16th Century
The World of Christopher Marlowe by
The definitive biography: a masterly account of Marlowe's work and life and the world in which he lived Shakespeare's contemporary, Christopher Marlowe revolutionized English drama and poetry, transforming the Elizabethan stage into a place of astonishing creativity. The outline of Marlowe's life, work, and violent death are known, but few of the details that explain why his writing and ideas made him such a provocateur in the Elizabethan era have been available until now. In this absorbing consideration of Marlowe and his times, David Riggs presents Marlowe as the language's first poetic dramatist whose desires proved his undoing. In an age of tremendous cultural change in Europe when Cervantes wrote the first novel and Copernicus demonstrated a world subservient to other nonreligious forces, Catholics and Protestants battled for control of England and Elizabeth's crown was anything but secure. Into this whirlwind of change stepped Marlowe espousing sexual freedom and atheism. His beliefs proved too dangerous to those in power and he was condemned as a spy and later murdered. Riggs's exhaustive research digs deeply into the mystery of how and why Marlowe was killed.
Call Number: PR 2673 .R54 2005ISBN: 9780805077551Publication Date: 2005-01-05
Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy by
Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy is the most thorough and detailed life of Marlowe since John Bakeless's in 1942. It has new material on Marlowe in relation to Canterbury, also on his home life, schooling, and six and a half years at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and includes fresh dataon his reading, teachers, and early achievements, including a new letter with a new date for the famous 'putative portrait' of Marlowe at Cambridge.The biography uses for the first time the Latin writings of his friend Thomas Watson to illuminate Marlowe's life in London and his career as a spy (that is, as a courier and agent for the Elizabethan Privy Council). There are new accounts of him on the continent, particularly at Flushing orVlissingen, where he was arrested. The book also more fully explains Marlowe's relations with his chief patron, Thomas Walsingham, than ever before.This is also the first biography to explore in detail Marlowe's relations with fellow playwrights such as Kyd and Shakespeare, and to show how Marlowe's relations with Shakespeare evolved from 1590 to 1593. With closer views of him in relation to the Elizabethan stage than have appeared in anybiography, the book examines in detail his aims, mind, and techniques as exhibited in all of his plays, from Dido, the Tamburlaine dramas, and Doctor Faustus through to The Jew of Malta and Edward II. It offers new treatments of his evolving versions of 'The Passionate Shepherd', and displayscircumstances, influences, and the bearings of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' in relation to Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander'Throughout, there is a strong emphasis on Marlowe's friendships and so-called 'homosexuality'. Fresh information is brought to bear on his seductive use of blasphemy, his street fights, his methods of preparing himself for writing, and his atheism and religious interests. The book also explores hisattraction to scientists and mathematicians such as Thomas Harriot and others in the Ralegh-Northumberland set of thinkers and experimenters. Finally, there is new data on spies and business agents such as Robert Poley, Nicholas Skeres, and Ingram Frizer, and a more exact account of thecircumstances that led up to Marlowe's murder.
Call Number: Main Collection PR 2673 .H57 2005ISBN: 9780198186953Publication Date: 2006-01-05
Seventeenth Century
Critical Insights by
Paradise Lost is widely regarded as the greatest of all epic poems in English and as one of the most influential poems in the English language. This volume looks at Milton's epic from many different critical and theoretical perspectives and offers students and researchers multiple ways of engaging with a writer whom many critics consider the equal of William Shakespeare.
Call Number: Main Collection PR3562 .P245 2019ISBN: 9781642650242Publication Date: 2019-02-01
Paradise Lost by
This is the second edition of the Norton Critical Edition of Milton's Paradise Lost. It represents an extensive revision of the first edition. The text of the poem remains that of Milton's 1674 edition, retaining the original punctuation but with modernized spelling and italics. Material for the study of contemporary religious and political issues is now included, as well as selections from his earlier poetry and prose.
Call Number: Main Collection PR 3560.A2 E45 1993ISBN: 9780393962932Publication Date: 1993-02-01
John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets by
The poetry of John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, and Richard Crashaw has fascinated critics for centuries. Ambivalently received but inescapably influential, their tradition can be traced through some of the best poets of our time. This new volume from the ""Bloom's Classic Critical Views"" series features insightful essays from the 17th and early 20th centuries that offer students of literature historical insights into these significant poets.
Call Number: eBook (log in with MyVCCCD)ISBN: 9781604131390Publication Date: 2008-07-01
Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689 by
Royalist Women Writers aims to put women back on the map of seventeenth-century royalist literature from which they have habitually been marginalized. Looking in detail at the work of Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, it argues that their writings inaugurate a more assertive model of the Englishwoman as literary author, which is crucially enabled by their royalist affiliations. Chalmers reveals new political sub-texts in the three writers' work and shows how these inflect their representations of gender. In this way both their texts and manner of presenting themselves as authors emerges as freshly pertinent to their male and female royalist contemporaries for whom supporting them could be an act of political self-definition.
Call Number: eBook (log in with MyVCCCD)ISBN: 9781429469579Publication Date: 2004-01-01
The Secret Life of Aphra Behn by
#Originally published: London : A. Deutsch, 1996.#Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
Call Number: Main Collection PR 3317.Z5 T645 1997ISBN: 9780813524559Publication Date: 1997-07-01
Versions of Blackness by
Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko (1688) is one of the most widely studied works of seventeenth-century literature, because of its powerful representation of slavery and complex portrayal of ways in which differing races and cultures - European, Black African, and Native American - observe and misinterpret each other. This edition presents a new edition of Oroonoko, with unprecedentedly full and informative commentary, along with complete texts of three major British seventeenth-century works concerned with race and colonialism: Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), Behn's Abdelazer (1676), and Thomas Southerne's tragedy Oroonoko (1696). It combines these with a rich anthology of European discussions of slavery, racial difference, and colonial conquest from the mid-sixteenth century to the time of Behn's death. Many are taken from important works that have not hitherto been easily available, and the collection offers an unrivaled resource for studying the culture that produced Britain's first major fictions of slavery.
Call Number: eBook (log in with MyVCCCD)ISBN: 9780511290206Publication Date: 2007-01-01
Women Writing Fancy by
This book brings to the foreground the largely forgotten "Fancy" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and follows its traces as they extend into the nineteenth and twentieth. Trivialized for its flightiness and femininity, Fancy nonetheless provided seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers such as Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Anna Barbauld a mode of vision that could detect flaws in the Enlightenment's patriarchal systems and glimpse new, female-authored worlds and genres. In carving out unreal, fanciful spaces within the larger frame of patriarchal culture, these women writers planted Fancy--and, with it, female authorial invention--at the cornerstone of Enlightenment empirical endeavor. By finally taking Fancy seriously, this book offers an alternate genealogy of female authorship and a new framework for understanding modernity's triumph.
Call Number: eBook (log in with MyVCCCD)ISBN: 3319494279Publication Date: 2017-04-08
For Fun
The Time Traveler's Guide to Restoration Britain by
Imagine you could see the smiles of the people mentioned in Samuel Pepys's diary, hear the shouts of market traders, and touch their wares. How would you find your way around? Where would you stay? What would you wear? Where might you be suspected of witchcraft? Where would you be welcome? This is an up-close-and-personal look at Britain between the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660 and the end of the century. The last witch is sentenced to death just two years before Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, the bedrock of modern science, is published. Religion still has a severe grip on society and yet some--including the king--flout every moral convention they can find. There are great fires in London and Edinburgh; the plague disappears; a global trading empire develops.Over these four dynamic decades, the last vestiges of medievalism are swept away and replaced by a tremendous cultural flowering. Why are half the people you meet under the age of twenty-one? What is considered rude? And why is dueling so popular? Mortimer delves into the nuances of daily life to paint a vibrant and detailed picture of society at the dawn of the modern world as only he can.
Call Number: Main Collection DA435 .M67 2017ISBN: 9781681778013Publication Date: 2018-08-14
18th Century
In Search of Robinson Crusoe by
For nearly three centuries, Robinson Crusoe has been the archetypal castaway, the symbol of survival in uninhabited wilds. In this book, Tim Severin adds this enterprising hero to the roster of legendary figures whose adventures he's replicated and whose origins he's explored. With the signature approach to literary and historical sleuthing that has led the New York Times to describe him as "original, audacious, and exuberant," Severin uncovers the seaman's world that captured Daniel Defoe's imagination, recounting dramatic survival stories of sailors, pirates, castaways, and native Americans and replicating their journeys to experience for himself the adventures that inspired Robinson Crusoe. He camps on islands that famous castaways once survived on, undertakes a perilous sea voyage, and searches Nicaragua and Honduras for the Miskutu Indians, the tribe that the model for Crusoe's companion, Friday, belonged to. Tim Severin has once again demonstrated a superb ability to bring together literature, history and adventure in an engrossing narrative.
Call Number: Main Collection ; G 530.S42 S48 2003ISBN: 9780465076994Publication Date: 2003-05-22
Crusoe by
January 1719. A man sits at a table, writing. Nearly sixty,Daniel Defoe is troubled with gout and mired in political controversy and legal threats. But for the moment he is preoccupied by a younger man on a barren shore--Robinson Crusoe.Several miles south, another old man, Robert Knox, sits bent over a heavy volume--published nearly forty years before.Knox's Historical Relation was a best seller when it was published in 1681, just a year after he escaped from Ceylon and returned to England.Where did Crusoe come from? And what is the secret of his endurance? Crusoe explores the intertwined lives of two real men, Daniel Defoe and Robert Knox, and the character and book that emerged from their peculiar conjunction. It is the biography of a book and its hero: the story of Defoe, the man who wrote Robinson Crusoe, and of Robert Knox, the man who was Crusoe.
Call Number: Main Collection ; PR3403.Z5 F73 2012ISBN: 9781605983349Publication Date: 2012-04-01
The Slave Narrative by
Edited by Kimberly Drake, who directs the writing program and teaches writing and American literature and culture at Scripps College, this volume includes chapters on the more widely read slave narratives, including those by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Solomon Northup, but also relatively lesser-known narratives, such as neo-slave narrative novels and slave narratives about slavery outside the U.S. Individual chapters will provide researchers with a wide range of approaches to the slave narrative genre, and the volume's Preface will discuss the history of the slave narrative genre from its origins to the present day, where it makes its way into popular films and novels.
Call Number: Main Collection ; PN56.S5765 S538 2014ISBN: 9781619253971Publication Date: 2014-05-30
The Life of Olaudah Equiano by Call Number: Main Collection HT 869.E6 A3 2007ISBN: 9562916065Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Jonathan Swift by
Best known as the author of Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift is one of literature's great satirists. Born and educated in Ireland, Swift became a politician and clergyman in England, where he wrote essays, pamphlets, poems, and fiction that addressed the political issues and social conditions of his time. In Gulliver's Travels, he introduced the allegorical settings of Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the island of the Houyhnhnms, as well as the term 'yahoos' in a playful, but dark, satirical reflection of humankind. This addition to Bloom's Classic Critical Views includes a chronology, an index, and an introductory essay by Yale University professor Harold Bloom.
Call Number: eBook (log in with MyVCCCD)ISBN: 9781438127606
