The most complete collection of the work of Aphra Behn (1640-89) available, this volume contains Oroonoko and five other works of fiction ranging from comedy and high melodrama to tragedy. The works included--The Fair Jilt, Memoirs of the Court of the King of Bantam, The History of the Nun, The...

The most complete collection of the work of Aphra Behn (1640-89) available, this volume contains Oroonoko and five other works of fiction ranging from comedy and high melodrama to tragedy. The works included--The Fair Jilt, Memoirs of the Court of the King of Bantam, The History of the Nun, The Adventure of the Black Lady, and The Unfortunate Bride--are complemented by a generous selection of her poetry from public political verse to lyrics and witty conversation poems.

The period 1678-1730 was a decisive one not only in Western political history but also in the history of the British press. Changing conditions for political expression and an expanding book trade enabled unprecedented opportunities for political activity. The Women of Grub Street argues that women...

The period 1678-1730 was a decisive one not only in Western political history but also in the history of the British press. Changing conditions for political expression and an expanding book trade enabled unprecedented opportunities for political activity. The Women of Grub Street argues that women already at work in the London book trade were among the first to seize those new opportunities for public political expression. Synthesizing areas of scholarly inquiry previously regarded as separate, and offering a new model for the study of the literary marketplace, The Women of Grub Street examines not only women writers, but also printers, booksellers, ballad-singers, hawkers, and other producers and distributors of printed texts. Original both in its sources and in the claims it makes for the nature, extent, and complexities of women's participation in print culture and public politics, it provides a wealth of new information about middling and lower-class women's political and literary lives, and shows that these women were not merely the passive distributors of other people's political ideas. The central argument of the book is that women of the widest possible variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and religio-political allegiances in fact played so prominent a role in the production and transmission of political ideas through print as to belie simultaneous powerful claims that women had no place in public life. R The first full-length study to suggest the degree of involvement of women in the entire process of print creation at this important moment, The Women of Grub Street supports a number of important revisionary arguments with a broad range of literary and archival evidence. It will be of interest to readers of literature, social and publishing history, women's studies and feminism, and the history of democracy and public discourse.

In Unmaking Mimesis Elin Diamond interrogates the concept of mimesis in relation to feminism, theatre and performance. She combines psychoanalytic, semiotic and materialist strategies with readings of selected plays by those as diverse as Ibsen, Brecht, Aphra Behn, Caryl Churchill and Peggy...

In Unmaking Mimesis Elin Diamond interrogates the concept of mimesis in relation to feminism, theatre and performance. She combines psychoanalytic, semiotic and materialist strategies with readings of selected plays by those as diverse as Ibsen, Brecht, Aphra Behn, Caryl Churchill and Peggy Shaw.Through a series of provocative readings of theatre, theory and feminist performance she demonstrates the continuing force of feminism and mimesis in critical thinking today. Unmaking Mimesis will interest theatre scholars and performance and cultural theorists, for all of whom issues of text, representation and embodiment are of compelling concern.

In Tropicopolitans Srinivas Aravamudan reconstructs the colonial imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations of peoples & cultures subjected to colonial discourse, he makes a case for the agency-or the capacity to resist domination-of those oppressed. Aravamudan's analysis of...

In Tropicopolitans Srinivas Aravamudan reconstructs the colonial imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations of peoples & cultures subjected to colonial discourse, he makes a case for the agency-or the capacity to resist domination-of those oppressed. Aravamudan's analysis of texts that accompanied European commercial & imperial expansion from the Glorious Revolution through the French Revolution reveals the development of anticolonial consciousness prior to the nineteenth century. "Tropicalization" is the central metaphor of this analysis, a term that incorporates both the construction of various dynamic tropes by which the colonized are viewed & the site of the study, primarily the tropics. Tropicopolitans, then, are those subaltern people who bear & resist the representations of colonialist discourse. In readings that expose new relationships between literary representation & colonialism in the eighteenth century, Aravamudan considers such texts as Behn's Oroonoko, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe & Captain Singleton, Addison's Cato, & Swift's Gulliver's Travels & The Drapier's Letters. He extends his argument to include analyses of Johnson's Rasselas, Beckford's Vathek, Montague's travel letters, Equiano's autobiography, Burke's political & aesthetic writings, & Abbe de Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes. Offering a radical approach to literary history, this study provides new mechanisms for understanding the development of anticolonial agency. Introducing eighteenth-century studies to a postcolonial hermeneutics, Tropicopolitans will interest scholars engaged in postcolonial studies, eighteenth-century literature, & literary theory.

Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth Century Theatre provides a comprehensive examination of this aesthetic theory. The author investigates this aesthetic history as a form of artistic creation, philosophical investigation, a way of representing and manipulating ideas about gender and a way of...

Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth Century Theatre provides a comprehensive examination of this aesthetic theory. The author investigates this aesthetic history as a form of artistic creation, philosophical investigation, a way of representing and manipulating ideas about gender and a way of acknowledging, reinforcing and making a critique of social values for the still and moving, the permanent and elapsing. The book's analysis covers the entire seventeenth-century with chapters on the work of Ben Jonson, John Milton, the pamphletheatre, Aphra Behn, John Vanbrugh and Jeremy Collier and will be of interest to scholars in the areas of literary and performance studies.