You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This study clarifies how Gryphius worked with a variety of source materials to artistically construct his four historical tragedies. Three conventional dramatic forms and techniques (choruses, poeticized monologues or Prunkreden, and visionary phenomena) are examined to determine how he poetically heightened his source material to proclaim vanitas mundi and the corollary message of gloria coeli. His creative use of these traditional conventions established the procedural mode of drama construction followed in Germany until the end of his century.
Original and thought-provoking, this collection sheds new light on an important yet understudied feature of seventeenth-century England's political and cultural landscape: exile. Through an essentially literary lens, exile is examined both as physical departure from England-to France, Germany, the Low Countries and America-and as inner, mental withdrawal. In the process, a strikingly wide variety of contemporary sources comes under scrutiny, including letters, diaries, plays, treatises, translations and poetry. The extent to which the richness and disparateness of these modes of writing militates against or constructs a recognisable 'rhetoric' of exile is one of the book's overriding themes....
Both historically and theoretically this book deals the work and the life of Joost van den Vondel, the most famous and controversial Dutch playwright in the Dutch Republic. Over twenty-five of his tragedies are analyzed, offering an overview of different theoretical approaches. Historically, Vondel is situated in his own times and in the present.
To metaphorize the world as a theatre has been a common procedure since antiquity, but the use of this trope became particularly prominent and pregnant in early modern times, especially in England. Old and new applications of the “theatrum mundi” topos pervaded discourses, often allegorizing the deceitfulness and impermanence of this world as well as the futility of earthly strife. It was frequently woven into arguments against worldly amusements such as the stage: Commercial theatre was declared an undesirable competitor of God’s well-ordered world drama. Early modern dramatists often reacted to this development by appropriating the metaphor, and in an ingenious twist, some playwrights even appropriated its anti-theatrical impetus: Early modern theatre seemed to discover a denial of its own theatricality at its very core. Drama was found to succeed best when it staged itself as a great unmasking. To investigate the reasons and effects of these developments, the anthology examines the metaphorical uses of theatre in plays, pamphlets, epics, treatises, legal proclamations and other sources.
None
This Handbook offers a comprehensive introduction and thirty-seven new essays by an international team of literary critics and historians on the writings generated by the tumultuous events of mid-seventeenth-century England. Unprecedented events-civil war, regicide, the abolition of monarchy, proscription of episcopacy, constitutional experiment, and finally the return of monarchy-led to an unprecedented outpouring of texts, including new and transformed literary genres and techniques. The Handbook provides up-to-date scholarship on current issues as well as historical information, textual analysis, and bibliographical tools to help readers understand and appreciate the bold and indeed revol...