This strong and timely collection provides fresh insights into how Shakespeare's plays and poems were understood to affect bodies, minds and emotions. Contemporary criticism has had surprisingly little to say about the early modern period's investment in imagining literature's impact on feeling. Shakespearean Sensations brings together scholarship from a range of well-known and new voices to address this fundamental gap. The book includes a comprehensive introduction by Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard and comprises three sections focusing on sensations aroused in the plays; sensations evoked in the playhouse; and sensations found in the imaginative space of the poems. With dedicated essays on Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and Twelfth Night, the collection explores how seriously early modern writers took their relationship with their audiences and reveals new connections between early modern literary texts and the emotional and physiological experiences of theatregoers.

Product Description: This book provides a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century life by examining the nature and context of 'Christian manliness' or 'muscular Christianity', an ideal of conduct that was widely popular with Victorian preachers and writers...read more

This book provides a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century life by examining the nature and context of 'Christian manliness' or 'muscular Christianity', an ideal of conduct that was widely popular with Victorian preachers and writers. It pays particular attention to Charles Kingsley (author of The Water-Babies) and Thomas Hughes (author of Tom Brown's Schooldays). Dr Vance traces the origins of Christian manliness in the traditions of English sporting prowess, in notions of chivalry and gentlemanliness, and in the preaching of vigourous virtue from St Paul to Victorian evangelists. He also considers the social and religious thought of Coleridge, Carlyle, F. D. Maurice and Thomas Arnold, showing how Kingsley and Hughes developed their own ideals of Christian manliness against this background, and in keen response to the troubles of their time: social unrest, religious rancour, war and disease. A final chapter traces the fragmentation and debasement of the ideal in the twentieth century.

Product Description: How did Renaissance literature affect readers' minds, bodies and souls? In what ways did the history of literary experience overlap with the history of humours and emotions? This book argues that a new aesthetic vocabulary based on the theory of the passions was formulated in the Renaissance to describe the affective power of literature...read more

Examines how Marlowe, Spenser, and other sixteenth-century English authors sustained the illusion in their writing that each was the principle creator of his own identity

Product Description: This study of Alan Sillitoe’s early work focuses in particular on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959). John Sawkins sees their heroes Arthur Seaton and Colin Smith in their resistance to a conformist society as embodying the concept of Alienation (Estrangement)...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Michael Schoenfeldt's fascinating study explores the close relationship between selves and bodies, psychological inwardness and corporeal processes, as they are represented in English Renaissance literature. After Galen, the predominant medical paradigm of the period envisaged a self governed by humors, literally embodying inner emotion by locating and explaining human passion within a taxonomy of internal organs and fluids...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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To recent studies of Renaissance subjectivity, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England contributes the argument that masculinity is unavoidably anxious and volatile in cultures that distribute power and authority according to patriarchal prerogatives. Drawing from current arguments in feminism, cultural studies, historicism, psychoanalysis and gay studies, Mark Breitenberg explores the dialectic of desire and anxiety in masculine subjectivity in the work of a wide range of writers, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Burton, and the women writers of the "querelles des femmes" debate, especially Jane Anger. Breitenberg discusses jealousy and cuckoldry anxiety, hetero and homoerotic desire, humoural psychology, anatomical difference, cross-dressing and the idea of honor and reputation. He traces masculine anxiety both as a sign of ideological contradiction and, paradoxically, as a productive force in the perpetuation of Western patriarchal systems. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Book by Gross, Gloria Sybil

Product Description: Book by Nardo, Anna K.

Product Description: Focusing on Langland, Chaucer, and the "Gawain" poet, Aers explores the treatment of the community, gender and individual identity in English writing between 1360 and 1430. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in Mediaeval studies, women's studies, literature...read more

In a collection of incisive essays in literary criticism, Edel provides psychological portraits of selected authors and their works

Product Description: Book by Golden, Ms. Hilda H.