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When Prince Oroonoko's passion for the virtuous Imoinda arouses the jealousy of his grandfather, the lovers are cast into slavery and transported from Africa to the colony of Surinam. Oroonoko's noble bearing soon wins the respect of his English captors, but his struggle for freedom brings about his destruction. Inspired by Aphra Behn's visit to Surinam, Oroonoko (1688) reflects the author's romantic view of Native Americans as simple, superior peoples 'in the first state of innocence, before men knew how to sin'. The novel also reveals Behn's ambiguous attitude to African slavery - while she favoured it as a means to strengthen England's power, her powerful and moving work conveys its injustice and brutality.
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$7.38 |
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 (4.0 / 5.0) Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the seventeenth century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made Empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes The Contract, a romance in which love and law work harmoniously together, and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, which explores the power and freedom a woman can achieve in the disguise of a man.
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$8.67 |
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A collection of some of the best, wittiest and most unusual excerpts from 16th- and 17th-century writing. "Shakespeare's England" brings to life the variety, the energy and the harsh reality of England at this time. Providing a portrait of the age, it includes extracts from a wide variety of writers, taken from books, plays, poems, letters, diaries and pamphlets by and about Shakespeare's contemporaries. These include William Harrison and Fynes Moryson (providing descriptions of England), Nicholas Breton (on country life), Isabella Whitney and Thomas Dekker (on London life), Nashe (on struggling writers), Stubbes (with a Puritan view of Elizabethan enjoyments), Harsnet and Burton (on witches and spirits), John Donne (meditations on prayer and death), King James I (on tobacco) and Shakespeare himself.
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$9.31 |
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The later years of Elizabeth and the reign of James I were the age of Shakespeare, but the age also of Sidney, Spenser, and Donne, of fellow dramatists Marlowe, Jonson, and Webster, and of the prose writers Nashe, Bacon, and Burton. This book examines the social conditions that produced this uniquely dazzling array of talent, and relates them closely to the literature of the period. In this extensively revised new edition, Julia Briggs has included two new chapters which examine the role of women, the family, travelers and `outsiders' within the social and literary contexts of the period.
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$12.00 |
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This anthology brings together a stimulating and entertaining collection of works from the confident and creative period of 1660-1700. The literature of this time is by turns refined, poignant, and brash. Alongside major works such as Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel and Mac Flecknoe, printed in their entirety, is a substantial group of lyrics by Rochester, while Milton's Paradise Lost provides a running commentary on the Restoration scene. Scurrilous satires and pamphlets, diaries, theatrical prologues, translations and striking work by women poets and autobiographers illustrate the period in politics, religion, philosophy and in attitudes to town and country, love and friendship.
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$10.92 |
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Long after the establishment of printing in England, many writers and composers still prefered to publish their work through handwritten copies. Although censorship was one reason for this persistance of the older practice, scribal publication remained the norm for texts that were required only in small numbers, or whose authors wished to avoid the "stigma" of print. This text considers the trade in manuscripts as an important supplement to the trade in printed books and describes the agencies that met the need for rapid duplication of key texts.
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$29.95 |
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From Shakespeare’s “green-eyed monster” to the “green thought in a green shade” in Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,” the color green was curiously prominent and resonant in English culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among other things, green was the most common color of household goods, the recommended wall color against which to view paintings, the hue that was supposed to appear in alchemical processes at the moment base metal turned to gold, and the color most frequently associated with human passions of all sorts. A unique cultural history, <I>The Key of Green considers the significance of the color in the literature, visual arts, and popular culture of early modern England.
Contending that color is a matter of both sensation and emotion, Bruce R. Smith examines Renaissance material culture—including tapestries, clothing, and stonework, among others—as well as music, theater, philosophy, and nature through the lens of sense perception and aesthetic pleasure. At the same time, Smith offers a highly sophisticated meditation on the nature of consciousness, perception, and emotion that will resonate with students and scholars of the early modern period and beyond. Like the key to a map, <I>The Key of Green provides a guide for looking, listening, reading, and thinking that restores the aesthetic considerations to criticism that have been missing for too long.
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$30.79 |
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Renaissance Drama provides a comprehensive and engaging new account of one of the richest periods of theatre history: the drama of early modern England produced for the professional theatre. It brings new insights to bear by exploring the plays in their relation to the culture and society of the period.
Sandra Clark takes the reader through a compelling examination of how plays participate in and respond to changing anxieties, for instance about English nationhood, the monarchy, or the role of the family, sometimes raising difficult questions or offering challenges to accepted views. Unlike many books on Elizabethan drama, the book is organized so as to cover a wide range of plays, some familiar, many less so, by many playwrights, from Lyly in the 1580s to Shirley in the 1640s. Shakespeare is not foregrounded, but neither is he excluded; a chapter considers his dialogue with contemporaries and also the ways in which later playwrights wrote back to his work. Renaissance Drama will become standard reading for all students and scholars of English literature or the early modern period.
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$22.83 |
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Presenting seven works from the Elizabethan age including Dekker's "Lantern and Candle-light" and Rid's "Art of Juggling", this book discusses these and other Elizabethan "protonovels" and assesses their influence on writers such as Shakespeare.
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$21.00 |
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Volume 1C (The Eighteenth Century) of 6-volume splits of parent volumes.
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$2.50 |