Centre for Studies in Literature (CSL)
Early Modern Writing
Researchers in Early Modern Writing work across a variety of intellectual disciplines with notable strengths in the history of science, the history of political thought, and literary studies (particularly poetry and its relationship with gender, politics and commerce). A broad range of writing is covered from the Renaissance to the Romantic era, and we have expertise in the work of John Milton, William Blake, Margaret Cavendish, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Bernard Mandeville and David Hume. Recent publications have been concerned with encyclopaedias and encyclopaedism, the reception of Shakespeare in nineteenth-century America, the poetry of retirement and feminine identity, and the representation of labour and the labourer in Georgian political economy. Staff working in this field have edited books for publishers including Manchester University Press, and Pickering and Chatto, and have been published in journals such as Literature and History, Notes and Queries, Modern Intellectual History, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, Borrowers and Lenders: Shakespeare and Appropriation, and Women's Writing.
Future projects will include work on translation (both as theme and activity), the representation of friendship in the Early Modern period, and debates surrounding the education of the labouring sort in eighteenth-century Britain. The Centre hosted a Symposium on Amity in Early Modern Literature and Culture on September 17th 2009.
Researchers working in this area are: