Games and War in Early Modern English Literature (eBook)

Holly Faith Nelson is Professor, Chair and Graduate Stream Coordinator of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Trinity Western University and the Co-Director of the Gender Studies Institute. She has published widely in the literature of the seventeenth and long eighteenth centuries. She has authored or co-authored approximately 30 articles (in addition to many brief entries, notes, and book reviews) and has co-edited eight books, including Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe (AMS), French Women Authors: The Significance of the Spiritual, 1400-2000 (U of Delaware P), Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (Ashgate), Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory (Wilfrid Laurier UP), James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author (Ashgate), Eikon Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes (Broadview), Of Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in Honor of Alan Rudrum (U of Delaware P, 2004), and the Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose (Broadview). Jim Daems is an Assistant Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University College of the North. He has published articles and books on a range of early modern and long-eighteenth century topics and authors. His two book-length studies are entitled Seventeenth Century Literature and Culture (Continuum) and 'A Warr So Desperate': John Milton and Some Contemporaries on The Irish Rebellion (Cambridge Scholars). He also edited, with Holly Faith Nelson, Eikon Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes (Broadview).

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This pioneering collection of nine original essays carves out a new conceptual path in the field by theorizing the ways in which the language of games and warfare inform and illuminate each other in the early modern cultural imagination. They consider how warfare and games are mapped onto each other in aesthetically and ideologically significant ways in the plays, poetry, or prose of William Shakespeare, Thomas Morton, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Jonathan Swift, among others. Contributors interpret the terms 'war games' or 'games of war' broadly, freeing them to uncover the more complex and abstract interplay of war and games in the early modern mind, taking readers from the cockpits and clowns of Shakespearean drama, through the intriguing manuals of cryptographers and the ingenious literary war games of Restoration women authors, to the witty but rancorous paper wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.