As the new academic year is now well and truly in full swing, I thought I'd go back to a topic of some of our recent posts and highlight some more of our new books for students. In particular, I wanted to flag up our rapidly growing Continuum Renaissance Drama series which offers really comprehensive guides to some of the major works of the Early Modern Theatre.
We've had some really high praise for this series (which launched last year) and I really think that the series editors (Andrew Hiscock of the University of Wales Bangor, UK and Lisa Hopkins of Sheffield Hallam University, UK) have come up with an incredibly useful format that really will provide students and scholars of these plays with a concise all-in-one guide to working with these texts. Each book starts with a survey of "the critical back story" examining changing responses to the play in question through the ages, from the time of its original performance through to today and goes on to consider the performance histories as well. From here, the books go on to explore the latest academic debates and discussions on the plays and future directions for scholarship. On top of all that, each book in the series also contains substantial guides on available resources, including the full range of available editions, key works of secondary criticism, online resources and teaching guides.
We've got several titles available in this series now, with the latest covering William Shakespeare's King Lear and I Henry IV, Ben Jonson's Volpone, Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi – I've posted the jacket for the Duchess of Malfi volume above with the links to the free preview, which I would definitely urge you to explore so that you can see the series format in action (and previews are also available for every title in the series: just head to the web page for the one you want and click on the link by the jacket). We've got other plays covered in this series, too, with many more to come so do keep an eye on the series page here.
Happy Reading!
David
Senior Commissioning Editor,
Continuum Literary Studies