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Julia V. Douthwaite describes the interrelated representations of cultural and sexual difference in key French works of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The heroines of this book are foreign women, brought to France through no will of their own, and forced into the margins of a new society.The author contends that their experience resonates with larger cultural beliefs about exotic and primitive peoples in ancien régime France and illuminates some of the blind spots in Enlightenment thought.

In Forms and Meanings, Chartier explores what effect changes in form will have on the way we come to know texts in the future, placing his projections within a larger historical perspective that spans from stone tablet to Guttenberg bible and beyond.

In Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, Jayne Ann Krentz and the contributors to this volume—all best-selling romance writers—explode myths and biases that haunt both the writers and readers of romances.In this seamless, ultimately fascinating, and controversial book, the authors dispute some of the notions that plague their profession, including the time-worn theory that the romance genre contains only one single, monolithic story, which is cranked out over and over again. The authors discuss positive life-affirming values inherent in all romances: the celebration of female power, courage, intelligence, and gentleness; the inversion of the power structure of a patriarchal society; and the integration of male and female. Several of the essays also discuss the issue of reader identification with the characters, a relationship that is far more complex than most critics realize.

In the closing decades of the sixteenth century, England attempted its first colonial expansion into the New World through planned settlements in Ireland, Newfoundland, Virginia, and Guiana. All of these colonial efforts were unsuccessful. Yet these projects were a significant cultural force in early modern England. Influenced by recent work in postcolonial theory and cultural studies, Shannon Miller's Invested with Meaning examines the documentary and material remains of these vanished colonies to explore the multiple influences of the Irish and New World encounters on English culture.Miller contends that the projects sponsored by the Raleigh circle were inextricably bound to the economic and social transformations of English systems, including the transition from a feudal-based economy to an emergent capitalism, the redefinition of the patron-client relationship, and challenges to the categories of gentry and merchant. These social and economic transitions shaped the goals of the colonization projects and dictated the ways in which the writers and artists of these enterprises could frame the New World and its people; influenced by the changes in England, their construction of the New World both reflected and helped to constitute a sense of English national identity.

The Language of the Heart presents a study of images less concerned with the tally of external figures of nature than with the construction of human physiology-and human nature itself. It is at once a work of rigorous historicist examination and a book of immense relevance to modern readers living in a new "cardiocentric" age.

The unmarried "care for the things of the Lord," said St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, while married men and women "care for the things of the world." The doctrine that virginity for both men and women is superior to marriage remained strong in Augustine, who believed that consecrated virgins were "a greater blessing" than the married. Even the current edition of the New Catholic Encyclopedia privileges the state of virginity because "it has as its object a superior good." In Pure Resistance Theodora A. Jankowski surveys the history of virginity in Christian thought from ancient times though the Renaissance, contrasting the Catholic tradition on this issue with Protestant doctrine as it developed in early modern England. With the Reformation, theologians argued that marriage was the ideal, even that vowed virginity was unnatural. If the multiple sexual, erotic, economic, and communal arrangements of Catholic Europe offered possibilities for destabilizing the categories male/female, married/virgin, chaste/unchaste, she contends, Protestant thought rigidified these binary oppositions. Exploring resistance to the patriarchal sexual economy, Jankowski considers representations of female virgins in English stage plays from 1590 to about 1670. In these dramatic texts she finds characters who range from collaborators with patriarchy to women who utterly repudiate marriage, opting instead for a life completely outside the heterosexual gender paradigm-and who thus, like Isabella in Measure for Measure or Moll Cutpurse in Dekker and Middleton''s The Roaring Girl, become "queer virgins."

"Hodgdon's work should be required reading for anyone concerned with Shakespeare's cultural capital at the end of the twentieth century."-South Atlantic Review

Barbara Leckie mines novels, newspapers, and court and parliamentary records to explore how adultery became visible in the public sphere in the second half of the nineteenth century and how the history of the Victorian novel is revised when the culture's concern with adultery and censorship is brought into focus.

Mining rich archival resources of play-texts, censorship reports, critical reviews, and contemporary writings on performance practice, Angela C. Pao reveals the complex processes by which the institutions of popular culture helped shape nineteenth-century notions of race, ethnicity, and nationality.

"Yachnin's implicit claim here is that Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton in effect created the basic institutions of the commercial theater along with the social habitus of the cultural consumer. An important and badly needed contribution to the field of early modern studies."-Michael Bristol, McGill University

Joseph Childers contends that novels such as Benjamin Disraeli''s Coningsby, Elizabeth Gaskell''s Mary Barton, and Charles Kingsley''s Alton Locke were in direct competition with other forms of public discourse for interpretive dominance of their age. Childers examines the interactions between the novel and a set of texts generated by parliamentary and radical politics, the sanitation reform movement, and religion. Reversing the position of earlier studies of this period, he argues that the novel was in fact constitutive of—and often provided the model for—texts as diverse as the political agendas of Robert Peel and T. B. Macaulay or Edwin Chadwick''s enormously important Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, with its seemingly encyclopedic description of the conditions of poverty.

In Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England, Bruce Thomas Boehrer argues that a preoccupation with incest is built not the dominant social and cultural concerns of early modern England. Proceeding from a study of Henry III''s divorce and succession legislation, through the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, this work examines the interrelation between family politics and literary expression in and around the English royal court.

"Well argued, clearly written, with interesting emphases and ambitious breadth, this excellent book maintains a uniformly high level of scholarship."-Choice

Nina Auerbach brilliantly reveals the Ellen Terry whose roles, on stage and off, embodied everything that a rapidly changing world exhorted women to be.

In Bodytalk, E. Jane Burns contends that female protagonists in medieval texts authored by men can be heard to talk back against the stereotyped and codified roles that their fictive anatomy is designed to convey.

This cultural biography rescues Queen Anna from the shadow of King James I, arguing that she sponsored many of the artistic endeavors at court in the innovative Jacobean period (e.g., the extravagant drama known as the masque) in her role as early modern queen consort. Leeds Barroll also delves into her relationship with Catholicism.

Autobiography came into being when we began to see the self differently.

Birth Marks reexamines the body of French classical tragedy from the perspective of recent theories about the sibling bond and, in particular, birth order.

A study of sexual violence and rape in medieval French literature and law, which uses an approach combining feminist criticism with postmodern French theory. The author demonstrates how medieval discourse made rape acceptable, and draws parallels between medieval and modern attitudes about rape.

"An original and elegant work that will make signal contributions to the fields of eighteenth-century studies and Romanticism, and to the study of British nationalism and colonialism."-Adela Pinch, University of Michigan

A collection of 10 original essays that explore the social context in which paintings, statues, textiles, maps, and other artifacts were produced and consumed in Renaissance England.

The contributors to Perennial Decay approach the question of decadence afresh, reevaluating the continuing importance of late nineteenth-century decadence for contemporary literary and cultural studies.

In Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, scholars illuminate the sometimes surprising issues at stake in such common matters of daily life as mirrors, books, horses, money, laundry baskets, graffiti, embroidery, and food during the Renaissance in England and on the Continent.

"A feminist analysis of the writing of the fifteenth-century English mystic, showing how Kempe exploited the gendered ideologies of flesh and text, violated taboos, and responded to the constraints of her time."-Book News, Inc.

From accounts of the Holocaust, to representations of AIDS, to predictions of environmental disaster; from Hal Lindsey''s fundamentalist 1970s bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, to Francis Fukuyama''s The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, the sense of apocalypse is very much with us. In Postmodern Apocalypse, Richard Dellamora and his contributors examine apocalypse in works by late twentieth-century writers, filmmakers, and critics.

Identified only in 1986, the Nahuatl Holy Week play is the earliest known dramatic script in any Native American language. In Holy Wednesday, Louise Burkhart presents side-by-side English translations of the Nahuatl play and its Spanish source. An accompanying commentary analyzes the differences between the two versions to reveal how the native author altered the Spanish text to fit his own aesthetic sensibility and the broader discursive universe of the Nahua church. A richly detailed introduction places both works and their creators within the cultural and political contexts of late sixteenth-century Mexico and Spain.

Contributors examine the import of Barthes's shifting positions on photography and visual representation and the impact of his work on current developments in cultural studies and theories of the media and popular culture.