The economic history of England has long been dominated by the Industrial Revolution, examining its degree of uniqueness, and its longer-term implications for both the domestic economy and that of the nations whose advance to the modern industrial state took place rather later. In this study , scholars have tended to concentrate on the period after 1750, often dismissing the previous century rather naively in terms of 'preconditions' for industrial growth. Relatively few have looked at the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in depth, except in the fields of public finance and overseas trade. For most purposes, the century before the Industrial Revolution is still, in Professor Fisher's words, a 'Dark Age'. One sector of the economy, the retail trade and retailing institutions, has been generally deprived of scholarly attention. Apart from the development of the great chain stores in the nineteenth century, the bulk of our knowledge of the sector of the economy stems from research conducted prior to 1920. While age is hardly synonymous with a lack of quality, the time had clearly come for some revision. As scholars such as Professor Eversley have come to stress the significance of changing patterns of consumption in the home market to the Industrial Revolution, this sector of the economy has increasingly demanded more research.

Shakespeare’s career in the theatre coincides with the ascendancy of Catholic-Protestant polemic, a body of writing that exerted a deep and pervasive influence on literate life in early modern England. Eroding a secularizing bias within the academy, the much heralded turn to religion in the discipline has already covered ample ground in repositioning Shakespeare in relation to the religious cultures of his age. But if such criticism is no longer the preserve of parti pris commentators, Shakespeare’s plays have yet to be fully explored through the particular breed of antagonistic writing that emerged during the Reformation and eventually contributed to the period’s self-styling as the “scribbling age.” Placing drama within this neglected field of enquiry, I reveal the importance the modes and preoccupations of such controversial writing had for the evolving shape and content of Shakespeare’s art. The four plays considered here illuminate the subtlety and sophistication with which Catholic-Protestant polemic permeates the theatre; but they also demonstrate that theatre could in turn permeate polemic, hijacking and radically altering its concerns or critiquing its values and assumptions as a practice. King John, 1 Henry IV, Hamlet, and Henry VIII are all marked by cultures of religious scribbling, but in strikingly different ways. By charting changes to these configurations across such a chronology, we can grasp how the plays loosely move from a tentative, experimental approach to polemic to a greater assuredness in its repudiation, developments with important implications for piecing together Shakespeare’s development as a reader and writer.

This dissertation tracks the intimate relationship between writing and the body to add new dimensions to humoral criticism and textual studies of Renaissance literature. Most humor theory focuses on the volatile, permeable nature of the body, and its vulnerability to environmental stimuli, neglecting the important role that written texts play in this economy of fluids. I apply the principles of humor theory to the study of handwritten and printed texts. This approach demonstrates that the textual economy of the period—reading, writing, publishing, exchanging letters, performing all of the above on stage—mirrors the economy of fluids that governed the humoral body. Early modern readers and writers could imagine textual activities not only as cerebral, abstract concepts, but also as sexual activities, as processes of ingestion and regurgitation. My study of ink combines humoral, historical materialist, and ecocritical modes of study. Materialist critics have examined the quill, paper, and printing press as metaphors for the body; however, the ink within them remains unexamined. This dissertation infuses the figurative body of the press with circulating passions, and brings to bear the natural, biochemical properties that ink lends to the texts it creates. Considering the influence of written and printed materials on the body in early modern poetry and drama requires consideration of the murky liquid from which these texts were composed. For early moderns, writing began with the precise, anatomical slicing of a goose feather, with the crushing of oak galls into wine or rainwater, with the application of heat and ferrous sulfate. These raw materials underwent a violent transformation to fill early modern inkwells. As a result of that mystical concoction, the fluid inside these vessels became humoral. The ink on a page represented one person's passions potentially invading the body of another. Therefore, ink serves as more than a metaphor for any particular humor. Pen and paper work as extensions of the body, and serve at turns as a mechanism of balance or imbalance.

archivists, antiquarians, geographers and civil servants within the India Office reorganised the records of the East India Company, the Board of Control and the India Office itself into what is now the India Office Records. My thesis focuses on the earliest materials of the East India Company - the records of its trading activities in the Indian Ocean from 1600 to 1623 - and how these materials were absorbed into the India Office Records between 1875 and 1891. I study the documents themselves as evidence of a complex early modern documentary culture; then I study the processes by which they were absorbed into the India Office Records, classified, edited, interpreted, and publicized. I argue that the creators of the India Office Records - civil servants, antiquarians and geographers such as George Birdwood, F. C. Danvers, William Foster and Clements R. Markham - organised and interpreted their materials in the service of a teleological historiography of empire. I situate the archive's creation within the contexts of nineteenth-century archival, antiquarian and historiographical practice, the crisis of 'high imperialism' in the late nineteenth century, and the development of the 'exhibitionary complex', and locate it within the scholarly and governmental formations of the time. Ultimately I hope to demonstrate how the archive itself, as an apparently neutral repository of historical information, was in fact instrumental in the production of imperial discourse and ideology

Review of Making and Moving Sculpture in Early Modern Italy edited by Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio

This project explores the ways in which early modern English women writers engaged with the rhetoric of ideal male friendship. Early modern writers on friendship, drawing from classical texts such as Cicero's De Amicitia, most often defined friendship as a relationship of equality between two virtuous men. Women writers revised this dominant discourse by arguing for their own ability to practice virtuous friendship, thus investing women's friendships with the political significance long carried by the male tradition. In this dissertation, I discuss Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Katherine Philips as writers who depict friendships that overcome class or gender differences through the common virtue of the participants. Placing these works alongside those of male writers on friendship such as Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, and William Shakespeare, I demonstrate the ways in which early modern women writers created a space for their own participation in an often exclusionary discourse.

This thesis aims to explore translation theory in modern China to shed light on the thought of inter-culturality through translation in the age of globalization, focussing on the works of Lu Xun and Qian Zhongshu. This paper attempts to unveil the constitution of modernization, the cultural way of crossing boundary, and the construction of imaginary otherness. The first chapter examines the methodological problems of translation in Lu Xun and Qian Zhongshu, separately, to demonstrate their contributions to Chinese modern translation theory from aesthetic viewpoints. The second chapter discusses the purpose of translation, investigating the cultural meaning of boundary crossing in translation. The third chapter examines the problems of the translatability and untranslatability from Lu Xun’s and Qian Zhongshu’s aspects, by contrasting with the concept of differences and translatability in post-structuralism theory, discussing the possibilities of mutual understanding between two cultures and languages through the imagined other in translation.

This thesis aims to explore translation theory in modern China to shed light on the thought of inter-culturality through translation in the age of globalization, focussing on the works of Lu Xun and Qian Zhongshu. This paper attempts to unveil the constitution of modernization, the cultural way of crossing boundary, and the construction of imaginary otherness. The first chapter examines the methodological problems of translation in Lu Xun and Qian Zhongshu, separately, to demonstrate their contributions to Chinese modern translation theory from aesthetic viewpoints. The second chapter discusses the purpose of translation, investigating the cultural meaning of boundary crossing in translation. The third chapter examines the problems of the translatability and untranslatability from Lu Xun’s and Qian Zhongshu’s aspects, by contrasting with the concept of differences and translatability in post-structuralism theory, discussing the possibilities of mutual understanding between two cultures and languages through the imagined other in translation.

Literature and theatre have traditionally used exempla based on historical or classical models as a fundamentally conservative rhetorical technique which aimed to reinforce pre-existing values. However, in the early modern period the reproduction of exemplary figures on stage also created the possibility that the authority of the dominant culture could be used to reinterpret exempla and the tradition they represented. In Troilus and Cressida, instead of presenting an internally consistent alternative version of the Troy story, Shakespeare presents a deconstructed narrative in which nothing is definitive or authoritative. Many of Troilus and Cressidas characters were traditionally presented as exempla, but in Shakespeares story they are divided between the exemplary self and the actual. Shakespeare reproduces and enhances the contradictions of earlier versions of the Troy story, so that the exempla which are supposed to signify a singular virtue instead point to a confusing variety of possible motives and interpretations. Their behaviour is indefinitely open to reinterpretation and resists a singular meaning. Cressidas inherently divided and contradictory nature undermines her traditional position as a negative exemplum with a clear, singular meaning. The contradiction she embodies also applies to the play as a whole. The limited viewpoint the audience is given in Troilus and Cressida and the ambiguity of the characters undermine both specific examples of exemplarity and broader ideas about the value of exempla. The play works to create confusion and multiplicity of meaning, posing questions for the audience to consider rather than providing definitive answers.

Literature and theatre have traditionally used exempla based on historical or classical models as a fundamentally conservative rhetorical technique which aimed to reinforce pre-existing values. However, in the early modern period the reproduction of exemplary figures on stage also created the possibility that the authority of the dominant culture could be used to reinterpret exempla and the tradition they represented. In Troilus and Cressida, instead of presenting an internally consistent alternative version of the Troy story, Shakespeare presents a deconstructed narrative in which nothing is definitive or authoritative. Many of Troilus and Cressidas characters were traditionally presented as exempla, but in Shakespeares story they are divided between the exemplary self and the actual. Shakespeare reproduces and enhances the contradictions of earlier versions of the Troy story, so that the exempla which are supposed to signify a singular virtue instead point to a confusing variety of possible motives and interpretations. Their behaviour is indefinitely open to reinterpretation and resists a singular meaning. Cressidas inherently divided and contradictory nature undermines her traditional position as a negative exemplum with a clear, singular meaning. The contradiction she embodies also applies to the play as a whole. The limited viewpoint the audience is given in Troilus and Cressida and the ambiguity of the characters undermine both specific examples of exemplarity and broader ideas about the value of exempla. The play works to create confusion and multiplicity of meaning, posing questions for the audience to consider rather than providing definitive answers.