Böcker i Mhra Critical Texts-serien

Aphra Behn's spectacular farce, Emperor of the Moon (1687), so engaged audiences that it was restaged well into the eighteenth century. Her play was largely adapted from Anne Mauduit de Fatouville's Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune (1684), a commedia dell'arte production by the Comédie-Italienne troupe, a performance which also proved immensely popular with Parisian audiences. Within its witty and amusing three acts, Behn's play explores a number of contemporary concerns - from commedia dell'arte, to gender and politics, to science and astronomy, including a plurality of worlds, for example - all culminating in the third act's operatic spectacle. This volume offers a transcription of Behn's 1687 play with extensive annotations, a critical discussion of Behn's text, and the first English translation of Fatouville's eight French and Italian scenes.

The Fortunate Foundlings was one of Eliza Haywood's more successful novels, though it remains one of her lesser known works. Ittells the story of a brother and sister left as babies in the care of a gentleman. Like many another eighteenth-century foundling, the siblings leave their guardian behind and make their own way in the world: Horatio as a soldier and Louisa as a lady's companion, finding love and adventure in the battlefields and courts of Europe. Haywood uses the Continental setting to explore different customs-especially those that might benefit women-and different political choices.Also published here for the first time is her anonymous pamphlet of 1750, A Letter from H--- G---g, Esq., ostensibly a letter from Charles Edward Stuart's aide-de-camp, travelling with him after the prince's expulsion from France. Seemingly a straightforward expression of Jacobite sympathies, it also encodes support for the Patriot cause of the 1740s and '50s.Both works were translated and adapted, having an extended afterlife in the writings of Crébillon fils, Edward Kimber and Robert Louis Stevenson. They add to our expanding sense of the author's range, influence and political agenda.

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) was a key advocate for modernism across the arts in America in the first half of the twentieth century. As a critic of music, dance, and literature, as novelist, as photographer, as patron of the arts, and as saloniste, he exerted an influence on the development and reception of popular and avant-garde forms of modernism - from jazz, blues, and early cinema to Gertrude Stein and Igor Stravinsky. Though currently less well-known than 'Lost Generation' contemporaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Van Vechten was a popular and critically acclaimed figure in his day. Van Vechten's novels are worthy of recuperation for their distinctive take on the raucous spirit of the Jazz Age, bringing a witty and sardonic viewpoint to issues that his modernist contemporaries approached with gravityThis edition brings back into print Van Vechten's second novel, The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), which Van Vechten's most recent biographer has called a 'great, forgotten American novel of the 1920s'. It is thoroughly annotated and provides an introduction that foregrounds the novel's importance for literary modernism and as a treatment of queer identity.

La Belle Dame qui eust mercy and Le Dialogue d'amoureux et de sa dame are two late-medieval poems in which a courtly gentleman and lady debate the merits of his pleas for her affections. In both cases, the lady is recalcitrant, dismissing her suitor's lovesickness as a trifle, denying that she ever gave any sign of encouragement, and wishing to protect her reputation. The lady in Le Dialogue never capitulates; in contrast, the Belle Dame ends by agreeing to her lover's suit and imagining a future in which they will joyfully live together. Both poems merit serious attention for their kinship with Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame sans mercy (1424) and other poems in the so-called "Belle Dame" cycle. Their presence in numerous fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript and printed collections attests to their appeal in their day. Equally as significant is their unusual bipartite stanzaïc structure, suggesting amalgamation of separate poems and/or continuations of existing poems. Such an anomaly complicates attribution of authorship and dating, but close study of La Belle Dame qui eust mercy and Le Dialogue d'amoureux et de sa dame can only enhance our understanding of the process(es) of poetic composition, as well as the mise en page and reception of literary works, in the late Middle Ages.

Alessandria, Italy, 1628: a young woman, Isabella Sori, publishes her only known work, consisting of three different texts, at a time when war and the plague are looming. Written in the form of letters by a mother to her daughter, her Ammaestramenti e ricordi is a treatise on the ideal conduct of women in everyday life which draws from an impressive array of sources and displays an unusual level of erudition for the author's sex and age. Attacked for her literary enterprise by unidentified malicious detractors, Isabella Sori is forced to defend herself (and the female sex) against their criticisms: her Difese still preserves her unfiltered indignation. A Panegirico of Alessandria, a cross between an idealized portrait and a historical document of the city, concludes the work. Amid questions of authorship and attribution, Sori's work, with its immediacy and liveliness offersprecious insight into the life and customs of a long-lost era, as well as a poignant testimony of a local 'battle of the pens' waged by the author with pride and dignity. This rich edition, comprehensively annotated and providing a meticulous reconstruction of her wide-ranging sources, restores Sori's rare writings to the public once more, after nearly four hundred years of oblivion.Contents include: a historical introduction to the author, her times, and her work; a note on the text; the Italian text with notes; a glossary; an appendix; a bibliography; an index of names.Helena Sanson is Reader in Italian Language, Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Clare College.

El Retrato de la Loc¿ana andaluza, compuesto en Roma en 1524 y publicado anonimamente en Venecia hacia 1530, es un libro misterioso y complejo de enorme riqueza verbal.Esta edicion analiza aspectos linguisticos esenciales para entender la obra en su contexto: su recepcion oral y colectiva, el español en la Italia del siglo xvi, el debate linguistico en el Siglo de Oro y la actitud de Delicado hacia las variedades del español (castellano, andaluz…), la mímesis de la lengua hablada a través de la caracterizacion linguistica de situaciones comunicativas y personajes (se añade una tabla con los 139 personajes que aparecen). Para que la edicion pueda usarse en estudios grafematicos/fonético-fonologicos, se han conservado las grafias originales.Francisco Delicado nos ofrece un retrato de Loçana, una prostituta, andaluza como el, que es a la vez un fresco vivísimo de la Roma plurilingue anterior al saqueo de 1527. Este retrato incluye como componente esencial la lengua hablada, las voces multiculturales de sus calles. Y lo escribio consciente de que su obra estaba destinada a la lectura colectiva, y casi nos permite oir -y ese es uno de sus grandes logros- los ecos de esas multiples voces perdidas del espanol hablado en la Italia del siglo xvi.

At the end of Molière's masterpiece Le Misanthrope (1666), the irascible anti-hero Alceste storms off the stage, resolved to spend the rest of his life in a remote wilderness rather than to spend another moment mixing with corrupt Parisian society. Molière's comedy is thus, in an important sense, unfinished, and various writers over the centuries, from Fabre d'Églantine in the eighteenth century to David Ives in the twenty-first, have written sequels - works that aim simultaneously to exploit the popularity of the original play, to resolve its narrative, and to lay to rest some of its more troubling implications about society. This volume brings together two of the first sequels. As their titles imply, both Jean-François Marmontel's 'moral tale' Le Misanthrope corrigé (1765) and its dramatic adaptation, Charles-Albert Demoustier's three-act verse comedy Alceste à la campagne, ou le Misanthrope corrigé (c.1790), follow the gradual rehabilitation of Molière's bad-tempered misanthrope. This critical edition traces the two plays' complex relationships both to each other and to Molière's original comedy. It situates them both in the context of Molière reception in the Enlightenment, and particularly in relation to Marmontel's debates with Jean-Jacques Rousseau about the ethics and aesthetics of Molière's original play.