You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In 1966, a young Ph.D. fresh from Harvard came down to New Haven to take up a teaching position in the Yale English department, then widely viewed as the best in the world. In Another Life focuses in lucid retrospect on that time, place, and career, and on that moment within it which would define his destiny. Would he succeed, through native wit, hard work, intense ambition, and sheer good luck, in rising through the ranks, pleasing senior colleagues, weathering the shifting winds of critical doctrine and storms of institutional politics, to achieve that most glittering, coveted, and rarely conferred of prizes: tenure at Yale? A campus novel, full of eccentric characters and bizarre twists a...
We are often told that Shakespeare is our contemporary, yet we insist just as often on the Elizabethan quality of his work as it reflects a culture remote from our own. Beginning with this paradox, Howard Felperin explores the question of modernity in literature. He directs his attention toward several older poets and examines Shakespeare in particular to show how literary modernity depends, not on chronological considerations, but on the process of mimesis, or imitation, that art has traditionally claimed for itself. In analyzing Shakespeare's major tragedies, Professor Felperin notes that each carries within it a model of its dramatic prototypes, and therefore requires a conservative respo...
This book examines Shakespeare's response in his late plays to the challenge of making romance stories believable through theatrical representation and the kind of experience the late plays in performance seek to create for their spectators. Taking The Winter's Tale as a case study, the book's central chapters demonstrate how Shakespeare tests and transforms the techniques to create the sweeping, restorative transformations of individuals and communities that are central to both earlier dramatic romances and Shakespeare's own romance experiments. The book's three other chapters address the methodologies for study of spectator's experience through a dramatic text, the history of dramatic romance to 1610, and Shakespeare's further experiments with the staging of romance after The Winter's Tale.-
A collection of critical essays concerning Shakespeare's tragic play of tyranny, revenge, and mental anguish.
The book represents a selection of papers presented at an international symposium in Singapore on the role of theory and practice in the mutually interactive and mutating relations between institutions and cultures. In effect, the papers turn about a single theme: the ways in which power is expressed through those institutions by means of which cultures mediate their requirements. The symposium brought together scholars and academics from a variety of disciplines, including literature, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, comparative literature and comparative religions. In terms of the geography of cultures and the history of institutions, the range of reference to this book of the symp...
William Shakespeare explores political survival as a question of interaction at court in King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Through a discussion of authority as an element that is distinct from power, this book offers a new perspective on the importance of acts of persuasion and the contribution the late tragedies make to Shakespeare’s portrayal of monarchy. It argues that the most productive uses of the material power to judge or reward are those that reinforce royal authority and establish the monarch at the centre of the web of noble relationships. In the late tragedies, rulership is exercised at court. It acquires a nature of its own as the interaction of powerful and potent...
No volume about the spectacles and public performances of early modern England could pretend to treat comprehensively a body of materials so conspicuously vast. Rather than efforts to survey the territory, these essays are best understood in the original sense of the term as “essays”—as trials, attempts, experiments to open alternative ways of understanding that vast corpus of mystery plays, civic pageants, court masques and professional dramas that constitute its subject. The book crosses traditional period lines, including studies of Medieval as well as Renaissance entertainments. Once more, the essays are not organized according to a single critical or historical methodology. They employ an eclectic range of interpretive practices, reflecting the variety of interpretive approaches now current in the field. Contributors include: Tiffany J. Alkan, Robert W. Barrett, Jr., Sarah Beckwith, Tom Bishop, Peter Cockett, Richard K. Emmerson, Peter Holland, Nora Johnson, Richard C. McCoy, Lauren Shohet, and Robert E. Stillman.
This book explores the methodologies and assumptions governing answers to the question 'what did Shakespeare actually write?'
First Published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions asks why Catholicism had such an imaginative hold on Shakespearean drama, even though the on-going Reformation outlawed its practice. Concentrating on dramatic impact, and integrating literary analysis with fresh historical research, Gillian Woods offers a new and engaging answer to this important question.