Reading the Road, from Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways

Explores how cultural conceptions of mobility and the road contribute to identity and culture in early modern Britain This book brings together thirteen essays, by both established and emerging scholars, which examine the most influential meanings of roads in early modern literature and culture. Chapters develop our understanding of the place of the road in the early modern imagination and open various windows on a geography which may by its nature seem passing or trivial but is in fact central to all conceptions of movement. They also shed new light on perhaps the most astonishing achievement of early modern plays: their use of one small, bare space to suggest an amazing variety of physical and potentially metaphysical locations. Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University. Bill Angus is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at Massey University in New Zealand.