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This collection examines some of the people, places, and plays at the edge of early modern English drama. Recent scholarship has begun to think more critically about the edge, particularly in relation to the canon and canonicity. This book demonstrates that the people and concepts long seen as on the edge of early modern English drama made vital contributions both within the fictive worlds of early modern plays, and without, in the real worlds of playmakers, theaters, and audiences. The book engages with topics such as child actors, alterity, sexuality, foreignness, and locality to acknowledge and extend the rich sense of playmaking and all its ancillary activities that have emerged over the last decade. The essays by a global team of scholars bring to life people and practices that flourished on the edge, manifesting their importance to both early modern audiences, and to current readers and performers.
A Critical Companion to Julie Taymor is the most updated and holistic volume on the director currently published. Situating Taymor’s work within the intersections of story and spectacle, contributors to this collection examine issues of creativity, gender, sexuality, and adaptation by focusing on themes from Taymor’s oeuvre including martyrdom, musicality, fidelity, postmodern representations, feminism and queerness, identity, desire, trauma, revenge, hybridity, and obscenity. The result reveals Julie Taymor to be a globally-influenced American director who exhibits and exemplifies the authentic artistry of ingenious storytelling and deserves scholarly attention. This work will be of particular interest to scholars of film, philosophy, popular culture, gender, feminisms, and queer identities.
This book examines the emergence of the queen consort in medieval England, beginning with the pre-Conquest era and ending with death of Margaret of France, second wife of Edward I, in 1307. Though many of the figures in this volumes are well known, such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Eleanor of Castille, the chapters here are unique in the equal consideration given to the tenures of the lesser known consorts, including: Adeliza of Louvain, second wife of Henry I; Margaret of France, wife of Henry the Young King; and even Isabella of Gloucester, the first wife of King John. These innovative and thematic biographies highlight the evolution of the office of the queen and the visible roles that consorts played, which were integral to the creation of the identity of early English monarchy. This volume and its companions reveal the changing nature of English consortship from the Norman Conquest to today.
None a Stranger There offers a collection of wide-ranging essays that explore the creation and understanding of English identity through the lens of early modern drama. Drawing together a rich array of disciplines--literary criticism, theater history, linguistics, book history, and performance studies--the scholars in this collection illuminate how diverse or competing notions of "Englishness" can be seen and studied in early modern English plays. They are an especially fertile site of study because they enabled collective performances in a variety of settings, such as public theaters, royal courts, and streets. They engaged with live audiences from a cross section of society. The contributo...
Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction offers an overview of the ways in which the past is brought back to the surface and influences the present in British detective fiction written between 1920 and 2020. Exploring a range of authors including Agatha Christie, Patricia Wentworth, Val McDermid, Sarah Caudwell, Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett, Jonathan Stroud and Ben Aaronovitch, Lisa Hopkins argues that both the literal and literary disinterment of the past use elements of the national past to interrogate the present. As such, in the texts discussed, uncovering the truth about an individual crime is also typically an uncovering of a more general connection between the present and the past. Whether detective novels explore murders on archaeological digs, hauntings, cold crimes or killings at Christmas, Hopkins explores the underlying message that you cannot understand the present unless you understand the past.
Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures analyzes folk horror by looking at its recent popularity in novels and films such as The Ritual (2011), The Witch (2015), and Candyman (2021). Countering traditional views of the genre as depictions of the monstrous, rural, and pagan past trying to consume the present, the contributors to this collection posit folk horror as being able to uniquely capture the anxieties of the twenty-first century, caused by an ongoing pandemic and the divisive populist politics that have arisen around it. Further, this book shows how, through its increasing intersections with other genres such as science fiction, the weird, and eco-criticism as seen in films and texts like The Zero Theorum (2013), The Witcher (2007–2021), and Annihilation (2018) as well as through its engagement with topics around climate change, racism, and identity politics, folk horror can point to other ways of being in the world and visions of possible futures.
The first decade of the new century has certainly been a busy one for diversity in Shakespearean performance and interpretation, yielding, for example, global, virtual, digital, interactive, televisual, and cinematic Shakespeares. In Locating Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century, Gabrielle Malcolm and Kelli Marshall assess this active world of Shakespeare adaptation and commercialization as they consider both novel and traditional forms: from experimental presentations (in-person and online) and literal rewritings of the plays/playwright to televised and filmic Shakespeares. More specifically, contributors in Locating Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century examine the BBC’s ShakespeaRE...
This volume explores the multiple connections between contemporary British theatre and the medieval and early modern periods. Involving both French and British scholars, as well as playwrights, adapters and stage directors, its scope is political, as it assesses the power of adaptations and history plays to offer a new perspective not only on the past and present, but also on the future. Along the way, burning contemporary social and political issues are explored, such as the place and role of women and ethnic minorities in today’s post-Brexit Britain. The volume builds into a dialogue between the ghosts of the past and their contemporary spectators. Starting with a focus on contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, then concentrating on contemporary history plays set in the distant past, and ending with the contributions of famous playwrights sharing their experience, the book will be of interest to practitioners, as well as students and researchers in drama and performance studies.
The Victorians elevated the home and heteronormative family life to an almost secular religion. Yet alongside the middle-class domestic ideal were other families, many of which existed in the literature of the time. Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature is chiefly concerned with these atypical or "queer" families. This collection serves as a corrective against limited definitions of family and is a timely addition to Victorian studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection opens up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. Broad in scope, subjects range from Count Fosco and his animal "children" in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, to male kinship within and across Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and the nexus between disability and loving relationships in the fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge. Queer Victorian Families is a wide-ranging and theoretically adventurous exposé of the curious relations in the literary family tree.
From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past is a collection of essays that both analyses the historical and cultural medieval and early modern past, and engages with the medievalism and early-modernism—a new term introduced in this collection—present in contemporary popular culture. By focusing on often overlooked uses of the past in contemporary culture—such as the allusions to John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1623) in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and the impact of intertextual references and internet fandom on the BBC’s The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses—the contributors illustrate how cinematic, televisual, artistic, and literary depictions of the historical and cultural past not only re-purpose the past in varying ways, but also build on a history of adaptations that audiences have come to know and expect. From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past analyses the way that the medieval and early modern periods are used in modern adaptations, and how these adaptations both reflect contemporary concerns, and engage with a history of intertextuality and intervisuality.