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Fresh explorations of the tragicomic drama, setting the familiar plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries alongside Irish and European drama. Tragicomedy is one of the most important dramatic genres in Renaissance literature, and the essays collected here offer stimulating new perspectives and insights, as well as providing broad introductions to arguably lesser-known European texts. Alongside the chapters on Classical, Italian, Spanish, and French material, there are striking and fresh approaches to Shakespeare and his contemporaries -- to the origins of mixed genre in English, to the development of Shakespearean and Fletcherian drama, to periodization in Shakespeare's career, to the language of tragicomedy, and to the theological structure of genre. The collection concludes with two essays on Irish theatre and its interactions with the London stage, further evidence of the persistent and changing energy of tragicomedy in the period. Contributors: SARAH DEWAR-WATSON, MATTHEW TREHERNE, ROBERT HENKE, GERAINT EVANS, NICHOLAS HAMMOND, ROSKING, SUZANNE GOSSETT, GORDAN MCMULLAN, MICHAEL WINMORE, JONATHAN HOPE, MICHAEL NEILL, LUCY MUNRO, DEANA RANKIN
Ever since Timon of Athens shunned his fellow-countrymen and went to live out in the wilderness, the misanthrope has proved to be a fascinating but troubling figure for writers and thinkers. This comparative study brings together a range of material from various genres, periods, and countries to explore the developing status of misanthropy in the European literary and intellectual imagination from the late Renaissance to the dawn of Romanticism. During this period, the term 'misanthropy' shifts from being an obscure Greek calque to being almost banal in its ubiquity. In order to trace the contours of the period's evolving attitudes towards misanthropy, this study takes a combined thematic an...
What does it mean to perform Shakespeare in languages other than English and how do audiences respond?
The Dark Bible explores early modern England's interactions with difficult aspects of the Bible. For the early modern reader, although the Bible was understood to be perfect, sufficient, and transcendent (indeed, the Protestant Reformation required it), it was not always experienced as such.While traditional interpretive precepts, such as the claim that all dark passages could be read in the light of clear ones, were frequently recited by early modern commentators, their actual encounters with the darkness of the Bible suggest that writers, commentators, and translators were oftendeeply uncomfortable with the disjunction between what the Bible should be, and what it actually was.The Dark Bib...
Draws from a wide range of disciplines to bring together 36 leading scholars writing about 400 years of modern Irish history
A novel study of the political, religious, and cultural worlds of the principal Irish figures at the exiled court of Charles II
Featuring new essays by international literary scholars, the two-volume Companion to Irish Literature encompasses the full breadth of Ireland's literary tradition from the Middle Ages to the present day. Covers an unprecedented historical range of Irish literature Arranged in two volumes covering Irish literature from the medieval period to 1900, and its development through the twentieth century to the present day Presents a re-visioning of twentieth-century Irish literature and a collection of the most up-to-date scholarship in the field as a whole Includes a substantial number of women writers from the eighteenth century to the present day Includes essays on leading contemporary authors, including Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Roddy Doyle, and Emma Donoghue Introduces readers to the wide range of current approaches to studying Irish literature
This book elucidates the ways the pained and suffering body has been registered and mobilized in specifically Irish contexts across more than four hundred years of literature and culture. There is no singular approach to what pain means: the material addressed in this collection covers diverse cultural forms, from reports of battles and executions to stage and screen representations of sexual violence, produced in response to different historical circumstances in terms that confirm our understanding of how pain – whether endured or inflicted, witnessed or remediated – is culturally coded. Pain is as open to ongoing redefinition as the Ireland that features in all of the essays gathered here. This collection offers new paradigms for understanding Ireland’s literary and cultural history.
This collection begins on the premise that, until recently, religion has been particularly influential in Ireland in forming a sense of identity, and in creating certain versions of reality. History has also been a key component in that process, and the historical evolution of Christianity has been appropriated by the main religious denominations – Catholic, Church of Ireland, and Presbyterian – with a view to reinforcing their own identities. This book explores the ways in which this occurred; the writing of religious history, and some of the manifestations of that process, forms key parts of the collection. Also included are chapters discussing current and recent attempts to examine the legacy of collective religious memory - notably in Northern Ireland - based on projects designed to encourage reflection about the religious past among both adults and school-children. Readers will find this collection particularly timely in view of the current ‘decade of commemorations’.
"Michael Pierse is Lecturer in Irish literature at Queen's University Belfast. His research mainly explores the writing and cultural production of Irish working-class life. Over recent years this work has expanded into new multidisciplinary themes and international contexts, including the study of festivals, digital methodologies in public humanities and theatre-as-research practices. Michael has contributed to a range of national and international publications, is the author of Writing Ireland's Working Class: Dublin after O'Casey (2011), and has been awarded several Arts and Humanities Research Council awards and the Vice Chancellor's Award at Queen's"--