of well-known and new voices to address this fundamental gap. The book includes a comprehensive introduction by Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard and comprises three sections focusing on sensations aroused in the plays; sensations evoked in the playhouse; and sensations found in the imaginative space of the poems.

A collection of essays on the ways the senses 'speak' on Shakespeare's stage. Drawing on historical phenomenology, science studies, gender studies, and natural philosophy, the essays provide critical tools for understanding Shakespeare's investment in staging the senses.

The text of Measure for Measure is accompanied by a full introduction, a note on the text, textual variants, and related illustrations."Sources" considers the probable, primary, and analogous sources Shakespeare drew upon while composing Measure for Measure. "Criticism" collects seventeen important commentaries on Measure for Measure spanning four centuries. "Adaptations and Responses" reprints alternative versions of the play. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essaysoffer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear.

Examines the entire canon of his work and the social and intellectual environments in which it was produced, providing new readings of the texts, extensive analysis of former criticism, and up-to-date bibliographies. It examines a wide range of subtexts, intertexts, and analogues that contextualise the works within the literary conventions, traditions and genres upon which Spenser draws and not infrequently subverts and grapples with the issue of Spenser's effect on succeeding generations of editors, writers, painters and book-illustrators.

Explores the close relationship between selves and bodies, psychological inwardness and corporeal processes, as they are represented in English Renaissance literature.

Explores Spenser's emulation of Ovid's amatory poetics. His humanist education trained him to find or construct analogues and etiological patterns in classical texts. Therefore, his early study of translation, intensive reading, and "versifying" as an interrelated process guaranteed a densely allusive, metamorphic Ovidian poetics as a natural result.

This book, designed as a handbook to be consulted by students while reading the poem, is the only convenient and up-to-date guide available. Religious and political contexts are explained, while the analysis of Spenser's literary techniques encourages close reading.