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Joshua Eubanks and Paul Sims moved to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for very different reasons. Joshua, a young black man, came with his single mother to escape the crime and despair of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Paul left his life of privilege in Long Island to study Judaism with the Hasidic Lubavitch movement. They live in two different worlds separated by a few city blocks, but their hearts both yearn for Rachel Weissman, the daughter of a respected rabbi, who is torn between her aspiration to become a doctor and her obligation to obey the insular restrictions of her religion. As they establish lives in their respective communities, they are increasingly expected to take sides in growing tensions that would explode into the 1991 Crown Heights riots. Joshua: A Brooklyn Tale views four decades through three lives. Andrew Kane’s novel is a love story about loneliness, a reflection on the value of community that acknowledges that it takes a village to raise a mob, a tale of public dysfunction and personal demons, and an image of the frail beauty of humanity that somehow survives.
In the final volume of AMERICAN ECSTASY, written by Raguan Z. Faust (aka August Franza), Luke Hall, the man/eagle, baptizes himself for new and possibly more hopeful roles. He conjures Rachel Landauer, an old girlfriend, and flies west with her to experience a series of encounters with America, past and present. These include chemical and environmental pollution, industrial strikes, transcontinental railroad building and many scenes of mental derangement. He also meets Col. George A. Custer, P.T. Barnum, Leon Trotsky, Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss in the strangest of circumstances. After many bizarre adventures, Luke ends up teaching at a suspect College of the 21st Century. Around and around he goes in conflict with all manner of men and women, until he meets Zamattia Ueberruaga, a Basque-American woman of many delights. Luke is finally grounded. He gives up his eagle life and all of its derangements to settle down with a woman he loves and who loves him.
Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays--plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars--in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.
This book provides an overview of the establishment and use of parish libraries in early modern England and includes a thematic analysis of surviving marginalia and readers' marks. This book is the first direct and detailed analysis of parish libraries in early modern England and uses a case-study approach to the examination of foundation practices, physical and intellectual accessibility, the nature of the collections, and the ways in which people used these libraries and read their books.
Focusing on the production and reception of drama during the theatre closures of 1642 to 1660, Heidi Craig shows how the 'death' of contemporary theatre in fact gave birth to English Renaissance drama as a critical field. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English stage, drama thrived in print, with stationers publishing unprecedented numbers of previously unprinted professional plays, vaunting playbooks' ties to the receding theatrical past. Marketed in terms of novelty and nostalgia, plays unprinted before 1642 gained new life. Stationers also anatomized the whole corpus of English drama, printing the first anthologies and comprehensive catalogues of drama. Craig captures this crucial turning-point in English theatre history with chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia, and the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period, as well as a new incisive reading of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King.
A far-reaching analysis of censorship's profound impact on Georgian theatrical culture and its development across the long eighteenth century, showcasing how the analysis of plays can be helpful for historical research.
This book is based on the postmedieval journal special issue Prophetic Futures. It calls for renewed attention to prophecy and temporality, challenging in the process critical lenses that adhere to strict dualities of medieval/modern, superstitious/rationalized, and other problematic dyads that occlude our understanding of vatic language. The language, texts, and bodies of prophecy challenge commonplaces about a disenchanted modernity and point the way to new critical approaches to texts out of time. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 10, issue 1, March 2019.
This collection of essays, commissioned in honour of Andrew Pettegree, presents original contributions on the Reformation, communication and the book in early modern Europe. Together, the essays reflect on Pettegree’s ground-breaking influence on these fields, and offer a comprehensive survey of the state of current scholarship.
This handbook scrutinises the links between English literature and religion, specifically in the early modern period; the interactions between the two fields are explored through an examination of the literary impact the British church had on published work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This book considers the relationship between biblical readings and literary writings in early modern England and it explores the impact of how the Bible was read across a variety of writers and genres.