European Erotic Romance examines the Renaissance publication and translation of the ancient Greek erotic romances, and English adaptations of the genre by Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth. Providing fresh insight into the development of the novel, this study identifies the politicisation of erotic romance by the European philhellene (lovers of all things Greek) Protestant movement. To English translators and authors, the complex plots, well developed moralised characters (particularly female) and rhetorical styles of the ancient novels signify political and social reform. Generous quotation and translations ensure that European Erotic Romance is accessible to a broad spectrum of readers. Its organisation lends itself to use as a course text. It is suitable for use by senior undergraduates and specialists in Renaissance literature, translation, rhetoric and history.

In this book, Emily Griffiths Jones examines the intersections of romance, religion, and politics in England between 1588 and 1688 to show how writers during this politically turbulent time used the genre of romance to construct diverse ideological communities for themselves. Right Romance argues for a recontextualized understanding of romance as a multigeneric narrative structure or strategy rather than a prose genre and rejects the common assumption that romance was a short-lived mode most commonly associated with royalist politics. Puritan republicans likewise found in romance strength, solace, and grounds for political resistance. Two key works that profoundly influenced seventeenth-century approaches to romance are Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which grappled with romance’s civic potential and its limits for a newly Protestant state. Jones examines how these works influenced writings by royalists and republicans during and after the English Civil War. Remaining chapters pair writers from both sides of the war in order to illuminate the ongoing ideological struggles over romance. John Milton is analyzed alongside Margaret Cavendish and Percy Herbert, and Lucy Hutchinson alongside John Dryden. In the final chapter, Jones studies texts by John Bunyan and Aphra Behn that are known for their resistance to generic categorization in an attempt to rethink romance’s relationship to election, community, gender, and generic form. Original and persuasive, Right Romance advances theoretical discussion about romance, pushing beyond the limits of the genre to discover its impact on constructions of national, communal, and personal identity.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume, and third to appear in the series, covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.

Presented in two volumes, The Ashgate Research Companion to The Sidneys, 1500-1700 assesses the current state of scholarship on members of the Sidney family and their impact, as historical and/or literary figures, in the period 1500-1700. Volume 2: Literature, begins with an exploration of the Sidneys' books and manuscripts and how they circulated, followed by an overview of the contributions of family members -Sir Philip Sidney; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Mary Wroth; Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester; and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke - in the genres of prose romance, drama, poetry, psalms and prose. These essays outline major controversies and areas for further research, as well as conducting literary analysis.

AN EDUCATION IN PLEASURE Married young to a man hand-picked by her father, Elizabeth Petre is an ideal Victorian lady. She has borne two sons and endured sixteen years of selfless duty in a passionless marriage. Craving a man's loving touch yet loyal to her wedding vows, Elizabeth is determined to seduce her coldly indifferent husband. She knows of only one man who can teach her the erotic secrets of love. A LESSON IN LOVE The bastard son of an English countess and an Arab sheik, Ramiel Devington was reared to embrace both Western culture and Eastern pleasure. Scorned by society and challenged by prim Elizabeth's request, he undertakes her instruction in the art of sensual delight. But when the lessons become a temptation neither can resist, Elizabeth is forced to choose between obligation and a bold, forbidden passion...

No genre manifests the pleasure of reading—and its power to consume and enchant—more than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works, Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and adventures. Rejecting the assumption that novelistic realism is the most significant tendency in the history of prose fiction, Black asks three intertwined questions: What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? In answer, this study draws on the neglected genre of romance to reintegrate eighteenth-century British fiction with its classical and Continental counterparts. Black addresses works of prose fiction that self-consciously experiment with the formal structures and readerly affordances of romance: Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Burney’s The Wanderer. Each text presents itself as a secondary, satiric adaptation of anachronistic and alien narratives, but in revising foreign stories each text also relays them. The recursive reading that these works portray and demand makes each a self-reflexive parable of romance itself. Ultimately, Without the Novel writes a wider, weirder history of fiction organized by the recurrences of romance and informed by the pleasures of reading that define the genre.

The essays in this book analyze a range of genres and considers geographical areas beyond the Ottoman Empire to deepen our post-Saidian understanding of the complexity of real and imagined "traffic" between England and the "Islamic worlds" it encountered and constructed.

This study takes a fresh look at the abundant scenarios of disguise in early modern prose fiction and suggests reading them in the light of the contemporary religio-political developments. More specifically, it argues that Elizabethan narratives adopt aspects of the heated Eucharist debate during the Reformation, including officially renounced notions like transubstantiation, to negotiate culturally pressing concerns regarding identity change. Drawing on the rich field of research on the adaptation of pre-Reformation concerns in Anglican England, the book traces a cross-fertilisation between the Reformation and the literary mode of romance. The study brings together topics which are currently being strongly debated in early modern studies: the turn to religion, a renewed interest in aesthetics, and a growing engagement with prose fiction. Narratives which are discussed in detail are William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, Robert Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon, Philip Sidney’s Old and New Arcadia, and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynd and A Margarite of America, George Gascoigne’s Steele Glas, John Lyly’s Euphues: An Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England, Barnabe Riche’s Farewell, Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller.

In The Culture of Love in China and Europe Paolo Santangelo and Gábor Boros offer a survey of the cults of love developed in the history of ideas and literary production in China and Europe between the 12th and early 19th century. They describe parallel evolutions within the two cultures, and how innovatively these independent civilisations developed their own categories and myths to explain, exalt but also control the emotions of love and their behavioural expressions. The analyses contain rich materials for comparison, point out the universal and specific elements in each culture, and hint at differences and resemblances, without ignoring the peculiar beauty and attractive force of the texts cultivating love.

Romances were among the most popular books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among both Protestant and Catholic readers. Modeled after Catholic narratives, particularly the lives of saints, these works emphasized the supernatural and the marvelous, themes commonly associated with Catholicism. In this book, Tiffany Jo Werth investigates how post-Reformation English authors sought to discipline romance, appropriating its popularity while distilling its alleged Catholic taint. Charged with bewitching readers, especially women, into lust and heresy, romances sold briskly even as preachers and educators denounced them as papist. Protestant reformers, as part of their broader indictment of Catholicism, sought to redirect certain elements of the Christian tradition, including this notorious literary genre. Werth argues that through the writing and circulation of romances, Protestants repurposed their supernatural and otherworldly motifs in order to “fashion,” as Edmund Spenser wrote, godly "vertuous" readers. Through careful examinations of the period’s most renowned romances—Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia, Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, William Shakespeare’s Pericles, and Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania—Werth illustrates how post-Reformation writers struggled to transform the literary genre. As a result, the romance, long regarded as an archetypal form closely allied with generalized Christian motifs, emerged as a central tenet of the religious controversies that divided Renaissance England.