During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England grew from a marginal to a major European power, established overseas settlements, and negotiated the Protestant Reformation. The population burgeoned and became increasingly urban. England also saw the meteoric rise of commercial theatre in London, the creation of a vigorous market for printed texts, and the emergence of writing as a viable profession. Literacy rates exploded, and an increasingly diverse audience encountered a profusion of new textual forms. Media, and literary culture, transformed on a scale that would not happen again until television and the Internet. The twenty innovative contributions in Gathering Force: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1557-1623 trace ways that five different genres both spurred and responded to change. Chapters explore different facets of lyric poetry, romance, commercial drama, masques and pageants, and non-narrative prose. Exciting and accessible, this volume illuminates the dynamic relationships among the period's social, political, and literary transformations.

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England grew from a marginal to a major European power, established overseas settlements, and negotiated the Protestant Reformation. The population burgeoned and became increasingly urban. England also saw the meteoric rise of commercial theatre in London, the creation of a vigorous market for printed texts, and the emergence of writing as a viable profession. Literacy rates exploded, and an increasingly diverse audience encountered a profusion of new textual forms. Media, and literary culture, transformed on a scale that would not happen again until television and the Internet. The twenty innovative contributions in Gathering Force: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1557–1623 trace ways that five different genres both spurred and responded to change. Chapters explore different facets of lyric poetry, romance, commercial drama, masques and pageants, and non-narrative prose. Exciting and accessible, this volume illuminates the dynamic relationships among the period's social, political, and literary transformations.

The early modern period in Britain was defined by tremendous upheaval - the upending of monarchy, the unsettling of church doctrine, and the pursuit of a new method of inquiry based on an inductive experimental model. Political Turmoil: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1623–1660 offers an innovative and ambitious re-appraisal of seventeenth-century British literature and history. Each of the contributors attempts to address the 'how' and 'why' of aesthetic change by focusing on political and cultural transformations. Instead of forging a grand narrative of continuity, the contributors attempt to piece together the often complex web of factors and events that contributed to developments in literary form and matter - as well as the social and religious changes that literature sometimes helped to occasion. These twenty chapters, reading across traditional periodization, demonstrate that early modern literary works - when they were conceived, as they were created, and after they circulated - were, above all, involved in various types of transitions.

The years 1660 to 1714 represent a fraught transitional period, one caught between two now dominant periodization rubrics: early modern and the long eighteenth century. Containing narratives of disruption, restoration, and reconfiguration, Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660–1714 explores the conjunctions and disjunctions between historical and literary developments in this period, when the sociable, rivalrous textual world of letters registered and accelerated changes. Each of the volume's four parts highlights the relationship of various literary forms to a different kind of transformation - generic, ideological, cultural, or local. The five chapters in each section rigorously probe the conditions that affected the period's literary transformations, and interrogate the traditions that canonical and less established writers inherited, adapted, and often challenged. In making a case for an early mimetically produced English nation, this book, through its concentration on literary evidence and transitions also makes innovative contributions to an understanding of nationalism in the period.

This collection reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women's work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making, marking, and marketing of early modern English books.

The first volume to consider how the context of early modern biblical interpretation shaped Shakespeare's plays.

Deanne Williams offers the very first study of the medieval and early modern girl actor. Whereas previous histories of the actress begin with the Restoration, this book demonstrates that the girl is actually a well-documented category of performer and a key participant in the drama of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It explores evidence of the girl actor in archival records of payment, eyewitness accounts, stage directions, paintings, and in the plays and masques that were explicitly composed for girls, and, in some cases, by them. Contradicting previous scholarly assumptions about the early modern stage as male-dominated, this evidence reveals girls' participation in medieval religious drama, Tudor civic pageants and royal entries, Elizabethan country house entertainments, and Stuart court and household masques. This book situates its historical study of the girl actor within the wider contexts of 'girl culture', including girls as singers, translators and authors. By examining the impact of the girl actor on constructions of girlhood in the work of Shakespeare – whose girl characters register and evoke the power of the performing girl – Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance argues that girls' dramatic, musical and literary performances actively shaped medieval and early modern culture. It shows how the active presence and participation of girls shaped medieval and Renaissance culture, and it reveals how some of its best-known literary and dramatic texts address, represent, and reflect upon girl children, not as an imagined ideal, but as a lived reality.