You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare’s timeless preeminence as an author. On the other side are the theater historians who view modern claims of Shakespeare’s uniqueness as a distortion of his real professional life. In Shakespeare Only, Knapp draws on an extraordinary array of historical evidence to reconstruct Shakespeare’s authorial identity as Shakespeare and his contemporaries actually understood it. He argues that Shakespeare tried to adapt his own singular talent and ambition to the collaborative enterprise of drama by imagining himself as uniquely embodying the diverse, fractious energies of the popular theater. Rewriting our current histories of authorship as well as Renaissance drama, Shakespeare Only recaptures a sense of the creative force that mass entertainment exerted on Shakespeare and that Shakespeare exerted on mass entertainment.
A brilliant postmodern critique of Renaissance subjectivity, Cultural Aesthetics explores the simultaneous formation and fragmentation of aristocratic "selfhood" in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Patricia Fumerton situates the self within its sumptuous array of "trivial" arts—including the court literatures of chivalric romance, sonnet, and masque and the arts of architecture, miniature painting, stage design, and cuisine. Her integration of historicist and aesthetic perspectives makes this a provocative contribution to the vigorous field of Renaissance cultural studies.
None
Presents an in-depth look at children who have experienced the near-death phenomenon and the heightened abilities that these children exhibit • Provides compelling evidence for the existence of a generation of children who represent the spiritual evolution of the human race • Includes firsthand testimonies of children who have returned from near death The New Children and Near-Death Experiences is the first book to provide--from the view of the child--an in-depth study of children who have experienced the near-death phenomenon and its aftereffects. Atwater notes that the child who returns from a near-death experience is not the same child as before, but is a “remodeled, rewired, reconf...
Most contemporary critics characterize Shakespeare and his tribe of fellow playwrights and players as resolutely secular, interested in religion only as a matter of politics or as a rival source of popular entertainment. Yet as Jeffrey Knapp demonstrates in this radical new reading, a surprising number of writers throughout the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare himself, represented plays as supporting the cause of true religion. To be sure, Renaissance playwrights rarely sermonized in their plays, which seemed preoccupied with sex, violence, and crime. During a time when acting was regarded as a kind of vice, many theater professionals used their apparent godlessness to advantage, c...
A critically sophisticated yet highly readable exploration of Shakespeare's career as a mass entertainer.
What caused England's literary renaissance? One answer has been such unprecedented developments as the European discovery of America. Yet England in the sixteenth century was far from an expanding nation. Not only did the Tudors lose England's sole remaining possessions on the Continent and, thanks to the Reformation, grow spiritually divided from the Continent as well, but every one of their attempts to colonize the New World actually failed. Jeffrey Knapp accounts for this strange combination of literary expansion and national isolation by showing how the English made a virtue of their increasing insularity. Ranging across a wide array of literary and extraliterary sources, Knapp argues th...
From three partners at Google Ventures, this is a unique and easy-to-follow five-day process for solving tough business problems and testing new ideas - proven at more than 100 companies. Sprint is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. 'Sprint offers a transformative formula for testing ideas that works whether you're at a startup or a large organization' - Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup 'The genius of Jake Knapp's Sprint is its step-by-step breakdown of what it takes to solve big problems and do work that matters with speed and urgency' - Beth Comstock, Vice Chair of GE 'Game changer' - ***** Reader review 'Amazing book which yielded great practical results' - ***** Re...
Shakespeare's plays were immensely popular in their own day -- so why do we refuse to think of them as mass entertainment? In Pleasing Everyone, author Jeffrey Knapp opens our eyes to the uncanny resemblance between Renaissance drama and the incontrovertibly mass medium of Golden-Age Hollywood cinema. Through fascinating explorations of such famous plays as Hamlet, The Roaring Girl, and The Alchemist, and such celebrated films as Citizen Kane, The Jazz Singer, and City Lights, Knapp challenges some of our most basic assumptions about the relationship between art and mass audiences. Above all, Knapp encourages us to resist the prejudice that mass entertainment necessarily simplifies and cheapens whatever it touches. As Knapp shows, it was instead the ceaseless pressure to please everyone that helped generate the astonishing richness and complexity of Renaissance drama as well as of Hollywood film.
Contesting the notion of Shakespeare as originator, Clare demonstrates how Shakespeare adapted, imitated and borrowed from the work of others.