You are here
Back to topReading the Road, from Shakespeare's Crossways to Bunyan's Highways (Paperback)
Description
Explores how cultural conceptions of mobility and the road contribute to identity and culture in early modern Britain
Opens new windows on early modern culture, subjectivity and perceptions around the experience of the road and how that shapes the idea of the road itselfOffers insight into the ways both the bare boards of the stage and prose narratives were used to imagine road journeys and the intersections between public and private spaceEnhances historical understanding of the literal place of theatre in the road networks around early modern LondonProvides a crucial ligature in English literary and cultural history. The present plays and prose are prolegomena to the travel literature of Montagu, Swift, Boswell and Johnson in the Hebrides, Sterne's Sentimental Journey, Fielding's Tom Jones, and peripatetic Civil War narratives
About the Author
Lisa Hopkins is Professor Emerita of English at Sheffield Hallam University and co-editor of Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association, of Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama, and of Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. Her most recent publications are The Edge of Christendom on the Early Modern English Stage (2022) and A Companion to the Cavendishes, with Tom Rutter (2020). She also works on detective fiction and her book Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction was published in 2023. Bill Angus is a Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University, New Zealand. He has written extensively on early modern drama and material culture. His books with Edinburgh University Press include Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson (2016), Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre (2018), Reading the Road, from Shakespeare's Crossways to Bunyan's Highways (2019), co-edited with Lisa Hopkins, and his last monograph, A History of Crossroads in Early Modern Culture (2022). His latest edited collection Poison on the Early Modern English Stage, co-edited with Kibrina Davey and Lisa Hopkins, was published in 2023.