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The Drama of Complaint: Ethical Provocations in Shakespeare's Tragedy is the first book-length study of complaint in Shakespearean drama. Emily Shortslef makes two main arguments. One is that poetic forms of complaint--expressions of discontent and unhappiness--operate in and across the period's literary and nonliterary discourses as sites of thought about human flourishing, the subject of ethical inquiry. The other is that Shakespearean configurations of these ubiquitous forms in theatrical scenes of complaint model new ways of thinking about ethical subjectivity, or ways of desiring, acting, and living consonant with notions of the good life. The Drama of Complaint develops these interlock...
The Drama of Complaint: Ethical Provocations in Shakespeare's Tragedy is the first book-length study of complaint in Shakespearean drama. Emily Shortslef makes two main arguments. One is that poetic forms of complaint—expressions of discontent and unhappiness—operate in and across the period's literary and nonliterary discourses as sites of thought about human flourishing, the subject of ethical inquiry. The other is that Shakespearean configurations of these ubiquitous forms in theatrical scenes of complaint model new ways of thinking about ethical subjectivity, or ways of desiring, acting, and living consonant with notions of the good life. The Drama of Complaint develops these interlo...
The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama examines how early modern plays celebrated the power of different styles of talk to create dynamic forms of public address. Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, London expanded into an uncomfortably public city where everyone was a stranger to everyone else. The relentless anonymity of urban life spurred dreams of its opposite: of being a somebody rather than a nobody, of being the object of public attention rather than its subject. Drama gave life to this fantasy. Presented by strangers and to strangers, early modern plays codified different styles of talk as different forms of public sociability. Then, as now, to speak of style was to speak of a fantasy of public address. Offering fresh insight for scholars of literature and drama, Matthew Hunter reveals how this fantasy – which still holds us in its thrall – played out on the early modern stage.
This volume looks at Marx and Freud, who, though not 'Shakespeareans' in the usual academic or theatrical sense, were both deeply informed by Shakespeare's writings, and have both had enormous influence on the understanding and reception of Shakespeare. The first section of this volume consists of a discussion of Marx's use of Shakespeare by Crystal Bartolovich followed by an essay on Shakespeareans' recent uses of Marx by Jean E. Howard. The volume's second half, written by David Hillman, juxtaposes a discussion of Freud's use of Shakespeare with a meditation on Shakespeare's 'use' of Freud. Each part can be read fruitfully independently of the others, but the sum is greater than the parts, offering an engagement with two of the most influential thinkers in Western modernity and their interchanges with, arguably, the most influential figure of early modernity: Shakespeare.
Many have wondered why the works of Shakespeare and other early modern writers are so filled with violence, with murder and mayhem. This work explains how and why, putting the literature of the European Renaissance in the context of the history of violence. Personal violence was on the decline in Europe beginning in the fifteenth century, but warfare became much deadlier and the stakes of war became much higher as the new nation-states vied for hegemony and the New World became a target of a shattering invasion. There are times when Renaissance writers seem to celebrate violence, but more commonly they anatomized it and were inclined to focus on victims as well as warriors on the horrors of violence as well as the need for force to protect national security and justice. In Renaissance writing, violence has lost its innocence.
At a time when the standing and status of corporations is much in the news, this study of the early modern history of the concept of the corporation is particularly timely. Henry S. Turner provides a new account of early modern political institutions and political concepts by turning to the history of the corporation as a type of notional person and as a way of organizing collective life. Universities, guilds, towns and cities, religious confraternities, joint-stock companies: all were legal corporations, and all enjoyed rights and freedoms that sometimes exceeded the authority of the State. Drawing on the resources of economic and colonial history, literary criticism, law, political philoso...
"In the field of adaptation studies today, the idea of reading an adapted text as "faithful" or "unfaithful" to its original source strikes many scholars as too simplistic, too conservative, and too moralizing. In Uncanny Fidelity: Recognizing Shakespeare in Twenty-First Century Film and Television, James Newlin broadens the scope of fidelity beyond its familiar concerns of plot and language. Drawing upon Sigmund Freud's model of the Uncanny-the sudden sensation of peculiar, discomforting familiarity-this book focuses on films and series that do not selfidentify as adaptations of Shakespeare, but which invoke lost, even troubling aspects of the original. In doing so, Newlin demonstrates how ...
This collection examines early modern women’s contribution to the culturally central mode of complaint. Complaint has largely been understood as male-authored, yet, as this collection shows, early modern women used complaint across a surprising variety of forms from the early-Tudor period to the late-seventeenth century. They were some of the mode’s first writers, most influential patrons, and most innovative contributors. Together, these new essays illuminate early modern women’s participation in one of the most powerful rhetorical modes in the English Renaissance, one which gave voice to political, religious and erotic protest and loss across a diverse range of texts. This volume int...
This book presents close-readings of seven post-millennial comedic films: Up in the Air, Tropic Thunder, JCVD, Winnebago Man, The Trotsky, Be Kind Rewind, and Hamlet 2. It is a sequel to Stanley Cavell’s 1981 landmark study of the comedic genre, Pursuits of Happiness, where he examines seven comedies of Hollywood’s “Golden Age.” Khan puts forward the idea that comedies, once centred on the conventional “happy ending,” are no longer interested in detailing the steps to any ending we might call happy. Instead, the agenda of most culturally serious comedies today is to “spoof,” to make all that is fair foul. The seven films presented here risk a type of cultural nihilism—spoofing for the sake of spoofing and nothing else, indicative not of film’s promise but its failure. By equating the failure of film with the failed national politics of Canada (or the failed politics of nationalism and community more generally), this study shows that comedy has less to do with happiness and more to do with the grotesque. The films analysed represent hyper-realized forms of comic irony and move towards what theatre knows as tragedy, or a tragic vision.
This book explores sixteenth-century humanism as an origin for the idea of literature as good, even great, books. It argues that humanists located the value of books not only in the goodness of their writing-their eloquence—but also in their capacity to shape readers in good and bad behavior, thoughts, and feelings, in other words, in their morality. To approach humanism in this way, by attending to its moral interests, is to provide a new perspective on periodization, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance / early modern. That is, humanists did not so much rupture with medieval ideas about literature or with medieval models as they adapted and altered them, offering a new ...