Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800

Many scholars have written about eighteenth-century English novels, but no one really knows who read them.

From the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, French writing is especially concerned with analysing human nature.

In the midst of an age of prejudice, John Selden's immense, neglected rabbinical works contain magnificent Hebrew scholarship that respects, to an extent remarkable for the times, the self-understanding of Judaism.

Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren were radical friends in a revolutionary age.

Tom Lockwood's study is the first examination of Jonson's place in the texts and culture of the Romantic age.

Romantic Indians considers the views that Britons, colonists, and North American Indians took of each other during a period in which these people were in a closer and more fateful relationship than ever before or since.

A truly groundbreaking collaboration of original theatre history with exciting literary criticism, Shakespeare in Parts is the first book fully to explore the original form in which Shakespeare's drama overwhelmingly circulated.

Shakespeare's Late Work is a detailed reading of the plays written at the end of Shakespeare's career, centring on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.

Literary Relations argues that kinship relations between writers, both literal and figurative, played a central part in the creation of a national tradition of English literature.

The Victorians were preoccupied by the eighteenth century.

The traditional view of Samuel Johnson as hostile to particulars, trifles, and aesthetic mediocrity only half-explains his authorial character.

What existed before there was a subject known as English?

How do names attach themselves to particular objects and people and does this connection mean anything?

The Invention of Suspicion argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the sixteenth century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect and a decisive impact on the development of English Renaissance drama.

The 'book' - both material and metaphoric - is strewn throughout Shakespeare's plays: it is held by Hamlet as he turns through revenge to madness; buried deep in the mudded ooze by Prospero when he has shaken out his art like music and violence; it is forced by Richard II to withstand the mortality of deposition, fetishised by lovers, tormented by pedagogues, lost by kings, written by the alienated, and hung about war with the blood of lost voices.

Imagining Sex is a study of pornographic writing in seventeenth-century England.

This study draws on the theory and practice of archaeology to develop a new perspective on the literature of the Renaissance.

This authoritative edition was first published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode.

The Literary Culture of the Reformation examines the place of literature in the Reformation, considering both how arguments about biblical meaning and literary interpretation influenced the new theology, and how developments in theology in turn influenced literary practices.

For the first time in this innovative reference book the Romantic Age is surveyed across all aspects of British culture, rather than in literary or artistic terms alone.

'I made him know his Name should be Friday, which was the Day I sav'd his Life.

No other edition offers extensive textual apparatus such as explanatory notes, plot summaries, particularly vital as stories are complex and interwoven.

'Our virtues are, most often, only vices in disguise.

'Now the sport begins!

'He loved all mankind; for fortune prevented him from knowing there were rascals.

'You can leave a forest, but you can never leave a cloister; you are free in the forest, but you are a slave in the cloister.

While previous studies have concentrated largely upon political concerns, The Augustan Art of Poetry is an exploration of the influence of the Roman Augustan aesthetic on English neo-classical poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Johnson himself wrote in 1782: 'I know not that I have written any thing more generally commended than the Lives of the Poets'.

How was the social and cultural life of Britain affected by the fear that the French Revolution would spread across the channel?

What is the je-ne-sais-quoi?

This radical new look at the literary and political climate of England during the reign of Queen Anne examines the work of the greatest poet of the age, Alexander Pope.

In early modern Britain, the primary medium of free comment was the clandestine satire, circulated either orally or in manuscript.

Marxist cultural theory underlies much teaching and research in university departments of literature and has played a crucial role in the development of recent theoretical work.

The Oxford History of the Irish Book is a major new series that charts the development of the book in Ireland from its origins within an early medieval manuscript culture to its current incarnation alongside the rise of digital media in the twenty-first century.

Shakespeare and Women situates Shakespeare's female characters in multiple historical contexts, ranging from the early modern England in which they originated to the contemporary Western world in which our own encounters with them are staged.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship.

The Oxford Handbooks to Shakespeare are designed to record past and present investigations and renewed and revised judgments by both familiar and younger Shakespeare specialists.

The Oxford Handbooks to Shakespeare are designed to record past and present investigations and renewed and revised judgments by both familiar and younger Shakespeare specialists.

Shakespeare's Nature offers the first sustained account of the impact of the language and practice of husbandry on Shakespeare's work.

Studies of fashion and literature in recent decades have focused primarily on representations of clothing and dress within literary texts.

OXFORD SHAKESPEARE TOPICS General Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley Wells Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship.

Montaigne's English Journey examines the genesis, early readership, and multifaceted impact of John Florio's exuberant translation of Michel de Montaigne's Essays.

Treacherous Faith offers a new and ambitious cross-disciplinary account of the ways writers from the early English Reformation to the Restoration generated, sustained, or questioned cultural anxieties about heresy and heretics.

Roderick Random (1748), Smollett's first novel, is full of the dazzling vitality characteristics of all his work, as well as of his own life.

'Twelve Year a Whore, fives times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent' So the title page of this extraordinary novel describes the career of the woman known as Moll Flanders, whose real name we never discover.

Grattius' Cynegetica, a Roman didactic poem on hunting with dogs, is the author's only surviving work, though it reaches us now in an incomplete form.

Grattius' Cynegetica, a Roman didactic poem on hunting with dogs, is the author's only surviving work, though it reaches us now in an incomplete form.

This volume presents a winning selection of the very best essays from the long and distinguished career of Stanley Wells, one of the most well-known and respected Shakespeare scholars in the world.

This volume presents a winning selection of the very best essays from the long and distinguished career of Stanley Wells, one of the most well-known and respected Shakespeare scholars in the world.

Shakespeare and Ecology is the first book to explore the topical contexts that shaped the environmental knowledge and politics of Shakespeare and his audiences.