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Subjects on the World's Stage
"In this collection eighteen scholars offer various readings on British literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Although the period covered ranges from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the essays are tied together by a common interest in one of three topics: poetic personae, dramatic production, and the influence of social context upon authors or dramatists. Common to these topics is the crucial point of contact between an artist and society that prompts the literary imagination to respond either with the creation of a new character or with the demonstration of change in an old one."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy
The use of Italian culture in the Jacobean theatre was never an isolated gesture. In considering the ideological repercussions of references to Italy in prominent works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Michael J. Redmond argues that early modern intertextuality was a dynamic process of allusion, quotation, and revision. Beyond any individual narrative source, Redmond foregrounds the fundamental role of Italian textual precedents in the staging of domestic anxieties about state crisis, nationalism, and court intrigue. By focusing on the self-conscious, overt rehearsal of existing texts and genres, the book offers a new approach to the intertextual strategies of early modern English political drama. The pervasive circulation of Cinquecento political theorists like Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Guicciardini combined with recurrent English representations of Italy to ensure that the negotiation with previous writing formed an integral part of the dramatic agendas of period plays.
Shakespeare's History Plays
Shakespeare's history plays are central to his dramatic achievement. In recent years they have become more widely studied than ever, stimulating intensely contested interpretations, due to their relevance to central contemporary issues such as English, national identities and gender roles. Interpretations of the history plays have been transformed since the 1980s by new theoretically-informed critical approaches. Movements such as New Historicism and cultural materialism, as well as psychoanalytical and post-colonial approaches, have swept away the humanist consensus of the mid-twentieth century with its largely conservative view of the plays. The last decade has seen an emergence of feminist and gender-based readings of plays which were once thought overwhelmingly masculine in their concerns. This book provides an up-to-date critical anthology representing the best work from each of the modern theoretical perspectives. The introduction outlines the changing debate in an area which is now one of the liveliest in Shakespearean criticism.
Drama as Rhetoric/rhetoric as Drama
Part 1. Rhetorical dimensions of drama: the classical context: The enthymeme and the invention of troping in Greek drama / August W. Staub. Theorizing the spectacle: a rhetorical analysis of tragic recognition / Tom Heeney. Exile and the kingdom: reason as nightmare in the Aeschylean vision / John Arthos -- Part 2. The rhetorical in renaissance and neoclassical drama: Epideictic pastoral: rhetorical tensions in the staging of Torquato Tasso's Aminta / Maria Galli Stampino. Shakespeare's rhetoric versus the ideology of Ian McKellen's Richard III / George L. Geckle. And now for application: Venice preserv'd and the rhetoric of textual application / Odai Johnson -- Part 3. War, politics, and the drama: Federalist and republican theatre in the 1790s / Steve Wilmer. Uncle Tom's Cabin and the rhetoric of gradualism / Charles Wilbanks. Dario Fo's angry farce / Stanley Vincent Longman -- Part 4. Contemporary culture: Stain upon the silence: Samuel Beckett's deconstructive inventions / Leigh Anne Howard. Still angry after all these years: performing the language of HIV and the marked body in The normal heart and The destiny of me / Peter Michael Pober.
Tamburlaine
One of the smash hits of the late 1580s and 90s, Tamburlaine established blank verse as the poetic line of English Renaissance drama, Edward Alleyn as the first English star actor and Marlowe as one of the foremost playwrights of his time. The rise and fall of a Scythian peasant-warrior who conquers the Middle East and is struck down by illness after burning the books of the Koran is presented in two parts crammed with theatrical splendour and equally spectacular cruelty. Marlowe's original audiences were delighted with the blasphemous and ruthlessly ambitious hero; the introduction to this edition discusses the problems that such a character poses for modern audiences and highlights the undercurrents of the play that lead towards a more ironic interpretation.
The Malcontent
"This Malevole is one of the most prodigious affections that ever conversed with nature: a man, or rather a monster, more discontent than Lucifer." The Malcontent is a striking example of the new satiric tone and moral seriousness in English comedy of the early 1600s. The play's vision of a fallen humanity driven by lust and ambition is created partly by its depiction of Machiavellian intrigue in the court of Genoa, and partly by the disaffected Malevole, the malcontent of the title, who is actually the deposed Duke Altofronto in disguise. Marston's tragi-comedy is full of reversals, surprises and moral transformations and offers a thin disguise for the Jacobean court and its vices. This new student edition contains a lengthy new Introduction with background on the author, date and sources, theme, critical interpretation and stage history.
Faultlines
"A coherent and compelling politics of reading. . . . Sinfield is intervening in a cultural debate not merely about the meaning of the texts he considers but about the very nature of literary study itself. Though his reading of central Renaissance texts such as Sidney's Defence, Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Shakespeare's Othello, and Donne's lyrics are wonderfully agile and alert, the true stakes of his argument are the protocols of the institutions in which we read and study literature."—David Scott Kastan, author of Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time "This is an important and urgently needed contribution to the field of culture criticism both in the U. K. and in the U.S.A. Until fairly recently, culture criticism on both sides of the Atlantic has been dominated by the cultural apparatus of the New Right. Sinfield's energetic and courageous intervention helps to break the silence of dissident communities and it is therefore a welcome rejoinder to the neo-conservative chorus."—Michael D. Bristol, author of Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare
The Formal Center in Literature
An investigation of the phenomenon of the framed formal center in literature of the last 180 years, illuminating both the works and correspondences among works of different genres, periods, and nations.
The Aesthetics of Dedalus and Bloom
This study explores James Joyce's struggle to come to terms with the aesthetic outlooks current at the beginning of the century by examining his portrayal of their dangers and attractions in his two most fully realized characters, Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.
