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This work marks the 400th anniversary of the death of one of England's greatest monarchs, a highly intelligent and successful ruler. The volume appeals to everyone interested in the charismatic character of Elizabeth I, her time and cultural afterlife. Contributors focus on important aspects of Elizabeth's subtle and resourceful political power and the longstanding struggle she faced at home and abroad as well as the threats posed to her realm. This edition presents a series of essays about fictional representations of Queen Elizabeth I in literature, music, and film. Articles illuminate the fascinating story of her numerous afterlives and their significance for the cultural history of England, its sense of identity and psyche. Essays investigate the ceremony, festivities, and dance practices at her court and bring to life the cultural significance of this colorful and extraordinary monarch. Christa Jansohn is professor of British culture at the University of Bamberg, Germany.
This book charts the course of Scottish Critical Theory since the 1960s. It provocatively argues that 'French' critical-theoretical ideas have developed in tandem with Scottish writing during this period. Its themes can be read as a breakdown in Scottish Enlightenment thinking after empire - precisely the process which permitted the rise of 'theory'.The book places within a wider theoretical context writers such as Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan, Ian Hamilton Finlay, James Kelman, Alexander Trocchi, Janice Galloway, Alan Warner and Irvine Welsh, as well as more recent work by Alan Riach and Pat Kane, who can be seen to take the 'post-Enlightenment' narrative forward. In doing so, it draws on the work of the Scottish thinkers John Macmurray and R.D. Laing as well as the continental philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Paul Virilio.
Before William Shakespeare wrote world-famous plays on the themes of power and political turmoil, the Shakespeare family of Stratford-upon-Avon and their neighbors and friends were plagued by false accusations and feuds with the government -- conflicts that shaped Shakespeare's sceptical understanding of the realities of power. This ground-breaking study of the world of the young William Shakespeare in Stratford and Warwickshire discusses many recent archival discoveries to consider three linked families, the Shakespeares, the Dudleys, and the Ardens, and their battles over regional power and government corruption. Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, and Ambrose Dudley, earl of Warwick, used p...
The game of chess reached western Europe by the year 1000, and within several generations it had become one of the most popular pastimes ever. Both men and women, and even priests played the game despite the Catholic Church's repeated prohibitions. Characters in countless romances, chansons de geste, and moral tales of the eleventh through twelfth centuries also played chess, which often symbolized romantic attraction or sexual consummation. In Power Play, Jenny Adams looks to medieval literary representations to ask what they can tell us both about the ways the game changed as it was naturalized in the West and about the society these changes reflected. In its Western form, chess featured a...
Muriel Spark is widely considered to be one of the most gifted and innovative British novelists of her generation. Professor Cheyette's study is the first to explore her twenty novels as a whole and includes discussion of her short stories, poems and literary criticism.
A reading of how women's power is asserted and demonstrated in the popular medieval genre of romance.
Argues that deconstruction is not a critical methodology or theory but that which makes any act of good reading possible.
Why does Catholicism have such an imaginative hold on Shakespearean drama, even though the on-going Reformation outlawed its practice? Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions contends that the answers to this question are theatrical rather than strictly theological. Avoiding biographical speculation, this book concentrates on dramatic impact, and thoroughly integrates new literary analysis with fresh historical research. In exploring the dramaturgical variety of the 'Catholic' content of Shakespeare's plays, Gillian Woods argues that habits, idioms, images, and ideas lose their denominational clarity when translated into dramatic fiction: they are awkwardly 'unreformed' rather than doctrinally Cat...
A remarkable resurgence of interest has taken place over recent years in a biographical approach to the work of early modern poets and dramatists, in particular to the plays and poems of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. The contributors to this volume approach the topic in a manner that is at once critically and historically alert. They acknowledge that the biographical evidence for all three authors is limited, thus throwing the emphasis acutely on interpretation. In addition to new scholarship, the essays are valuable for their awareness of the challenges posed by recent redirections of critical methodology. Scepticism and self-criticism are marked features of the writing gathered here.
Victorian medievalism physically transformed the streets of Britain It lay at the root of new laws and social policies It changed religious practices It deeply coloured national identities And it inspired art literature and music that remains influential to this day Sometimes driven by nostalgia but also often progressive and futurefacing this widereaching movement which reached its peak during the reign of Queen Victoria looked back to a range of different peoples and historical periods spanning a thousand years in order to inspire and vindicate cultural political and social change Medievalism was pervasive in Victorian literature with texts ranging from translated sagas to pseudomedieval d...