Renaissance Drama, an annual interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theater, and performance. This special issue of Renaissance Drama on "Italy in the Drama of Europe" primarily builds on the groundwork laid by Louise George Clubb, who showed that Italian drama was made in such a way as to facilitate its absorption and transformation into other traditions, even when it was not explicitly cited or referenced. "Italy in the Drama of Europe" takes up the reverberations of early modern Italian drama in the theaters of Spain, England, and France and in writings in Italian, English, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Latin, and German. Its scope is an example of the continuing force of and interest in one of the most rewarding, wide-ranging, and productive early modern aesthetic modes, and a tribute to the scholarship of Louise George Clubb, who, among others, recalled our attention to it.

Focusing on major authors and problems from the Italian fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Machiavelli, Ariosto and Tasso, A Local Habitation and a Name examines the unstable dialectic of "reality" and "imagination," as well as of "history" and "literature." Albert Ascoli identifies and interprets the ways in which literary texts are shaped by and serve the purposes of multiple, intertwined historical discourses and circumstances, and he equally probes the function of such texts in constructing, interpreting, critiquing, and effacing the histories in which they are embedded. Throughout, he poses the theoretical and methodological question of how formal analysis and literary forms can at once resist and further the historicist enterprise. Along the way Ascoli interrogates the mechanisms of historical periodization that have governed for so long our study of what is sometimes called the "Renaissance," sometimes the early modern period. He also addresses the period's own unstable version of the literature/history opposition, the place of gendered discourse in the construction of historical narratives (and vice versa), the elaborate formal strategies by which poets and intellectuals negotiate their relations to power, and, finally, the way in which proper names (of authors, works, and exemplary characters) serve as points of negotiation between individual identity and social order in the Renaissance. The book brings to culmination two decades of a major scholar's thinking about some of the most important figures and questions that shaped the Renaissance, with emphasis on the question of history, both the historical context of literature and the writing of literary history.

Analyzes texts and art objects from the 15th to the late 16th centuries to show that Renaissance theories of emulating classical heroes generated a deep skepticism about representation, as these theories forced men to construct a public image that seemed fixed but could adapt to changing circumstances.

Traces the history of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., discussing its plan and structures, and considering how the concept of memorials and memorial space has changed since the nineteenth century.

Eating disorders do not only affect women and girls; men and boys get them too but remain mostly invisible. This book gives insight into this neglected problem through a comparative and transnational analysis of autobiographical accounts written by men with experience of living with eating disorders.

Men and Women Writers of the 1930s is a searching critique of the issues of memory and gender during this dynamic decade. Montefiore asks two principle questions; what part does memory play in the political literature of and about 1930s Britain? And what were the roles of women, both as writers and as signifying objects in constructing that literature? Montefiore's topical analysis of 1930s mass unemployment, fascist uprise and 'appeasement' is shockingly relevant in society today. Issues of class, anti-fascist historical novels, post war memoirs of 'Auden generation' writers and neglected women poets are discussed at length. Writers include: * George Orwell * Virginia Woolf * W.H. Auden * Storm Jameson * Jean Rhys * Rebecca West

Seven chapters take up readings of sonnets by Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, D.G. Rossetti, Hopkins, and, to draw out the implications of this study into our own century, Robert Frost. Close readings of individual Wordsworth sonnets in chapter 1 sketch out a constellation of themes and tropes, as well as a fundamental, revisionary poetic that the very form of the sonnet tropes. Both those tropes and that procedure are problematized and, in some cases, deconstructed by subsequent poets. Far from accepting Wordsworth's visionary claim for the sonnet, this study goes on to show how profoundly those claims were critiqued.

With democratization of fame in the wake of the French Revolution, writers enjoyed ever greater celebrity status. But in nineteenth-century France, the availability and perceived impermanence of such renown cheapened it, and prompted longing for enduring fame, exemplified by monuments - commemorative sculptural or architectural works, helping a nation in flux define itself, its past, and anticipated future. Within this cultural climate, there evolved an ideal of great writers and their work as immortal, that envisioned literary greatness through the metaphor of monuments and monumentality. study draws upon wide-ranging evidence, from journalism to poetry, caricature to statuary. Focusing on the lives, work, and fame of Honore de Balzac, George Sand, and Victor Hugo, it uncovers the salient features, and traces the rise and fall of this monumentalizing vision of literary greatness, largely forgotten today yet so central to nineteenth-century French culture. North Carolina State University.