Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture examines the historical, cultural and epistemological underpinnings of lying and deception in early modern England (1500-1750). The book draws on a wide range of English literature from Shakespeare to Swift, and from travel writing to poetry, in order to explore the extent to which plays, poems and narrative texts were sites of negotiation and, at times, of ideological warfare between the moral imperative of truth-telling and the expediency of telling lies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.