This Distracted Globe

Worldmaking takes many forms in early modern literature and thus challenges any single interpretive approach. The essays in this collection investigate the material stuff of the world in Spenser, Cary, and Marlowe; the sociable bonds of authorship, sexuality, and sovereignty in Shakespeare and others; and the universal status of spirit, gender, and empire in the worlds of Vaughan, Donne, and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rajasthani princess. Together, these essays
make the case that to address what it takes to make a world in the early modern period requires the kinds of thinking exemplified by theory.

Marcie Frank is Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. She is currently completing a book-length study of the two-way traffic between the novel and the stage in 18th- century England under the working title, "The Novel and the Repertory 1680-1814." Criticism 55.4, a special issue on melodrama that she edited, appeared in Fall 2013. "Frances Burney's Theatricality" will appear in ELH 82.2, and "Melodrama and the Politics of Literary Form in Elizabeth Inchbald" will soon be published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

Jonathan Goldberg is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Department of English, and Director of Studies in Sexualities at Emory University. He is the author and editor of numerous books including The Seeds of Things (Fordham, 2009), Tempest in the Caribbean (Minnesota, 2004), Queering the Renaissance (Duke, 1993), and Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, 1992; Fordham, 2010).

Karen Newman is Owen Walker '33 Professor of Humanities, and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Brown University. Her most recent books include Essaying Shakespeare and Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris.