This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

This monograph provides an insight into English country house fiction by twentieth and twenty-first century authors, with a focus on the works of E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Alan Hollinghurst, and Sarah Waters. The country house is explored within the wider social and cultural contexts of the period, including contemporary architectural development. The variety of literary depictions of the country house reflects the physical diversification of buildings which can be classified as such, from smaller variants to formerly grand residences on the brink of physical collapse. Within the scope of contemporary fiction, architecture and poetics of space, the country house, given its uniquely integrating and exceptionally evocative qualities, accentuates different conceptions of dwelling. Consequently, literary portrayals of the country house can be seen as both prefiguring and reflecting the contemporary practice of living.

In this study, Kari Boyd McBride defines 'country house discourse' as a network of fictions that articulated and mediated early modern concerns about the right use of land and the social relationships that land engendered. McBride provides new perspectives on the roles of the discourse she identifies, linking it with a number of larger historical shifts during the time period. Her interdisciplinary focus allows her to bring together a wide range of material-including architecture, poetry, oil painting, economic and social history, and proscriptive literature-in order to examine their complex interrelationship, revealing connections unexplored in more narrowly focused studies. McBride delineates the ways in which the country house (on the landscape and in literature) provided a locus for the construction of gender, race, class, and nation. Of particular interest is her focus on women's relationships to the country house: their writing of country house poetry and their representation in that literature; their designing of country houses and their lives within those architectural spaces (whether as lady of the house or domestic servant). One of the most important and promising insights in this study is that country house discourse was not simply static and nostalgic, but actually worked to mediate change. All in all, she presents a fresh and detailed study of the great disparities between country house reality and the ideals that informed country house discourse.

The house is perhaps the most recognizable emblem of the American ideals of self-making: prosperity, stability, domesticity, and upward mobility. Yet over the years from 1945-2021, the American house becomes more famous for the betrayal of those hopes than for their fulfilment: first, through the segregation of cities and public housing; then through the expansion of private credit that lays the ground for the subprime mortgage crisis of the early twenty-first century. Walt Hunter argues that, as access to housing expands to include a greater share of the US population, the house emerges as a central metaphor for the poetic imagination. From the kitchenette of Gwendolyn Brooks to the duplex of Jericho Brown, and from the suburban imagination of Adrienne Rich to the epic constructions of James Merrill, the American house poem represents the changing abilities of US poets to imagine new forms of life while also building on the past. In The American House Poem, 1945-2021, Hunter focuses on poets who register the unevenly distributed pressures of successive housing crises by rewriting older poetic forms. Writing about the materials, tools, and plans for making a house, these poets express the tensions between making their lives into art and freeing their lives from inherited constraints and conditions.

In recent years new schools of historiography and criticism have recast the political and cultural histories of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. However, for all the benefits of their insights, most revisionist historians have too narrowly focussed on high politics to the neglect of values and ideology, and New Historicist literary scholars have displayed an insufficient grasp of chronology and historical context. The contributors to this pioneering volume, richly fusing these approaches, apply a revisionist close attention to moments to the wide range of texts - verbal and visual - that critics have begun to read as representations of power and politics. Excitingly broadening the range of areas and evidence for the study of politics, these outstanding essays demonstrate how the study of high culture - classical translations, court portraits royal palaces, the conduct of chivalric ceremony - and low culture - cheap pamphlets and scurrilous verses - enable us to reconstruct the languages through which contemporaries interpreted their political environment. The volume posits a reconsideration of the traditional antithetical concepts - court and country, verbal and visual, critical and complimentary, elite and popular; examines the constructions of a moral and social order enacted in a wide variety of cultural practices; and demonstrates how common vocabularies could in changed circumstances be combined and deployed to sustain quite different ideological positions. This book opens a new agenda for the study of the politics of culture and the culture of politics in early modern England. -- Publisher's website.

"This major new collection of almost all the known estate poems of the seventeenth century draws on the literary, historical and artistic traditions of the period to clarify this much debated genre. The poems are mostly reproduced in their entirety and include ten from the Mildmay Fane manuscripts - an important, but so far unpublished source of such material. Full notes accompany the text, explaining difficult passages and relating them to their biographical, social and political contexts. There is a substantial introduction, a comprehensive bibliography, and a listing of visual sources complementing the contemporary illustrations. Containing much new evidence for architectural- and art-historians as well as for literary scholars, The Country House Poem is set to become the definitive work in this field."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This is a one volume, up-to-date collection of more than fifty wide-ranging essays which will inspire and guide students of the Renaissance and provide course leaders with a substantial and helpful frame of reference. Provides new perspectives on established texts. Orientates the new student, while providing advanced students with current and new directions. Pioneered by leading scholars. Occupies a unique niche in Renaissance studies. Illustrated with 12 single-page black and white prints.

Table of contents

In this revised and greatly expanded edition of theCompanion, 80 scholars come together to offer an originaland far-reaching assessment of English Renaissance literature andculture. A new edition of the best-selling Companion to EnglishRenaissance Literature, revised and updated, with 22 newessays and 19 new illustrations Contributions from some 80 scholars including Judith H.Anderson, Patrick Collinson, Alison Findlay, Germaine Greer,Malcolm Jones, Arthur Kinney, James Knowles, Arthur Marotti, RobertMiola and Greg Walker Unrivalled in scope and its exploration of unfamiliar literaryand cultural territories the Companion offers new readingsof both ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’texts Features essays discussing material culture, sectarian writing,the history of the body, theatre both in and outside theplayhouses, law, gardens, and ecology in early modern England Orientates the beginning student, while providing advancedstudents and faculty with new directions for theirresearch All of the essays from the first edition, along with therecommendations for further reading, have been reworked orupdated