The Lithic Imagination from More to Miltonexplores how stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm play a vital role in early modern England's religious and cultural systems, a rolethat, in turn, informs the period's poetic and visual imagination.The scale ofthe human lifespan and the gyre-like turns of England's long Reformation provide a conceptual framework for the various stony textual and visual archives this book studies.Thetexts and images participate in specifically English histories (literary, artistic, political,religious) although Continental influences are frequently in dialogue.The religious orbitencompasses the Christian rivalry with Jewish culture, touches on Christianity'stension with Islam, but most intently centers on the antagonism between Catholic and varians ofProtestant andReformed belief. The volume features canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Milton, and Pulter, but puts them in company with lesser-known religiouspolemicists, alchemists, anatomists, painters, mothers, and stonemasons.Accordingly,the multimediaarchive includes drama, lyric, and prose as well as biblical illustrations, tapestries, church furniture, paintings, anatomicaldrawings, and statues.The lithic too is capaciously construed as a continuum of rocky as well as mineral forms ranging from bodily encrustations like the kidney and bezoarstone, to salt, iron, limestone, marble, flint, and silicon.The assemblage of materialsbears witness to aspirational imperial fantasies and looming colonial conquests; it engages in both syncretism andsupersession; upholds and subverts gender hierarchies; limns the race-making category of hue with desire; and supports, and sometimes thwarts,elitist ideologies of an elect, chosen people.All come together via the storied pathways of stoneas densely material and as a foundation for the abstract imaginary along the scala naturae.Across the lithic-human fold, stone promises, fascinates, betrays. As alpha and omega, stone can herald salvation or it can threaten with damnation.

Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination explores how the cognitive and physical landscapes in which scholars conduct research, write, and teach have shaped their understandings of medieval and Renaissance English literary "oecologies." The collection strives to practice what Ursula K. Heise calls "eco-cosmopolitanism," a method that imagines forms of local environmentalism as a defense against the interventions of open-market global networks. It also expands the idea's possibilities and identifies its limitations through critical studies of premodern texts, artefacts, and environmental history. The essays connect real environments and their imaginative (re)creations and affirm the urgency of reorienting humanity's responsiveness to, and responsibility for, the historical links between human and non-human existence. The discussion of ways in which meditation on scholarly place and time can deepen ecocritical work offers an innovative and engaging approach that will appeal to both ecocritics generally and to medieval and early modern scholars.

This edited collection aims at highlighting the various uses of water in sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century England, while exploring the tensions between those who praised the curative virtues of waters and those who rejected them for their supposedly harmful effects. Divided into three balanced sections, the collection includes contributions from renowned specialists of early modern culture and literature as well as rising young scholars as it seeks to establish a dialogue between different methodologies, and explain why the spa-related issues examined still resonate in today’s society.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1860.

The great expositors of Blake and those who have followed in their footsteps have clarified the most minute particulars of Blake's vision. Now, in the place of traditional exegesis, comes a significantly new set of critical problems and interpretive methods. In this volume of essays, the major shift in Blake studies, already under way in practice, is addressed, gauged, analyzed, and debated. The contributors assembled here, leading exponents of contemporary critical methods as well as close students of Blake, argue the grounds, purposes, and validity of each approach and then apply its method in detailed readings of Blake's works. We see deconstruction, psychoanalytic interpretation, feminist critique, semiotic analysis, Marxist criticism, revisionism, and other methods brought to bear on Blake's texts and into confrontation with one another by those best able to do so. Through the essays themselves and in the reaction they will certainly provoke, Critical Paths will bring increased theoretical awareness to the study of Blake and will further the ongoing redefinition of Blake's art. At the same time, the collection investigates the general problem of methodology in literary studies by means of a casebook examination of modern critical approaches. Blake criticism and current literary theory here come together; the encounter illuminates and enriches both.