Exemplary England

What meaning does the past hold for the present? History writing often prioritizes the ethos and actions of the "great men" of the past, those connected to formal expressions of power, as models worthy of imitation. The problem with such exemplars is that they craft a limited view of national identity, drawn from political, economic, religious, and social institutional superstructures. Inherently exclusionary, narratives of exemplary men inadequately represent the complexities of a metropolitan and diverse society. In Exemplary England, Sarabeth Grant explores three canonical texts of 1740s England that critique the class, geography, and gender assumptions of the exemplar model. Through original readings of Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Richardson, she locates practices of constituting history and registering national identity in eighteenth-century England beyond that tradition. Her book argues that these literary texts offer recompense for the national injustices endured by the disenfranchised, charting the development of inward historical consciousness as necessary to civic stability.

This book explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with the exempla tradition in late medieval English literature. Such poetic narratives function as exemplary models which directly address the ambiguity of medieval English alchemical practice. This book examines the foundation of this relationship between alchemical narrative and exemplum in the poetry of Gower and Chaucer in the fourteenth century before exploring its diffusion in lesser-known anonymous poems and recipes in the fifteenth century, namely alchemical dialogues between Morienus and Merlin, Albertus Magnus and the Queen of Elves, and an alchemical version of John Lydgate’s poem The Churl and the Bird. It investigates how this exemplarity can be read as inherent to understanding poetic narratives containing alchemy, as well as enabling the reader to reassess the understanding and expectations of science and narrative within medieval English poetry.

Exemplary Spenser analyses the didactic poetics of The Faerie Queene, renewing attention to its avowed attempt to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" and examining how Spenser mobilises his pedagogic concerns through the reading experience of the poem. Grogan's investigation shows how Spenser transacts the public life of the nation heuristically, prompting a reflective reading experience that compels engagement with other readers, other texts and other political communities. Negotiating between competing pedagogical traditions, she shows how Spenser's epic challenges the more conservative prevailing impulses of humanist pedagogy to espouse a radical didacticism capable of inventing a more active and responsible reader. To this end, Grogan examines a wide variety of Spenser's techniques and sources, including Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy and the powerful visually-couched epistemological paradigms of early modern culture, ekphrasis among them. Importantly, Grogan examines how Spenser's didactic poetics was crucially shaped by readings of the Greek historian Xenophon's Cyropaedia, a text and influence previously overlooked by critics. Grogan concludes by reading the last book of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of Courtesy, as an attempt to reconcile his own didactic sources and poetics with the more recent tastes of his contemporaries for a courtesy theory less concerned with "vertuous and gentle discipline". Returning to the early modern reading experience, Grogan shows the sophisticated intertextual dexterity that goes into reading Spenser, where Spenserian pedagogy lies not simply in the textual body of the poem, but also in the act of reading it.

Tort law is a good thing (whatever it is....).

Covers cases decided [1879?]-1895.