The most important female English novelist of the 1720s, Eliza Haywood is famous for writing scandalous fiction about London society. Fast-moving, controversial, and sometimes disturbing, Haywood’s short novels The Masqueraders and The Surprize are valuable sources for the study of eighteenth-century gender and identity, the social history of masquerade, the dangers of courtship and seduction, and conceptions of elite and popular cultures.Despite their common theme of masquerade and seduction, the two short novels are a study in contrasts. The Masqueraders features the whirl of London life, with a libertine anti-hero and his serial seductions of women who believe that they can manipulate the social conventions that are expected to limit them. The Surprize, on the other hand, is an uncharacteristically sentimental story in which a similarly salacious plot ends in rewards for the good and virtuous.Well suited to the teaching of these two texts, this volume contains annotated scholarly editions of both novels, an extensive introduction, and useful appendices that discuss the masquerade’s role in eighteenth-century debates on gender, morality, and identity.

Product Description: In contemporary pop culture, the pursuits regarded as the most frivolous are typically understood to be more feminine in nature than masculine. This collection illustrates how ideas of the popular and the feminine were assumed to be equally naturally intertwined in the eighteenth century, and the ways in which that association facilitates the ongoing trivialization of both...read more

Product Description: Elizabeth Cooper’s The Rival Widows, or Fair Libertine provides a unique opportunity to restore to scholarly and pedagogical attention a neglected female writer and a play with broad and significant implications for studies of eighteenth-century history, culture and gender...read more

Product Description: The first collection of critical essays on HBO's The Wire - the most brilliant and socially relevant television series in years The Wire is about survival, about the strategies adopted by those living and working in the inner cities of America...read more

Product Description: With its fourth season due to air in January 2008, the award-winning Battlestar Galactica continues to be exceptionally popular for non-network television, combining the familiar features of science fiction with direct commentary on life in mainstream America...read more

Product Description: With its fourth season due to air in January 2008, the award-winning Battlestar Galactica continues to be exceptionally popular for non-network television, combining the familiar features of science fiction with direct commentary on life in mainstream America...read more

Product Description: Potter is the first author to make clear how English libertinism changed during the eighteenth century as the violent, hypersexualized Hobbesian libertine, typified by the Earl of Rochester, was tempered by England's cultures of sentiment and sensibility...read more