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This study examines the background to the well-known tales that Shakespeare used in his plays, describing their conventional use and then showing how Shakespeare deliberately subverted the motifs in order to challenge audience preconceptions.

The Gawain-Poet is the name given to the northern poet who is generally accepted as the sole author of four 14th-century Gawain poems. This text introduces the reader to the poems, setting the works in their relevant historical and cultural context and developing lines of critical argument.

In this completely re-written edition, Professor Brewer has taken into account recent literary criticism, both challenging new ideas and using them to analyse Chaucer's work. He has also included a more detailed account of The Book of the Duchess.

The Middle English popular romances are today accessible to readers in numerous editions and anthologies. This text hopes to suggest appropriate strategies of interpretation and serve as a starting point for further analytical approaches.

This title challenges the conventional view of Renaissance women as marginal to the cultural reproduction of the time. It examines texts written by women in relation to their social and historical contexts and looks at how women's lived experiences shaped their work.

The focus of this book, and the choice of poets that goes with it, follows the modern inclination. The author is at pains to emphasize the vagueness of the term metaphysical when considering the poets considered in the text.

This text examines the influence Italian and English writers have had on each other and looks at both the similarities and the differences between the two literary traditions. The historical, social and intellectual developments between the two countries in the early Renaissance are explored.

This text seeks to restore "Paradise Lost" to its original cultural context in order that its relevance to a 20th-century audience can be realized. The study aims to demonstrate how ideologies may, in high art, survive their political eclipse.

Offers an introduction to the entire canon of John Donne's religious writing, seeking to make its political and theological context fully accessible. This text focuses on the precise historical and political circumstances of Donne's life, and examines his prose works, essays and sermons.

This work is an account of Elizabethan humanism, dedicated to the Elizabethan period of Renaissance writing. It offers a new approach to the topic by using records of the words humanity and humanist to establish an understanding of the word humanism.

An introduction to the work of women dramatists in the early modern period. The text covers not only writing and translation of plays, but also female performance in official forms (such as "court" masque). The text charts the development of women's active involvement in drama.

This study on Andrew Marvell looks at both his political poetry and his often neglected political prose, revealing his life long commitment to writing about the standards of public life, freedom of conscience and constitutional government.