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"Many fictional works have real, historical authors as characters. Great national literary icons like Virgil and Shakespeare have been fictionalized in novels, plays, poems, movies, and operas. This fashion might seem typically postmodern, the reverse side of the contention that the Author is Dead; but this collection of essays shows that the representation of historical authors as characters can boast of a considerable history, and may well constitute a genre in its own right. This volume brings together a collection of articles on appropriations of historical authors, written by experts in a wide range of major Western literatures."--BOOK JACKET.
In this book, Franssen investigates the use of Shakespeare as a fictional character in different literary genres, periods and cultures.
This book traces the impact of the English Civil Wars and the resulting support for the royalist cause in the Dutch Republic.
"This is the first book-length study devoted to modern German "author-as-character" fiction set in the Age of Goethe. It shows for the first time in a sustained manner the powerful hold the Goethezeit continues to exercise on the imagination of many of Germany's leading writers. This inner-German dialogue across the ages provides an important corrective to the dominant critical view that contemporary German-language literature is composed primarily under the sign of both globalization and the influence of mass American culture." -- Book cover.
Why do Shakespeare and the English Bible seem to have an inherent relationship with each other? How have these two monumental traditions in the history of the book functioned as mutually reinforcing sources of cultural authority? How do material books and related reading practices serve as specific sites of intersection between these two textual traditions? This collection makes a significant intervention in our understanding of Shakespeare, the Bible, and the role of textual materiality in the construction of cultural authority. Departing from conventional source study, it questions the often naturalized links between the Shakespearean and biblical corpora, examining instead the historicall...
This publication looks at fictional portrayals of William Shakespeare with a focus on novels, short stories, plays, occasional poems, films, television series and even comics. In terms of time span, the analysis covers the entire twentieth century and ends in the present-day. The authors included range from well-known figures (G.B. Shaw, Kipling, Joyce) to more obscure writers. The depictions of Shakespeare are varied to say the least, with even interpretations giving credence to the Oxfordian theory and feminist readings involving a Shakespearian sister of sorts. The main argument is that readings of Shakespeare almost always inform us more about the particular author writing the specific work than about the historical personage.
This volume explores the multiple connections between the two most canonical authors in English, Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. The collection reflects on the historical, literary, critical and filmic links between the authors and their fates. Considering the implications of the popular cult of Austen and Shakespeare, the essays are interdisciplinary and comparative: ranging from Austen’s and Shakespeare’s biographies to their presence in the modern vampire saga Twilight, passing by Shakespearean echoes in Austen’s novels and the authors’ afterlives on the improv stage, in wartime cinema, modern biopics and crime fiction. The volume concludes with an account of the Exhibition “Will & Jane” at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which literally brought the two authors together in the autumn of 2016. Collectively, the essays mark and celebrate what we have called the long-standing “love affair” between William Shakespeare and Jane Austen—over 200 years and counting.
This collection of essays takes on two of the most pressing questions that face the discipline of Comparative Literature today: “Why compare?” and “Where do we go from here?”. At a difficult economic time, when universities all over the world once again have to justify the social as well as academic value of their work, it is crucial that we consider the function of comparison itself in reaching across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. The essays written for this book are by researchers from all over the world, and range in topic from the problem of translating biblical Hebrew to modern atheism, from Freud to Marlene van Niekerk, from the formation of one person’s identity to experiences of globalisation, and the relation of history to fiction. Together they display the ground-breaking, ideas which lie at the heart of an act as deceptively simple as comparing one piece of writing to another.
Brought to light in this study is a connection between the treatment of war in Shakespeare's plays and the issue of the 'just war', which loomed large both in religious and in lay treatises of Shakespeare's time. The book re-reads Shakespeare's representations of war in light of both the changing historical and political contexts in which they were produced and of Shakespeare's possible connection with the culture and ideology of the European just war tradition. But to discuss Shakespeare's representations of war means, for Pugliatti, not simply to examine his work from a literary point of view or to historicize those representations in connection with the discourses (and the practice) of war which were produced in his time; it also means to consider or re-consider present-day debates for or against war and the kind of war ideology which is trying to assert itself in our time in light of the tradition which shaped those discourses and representations and which still substantiates our 'moral' view of war.
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