Books by Liza Blake
Lucretius and Modernity is an edited collection that brings together essays by distinguished scho... more Lucretius and Modernity is an edited collection that brings together essays by distinguished scholars in the disciplines of philosophy, classics, literary studies, and the history of science to examine the relationship between the roman poet Lucretius—author of the poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)—and modernity. The volume understands “modernity” to encompass a number of topics when paired with Lucretius: Lucretius’s relation to the thought of his time and to the literary and philosophical traditions on which he drew; Lucretius’s role in inaugurating the historical period of European modernity (through his Humanist readers and in the work of writers from Machiavelli to Montaigne, Descartes, and Spinoza, among many others); and the influence of Lucretius’s thought on contemporary approaches to poetry, philosophy, and literary studies (his influence on contemporary materialist thought, both philosophical and scientific; on theology; on literary criticism).
In the late sixteenth century, Arthur Golding, a prolific Tudor translator perhaps best known for... more In the late sixteenth century, Arthur Golding, a prolific Tudor translator perhaps best known for his 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated a collection of fables that he entitled A Morall Fabletalke. This manuscript of Golding’s translation was never printed and is little known. Our volume is a scholarly edition of the manuscript, with additional edited selections from four other English Renaissance fable translations that, collectively, illustrate the importance of fable translations in literary, pedagogical, and political contexts in Renaissance England. By situating Golding’s text alongside William Caxton’s early printed translation from French (1485), Richard Smith’s English version of Robert Henryson’s Middle-Scots Moral Fabillis (1577), John Brinsley’s grammar school translation (1617, 1624), and the politicized fables that John Ogilby translated during the English Civil War (1651–68), we show the wide-ranging forms and functions of the fable during the English Renaissance.
Special Issue of Journal by Liza Blake
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, 2021
Website by Liza Blake
The Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography is a resource designed to help researchers find rele... more The Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography is a resource designed to help researchers find relevant writing on a variety of topics in asexuality studies and aromanticism studies. The site includes, at its core, a searching bibliography that aggregates, categorizes, and tags both academic and community writing on asexual and aromantic theory, allowing people interested in the study of these two critical queer theories to more easily find writing relevant to their interests. The site also includes a "Research and Teaching Collections" section that includes short blog posts offering recommended introductions to sub-fields in asexuality studies and aromanticism studies.
In the mid-seventeenth century, while in exile as a royalist during the English Civil War, Margar... more In the mid-seventeenth century, while in exile as a royalist during the English Civil War, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, wrote a book of poems that she entitled Poems and Fancies (along with a slightly later companion volume called Philosophical Fancies). Poems and Fancies, printed in London in 1653 while she was back in England advocating for her exiled husband, covered topics as various as the atomic makeup of the world; ethics and empathy with the non-human world; the cognitive possibilities of poetic and allegorical modes; the importance of making mental room for the supernatural; and the ravages of war on a nation and on individual minds. A second, much-revised edition was printed in 1664, and this revised edition was reprinted again in 1668, five years before her death. This digital critical edition, produced by Liza Blake with thirteen undergraduate editorial collaborators, makes this remarkable collection of poems freely available online, fully collated, edited, and modernized.
Papers by Liza Blake
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, 2021
This essay argues that we can enrich our understandings of form and formalisms if we return to ea... more This essay argues that we can enrich our understandings of form and formalisms if we return to early modernity’s rich variety of physics. The central object of study is the relationship between physics and poetics in Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Although this translation is commonly cast today as the work of an unsophisticated or moralizing Puritan, Golding claimed that Ovid’s work offered a “dark philosophy of turnèd shapes,” a natural philosophy of substance and change. As Golding translates, he systematically reshapes the physics he finds in Ovid, converting Ovid into a crypto-Neo-Platonist and, in the process, offering a new physics and poetics revolving around the concept of shape—a concept similar to but not identical with our modern understanding of form. In Golding’s translation, poetics becomes not just a way of communicating or elaborating natural philosophy, but the mechanism for exploring the nature of the universe. [L.B.]
The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals, 2020
Gathering Force: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1557-1623, 2018
This essay begins by arguing that discussions of interdisciplinarity between literature and scien... more This essay begins by arguing that discussions of interdisciplinarity between literature and science have been overly preoccupied by problems of counting: the issue is not that there are or are not Two Cultures, but that we start from defining and delimiting specific numbers of disciplines. It then suggests that that the works of Margaret Cavendish, a philosopher, scientist, playwright, and poet from the mid-seventeenth century, offer two concepts that may help us escape the traps of counting. With her concepts of grounds, she insists on fiction or literature as a mode of rationality parallel to and comparable to reason or science. She also attempts to re-orient contemporary debates about the possible grounds of scientific knowledge, insisting that Nature herself, in all of her variety, must serve as the ground or basis of nature. The essay then shows that the concept of the creature, as Cavendish develops it in her late works, offers a generative model for thinking about combination, cooperation, and association, and might therefore be a useful concept for helping us think beyond the numbering of disciplines.
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Books by Liza Blake
Special Issue of Journal by Liza Blake
Website by Liza Blake
Papers by Liza Blake