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Tragedy
Tragedy is one of the oldest and most resilient forms of narrative. Considering texts from ancient Greece to the present day, this comprehensive introduction shows how tragedy has been re-imagined and redefined throughout Western cultural history. Tragedy offers a concise history of tragedy tracing its evolution through key plays, prose, poetry and philosophical dimensions. John Drakakis examines a wealth of popular plays, including works from the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Sarah Kane and Tom Stoppard. He also considers the rewriting and appropriating of ancient drama though a wide range of authors, such as Chaucer, George Eliot, Ted Hughes and Colm Tóibín. Drakakis also demystifies complex philosophical interpretations of tragedy, including those of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Benjamin. This accessible resource is an invaluable guide for anyone studying tragedy in literature or theatre studies.
Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy
A unique look at the social and religious foundations of the tragic genre. Liebler asks whether it is possible to regard tragic heroes such as Lear and Coriolanus as `sacrificial victims of the prevailing social order'.
The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama
This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of "victim feminism," the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies - Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster's Duchess and White Devil, among others - are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.
Early Modern Prose Fiction
Emphasizing the significance of early modern prose fiction as a hybrid genre that absorbed cultural, ideological and historical strands of the age, this fascinating study brings together an outstanding cast of critics including: Sheila T. Cavanaugh, Stephen Guy-Bray, Mary Ellen Lamb, Joan Pong Linton, Steve Mentz, Constance C. Relihan, Goran V. Stanivukovic with an afterword from Arthur Kinney. Each of the essays in this collection considers the reciprocal relation of early modern prose fiction to class distinctions, examining factors such as: the impact of prose fiction on the social, political and economic fabric of early modern England the way in which a growing emphasis on literacy allow...
The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating
Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death.In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine.It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture.
The Politics of Carnival
Medieval festivals such as carnival and misrule, were occasions which created a temporary and dynamic upside-down world. This text shows these occasions were highly diverse, and discusses how they were able to negotiate a range of meanings and values.
Treason by Words
Under the Tudor monarchy, English law expanded to include the category of "treason by words." Rebecca Lemon investigates this remarkable phrase both as a legal charge and as a cultural event. English citizens, she shows, expressed competing notions of treason in opposition to the growing absolutism of the monarchy. Lemon explores the complex participation of texts by John Donne, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare in the legal and political controversies marking the Earl of Essex's 1601 rebellion and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. Lemon suggests that the articulation of diverse ideas about treason within literary and polemical texts produced increasingly fractured conceptions of the crime of treason itself. Further, literary texts, in representing issues familiar from political polemic, helped to foster more free, less ideologically rigid, responses to the crisis of treason. As a result, such works of imagination bolstered an emerging discourse on subjects' rights. Treason by Words offers an original theory of the role of dissent and rebellion during a period of burgeoning sovereign power.
Holy Estates
This volume examines analogies between marital and political ideology in early modern culture, analyzing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century marriage tracts and the appropriation of their rhetoric by Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and John Webster. Just as the marriage tracts draw explicitly on political metaphors to prescribe marital decorum, early modern political treatises adopt the language of the marriage tracts, using their construction of the family unit as a model for exercising power. on important, often subversive, meanings when they are redeployed in prose fiction and drama. The woman's place within these marital and political discourses and how she fares within early modern domestic and political hierarchies are the book's primary concerns. Included here are detailed discussions of Wroth's Urania, Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Othello, and The Tempest, Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Sid Ray is Associate Professor of English at Pace University in New York.
Shakespeare's Big Men
Shakespeare’s Big Men examines five Shakespearean tragedies – Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Coriolanus – through the lens of generative anthropology and the insights of its founder, Eric Gans. Generative anthropology’s theory of the origins of human society explains the social function of tragedy: to defer our resentment against the “big men” who dominate society by letting us first identify with the tragic protagonist and his resentment, then allowing us to repudiate the protagonist’s resentful rage and achieve theatrical catharsis. Drawing on this hypothesis, Richard van Oort offers inspired readings of Shakespeare’s plays and their representations of desire, resentment, guilt, and evil. His analysis revives the universal spirit in Shakespearean criticism, illustrating how the plays can serve as a way to understand the ethical dilemma of resentment and discover within ourselves the nature of the human experience.
The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England
In The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England, Elizabeth Rivlin explores the ways in which servant-master relationships reshaped literature. The early modern servant is enjoined to obey his or her master out of dutiful love, but the servant's duty actually amounts to standing in for the master, a move that opens the possibility of becoming master. Rivlin shows that service is fundamentally a representational practice, in which the servant who acts for a master merges with the servant who acts as a master. Rivlin argues that in the early modern period, servants found new positions as subjects and authors found new forms of literature. Representations of servants and masters became a site of contact between pressing material concerns and evolving aesthetic ones. Offering readings of dramas by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Thomas Dekker and prose fictions by Thomas Deloney and Thomas Nashe, Rivlin suggests that these authors discovered their own exciting and unstable projects in the servants they created.
