Elizabeth I - The Voice of a Monarch

This book focuses on the ways in which Elizabeth represented herself in her own words, especially in speeches, reported conversations, and private poems from the first half of her reign when she was simultaneously establishing her political authority and negotiating marriage at home and abroad. Although Elizabeth’s novel and unprecedented art of courtship garnered considerable resistance and disapproval, by the end of her reign it had sparked or merged with a wider, ongoing social controversy over conjugal freedom of choice and women’s lawful liberty that helped make the Elizabethan era an extraordinarily fertile and creative period in English literature.

Vernacular Bodies - The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England

Making babies was a mysterious process in seventeenth-century England. Fissell uses popular sources - songs, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to recover how ordinary men and women understood the processes of reproduction. Because the human body was so often used as a metaphor for social relations, the grand events of high politics such as the English Civil War reshaped popular ideas about conception and pregnancy. This book is the first account of ordinary people's ideas about reproduction, and offers a new way to understand how common folk experienced the sweeping political changes that characterized early modern England.

Restoration - Charles II and His Kingdoms

The late seventeenth century was a period of extraordinary turbulence and political violence in Britain, the like of which has never been seen since. Beginning with the Restoration of the monarchy after the Civil War, this book traces the fate of the monarchy from Charles II's triumphant accession in 1660 to the growing discontent of the 1680s. Harris looks beyond the popular image of Restoration England revelling in its freedom from the austerity of Puritan rule under a merry monarch and reconstructs the human tragedy of Restoration politics where people were brutalised, hounded and exploited by a regime that was desperately insecure after two decade of civil war and republican rule.

Foreign and Native on the English Stage, 1588 - 1611 - Metaphor and National Identity

This original and scholarly work uses three detailed case studies of plays – Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear and Cymbeline – to cast light on the ways in which early modern writers used metaphor to explore how identities emerge from the interaction of competing regional and spiritual topographies.

How Britain Got the Blues - The Transmission of American Blues Style in the United Kingdom

This book explores how, and why, the blues became a central component of English popular music in the 1960s. It is commonly known that many 'British invasion' rock bands were heavily influenced by Chicago and Delta blues styles. But how, exactly, did Britain get the blues? Blues records by African American artists were released in the United States in substantial numbers between 1920 and the late 1930s, but were sold primarily to black consumers in large urban centres and the rural south.