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Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches
by Erica Johnson Patricia MoranPresents new critical perspectives on Jean Rhys in relation to modernism, postcolonialism, and theories of affect. Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. She has played a major figure in debates attempting to establish the parameters of postcolonial and particularly Caribbean studies, and although she has long been seen as a modernist writer, she has also been marginalized as one who is not quite in, yet not quite out, either. The 10 newly commissioned essays and introduction collected in this volume demonstrate Jean Rhys’s centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s, including Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, as well as her later bestseller, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The volume establishes Rhys as a major author with relevance to a number of different critical discourses, and includes a path-breaking section on affect theory that shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates with the recent 'affective turn' in the social sciences and humanities. As this collection shows, strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhys’s portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth-century continue to trouble easy conceptualisations and critical categories. Key Features:- New and original work on Jean Rhys’s fiction and short stories, highlighting key areas of her work.- Contributors are　leading scholars on Jean Rhys from the US, the UK, and Australia, including Mary Lou Emery, Elaine Savory, John J. Su, Maroula Joannou, H. Adlai Murdoch, Rishona Zimring, Carine Mardorossian, Patricia Moran, Erica L. Johnson, and Sue Thomas.- Organised around 3 important themes: Rhys and modernism, postcolonial Rhys, and affective Rhys Patricia Moran is the author of Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf; Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma; and co-editor of Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in 19th and 20th-Century Women’s Writing and The Female Face of Shame. Formerly Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, she is now Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick. Erica L. Johnson is an Associate Professor of English at Pace University in New York. She is the author of Caribbean Ghostwriting (2009) and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell’Oro (2003), and is the co-editor with Patricia Moran of The Female Face of Shame (2013).
Richard Jefferies, After London; or Wild England (Edinburgh Critical Editions of Nineteenth-Century Texts)
by Mark Frost Richard JefferiesRichard Jefferies’ After London is uncanny and intriguing, an adventure story, quest romance, dystopia, and Darwinian novel rolled into one, but also a pioneering work of Victorian science fiction. Imagining a mysterious natural catastrophe that plunges its people into a barbaric future, Jefferies' remarkable novel drowns and destroys London and depicts a challenging ‘Wild England’ dominated by nature and filled with evolved animals and devolved humans. Of its time but also distinctively modern, After London can, in its uneasy expression of Victorian and post-Victorian anxieties about industrial development, urbanisation, natural resources, and climate, be regarded as one of the first novels of the Anthropocene. This new critical edition provides one of the earliest examples of a global catastrophe novel that is part of a flowering of nineteenth-century science fiction. It situates After London in a tradition of mid-late Victorian texts that respond to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and responds to a host of other key social, political, and cultural issues of the period.
Russian Futurist Theatre: Theory and Practice
by Robert LeachArgues that Shakespeare transforms philosophies of comedy and melancholy by revising them concomitantly
Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form
by Fiona SampsonToday, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, ‘difficult’ and therefore ‘elitist’. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word ’lyric’.These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa.
Reinventing Liberty: Nation, Commerce and the British Historical Novel from Walpole to Scott (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism)
by Fiona PriceRedefines the British historical novel as a key site in the construction of British national identity The British historical novel has often been defined in the terms set by Walter Scott’s fiction, as a reflection on a clear break between past and present. Returning to the range of historical fiction written before Scott, Reinventing Liberty challenges this view by returning us to the rich range of historical novels written in the late eighteenth-century. It explores how these works participated in a contentious debate concerning political change and British national identity. Ranging across well-known writers, like William Godwin, Horace Walpole and Frances Burney, to lesser-known figures, such as Cornelia Ellis Knight and Jane Porter, Reinventing Liberty reveals how history becomes a site to rethink Britain as ‘land of liberty’ and it positions Scott in relation to this tradition. Key Features Recovers the richness of the historical novel and history writing before Walter Scott, including the contribution of women writers to this debate Explores how historical fiction probes anxieties at the rise of commerce, the question of empire, and radical political change Rewrites our understanding of Scott and his relation to the earlier British historical novel
Contemporary Spanish Gothic
by Ann DaviesExamines Spain's contribution to international interest in Gothic culture, film and literatureWith the success of novels such as The Shadow of the Wind and films like The Others, contemporary Spanish culture has contributed a great deal to the imagery and experience of the Gothic, although such contributions are not always recognised as being specifically Spanish in origin. Contemporary Spanish Gothic is the first book to study how the Gothic mode intersects with cultural production in Spain today, considering some of the ways in which such production feeds off and simultaneously feeds into Gothic production more widely. Examining the works of writers and filmmakers like Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Pedro Almodóvar and Alejandro Amenábar, as well as the further reaches of Spanish Gothic influence in the Twilight film series, the book considers images and themes like the mad surgeon and the vulnerable body, the role of the haunted house, and the heritage biopics of Francisco de Goya.
The Contemporary British Novel Since 2000
by James AchesonFocuses on the novels published since 2000 by twenty major British novelistsThe Contemporary British Novel Since 2000 is divided into five parts, with the first part examining the work of four particularly well-known and highly regarded twenty-first century writers: Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith. It is with reference to each of these novelists in turn that the terms ‘realist’, ‘postmodernist’, ‘historical’ and ‘postcolonialist’ fiction are introduced, while in the remaining four parts, other novelists are discussed and the meaning of the terms amplified. From the start it is emphasised that these terms and others often mean different things to different novelists, and that the complexity of their novels often obliges us to discuss their work with reference to more than one of the terms.Also discusses the works of: Maggie O’Farrell, Sarah Hall, A.L. Kennedy, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Atkinson, Salman Rushdie, Adam Foulds, Sarah Waters, James Robertson, Mohsin Hamid, Andrea Levy, and Aminatta Forna.
Brecht On Art And Politics
by Bertolt BrechtThis volume contains new translations to extend our image of one of the twentieth century's most entertaining and thought provoking writers on culture, aesthetics and politics. Here are a cross-section of Brecht's wide-ranging thoughts which offer us an extraordinary window onto the concerns of a modern world in four decades of economic and political disorder. The book is designed to give wider access to the experience of a dynamic intellect, radically engaged with social, political and cultural processes. Each section begins with a short essay by the editors introducing and summarising Brecht's thought in the relevant year.
Shakespeare's Grammar
by Jonathan HopeA comparative reference guide to Shakespeare's grammar, based on a complete revision of an extremely elderly but still much-cited volume, Abbott's Shakespearean Grammar, first published in 1869 and still regarded by default as an essential component of Shakespeare research. This volume meets the identified need for an authoritative and systematic grammar of Shakespeare which takes account both of current linguistic developments and of the current state of knowledge about Early Modern English and enable editors and readers both to understand and to contextualise Shakespeare's use and manipulation of language, i.e. to locate it in the context of other writings in Early Modern English.`Should be an essential reference tool not only for Shakespeare editors but for university and school teachers' ' Professor Ernst Honigmann, editor of Arden 3 Othello'...should become part of every reader's, and certainly every teacher's, arsenal of central reference books' - Ruth Morse, Shakespeare Survey
Milked (Modern Plays)
by Simon LongmanAnyway. I was just wondering if you had any jobs at all? . . . Yeah . . . like . . . media. Something to do with media stuff . . . Where am I based? Well, currently Herefordshire but . . . sorry . . . that's too far away . . . too far away from what? . . . Oh . . . ok.Paul is trying to find a job. Snowy is trying to find himself. But when Snowy stumbles across an ailing cow stuck in a local field, he ropes Paul into trying to help the cow, either to improve its lot or put it out of its misery.What follows is a hilarious procession of failed suffocations, experiments with a saw and trip to the train tracks in this funny and moving black comedy about friendship, unemployment and a cow called Sandy.Milked premiered in a production by Pentabus Theatre Company in November 2013. This edition is published to coincide with the revival and national tour, beginning February 2015.
The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (Bloomsbury Revelations)
by David LodgeThe Modes of Modern Writing tackles some of the fundamental questions we all encounter when studying or reading literature, such as: what is literature? What is realism? What is relationship between form and content? And what dictates the shifts in literary fashions and tastes? In answering these questions, the book examines texts by a wide range of modern novelists and poets, including James Joyce, T.S.Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin, and draws on the work of literary theorists from Roman Jakobson to Roland Barthes. Written in Lodge's typically accessible style this is essential reading for students and lovers of literature at any level. The Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a new Foreword/Afterword by the author.
Shakespeare and Greece
by Alison Findlay Vassiliki MarkidouThis book seeks to invert Ben Jonson's claim that Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greek' and to prove that, in fact, there is more Greek and less Latin in a significant group of Shakespeare's texts: a group whose generic hybridity (tragic-comical-historical-romance) exemplifies the hybridity of Greece in the early modern imagination. To early modern England, Greece was an enigma. It was the origin and idealised pinnacle of Western philosophy, tragedy, democracy, heroic human endeavour and, at the same time, an example of decadence: a fallen state, currently under Ottoman control, and therefore an exotic, dangerous, 'Other' in the most disturbing senses of the word. Indeed, while Britain was struggling to establish itself as a nation state and an imperial authority by emulating classical Greek models, this ambition was radically unsettled by early modern Greece's subjection to the Ottoman Empire, which rendered Europe's eastern borders dramatically vulnerable. Focussing, for the first time, on Shakespeare's 'Greek' texts (Venus and Adonis, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen), the volume considers how Shakespeare's use of antiquity and Greek myth intersects with early modern perceptions of the country and its empire.
Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design (Performance and Design)
by Joslin McKinney Scott PalmerScenography Expanded is a foundational text offering readers a thorough introduction to contemporary performance design, both in and beyond the theatre. It examines the potential of the visual, spatial, technological, material and environmental aspects of performance to shape performative encounters. It analyses examples of scenography as sites of imaginative exchange and transformative experience and it discusses the social, political and ethical dimensions of performance design. The international range of contributors and case studies provide clear perspectives on why scenographic design has become a central consideration for performance makers today.The extended introduction defines the characteristics of 21st-century scenography and examines the scope and potentials of this new field. Across five sections, the volume provides examples and case studies which richly illustrate the scope of contemporary scenographic practice and which analyse the various ways in which it is used in global cultural contexts. These include mainstream theatre practice, experimental theatre, installation and live art, performance in the city, large-scale events and popular entertainments, and performances by and for specific communities.
Fireworks: Al' ab Nariya (Modern Plays)
by Dalia Taha Clem NaylorThere's no-one in the streets but us. You run that way and I'll run this way. Whoever gets back to the front door first without getting shot, wins.In a Palestinian town eleven-year-old Lubna and twelve-year-old Khalil are playing on the empty stairwell in their apartment block. As the siege intensifies outside, fear for their safety becomes as crippling as the conflict itself.Dalia Taha's play offers a new way of seeing how war fractures childhood. Fireworks (Al'ab Nariya) is part of International Playwrights: A Genesis Foundation Project and received its world premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 12 February 2015.
New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity
by Paul Edmondson Ewan FernieNew Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity documents and analyses the different ways in which a range of innovative projects take Shakespeare out into the world beyond education and the theatre. Mixing critical reflection on the social value of Shakespeare with new creative work in different forms and idioms, the volume triumphantly shows that Shakespeare can make a real contribution to contemporary civic life. Highlights include: Garrick's 1769 Shakespeare ode, its revival in 2016, and a devised performance interpretation of it; the full text of Carol Ann Duffy's A Shakespeare Masque (set to music by Sally Beamish); a new Shakespearean libretto inspired by Wagner; an exploration of the civic potential of new Shakespeare opera and ballet; a fresh Shakespeare-inspired poetic liturgy, including commissions by major British poets; a production of The Merchant of Venice marking the 500th anniversary of the Venetian Jewish Ghetto; and a remaking of Pericles as a response to the global migrant crisis.
Sex and the Three Day Week (Modern Plays)
by Stephen SharkeyI will NOT be denied. I AM a volcano! And this is MY night. Britain in the 1970s: a time of strikes, blackouts and free love. But Philip's frustrated. While his wife Angela thinks he's past it, he wants to share a whole lotta love with Catherine from next door. When the naughty neighbours check in at the Paradise Hotel, it's a night to remember - for all the wrong reasons. The lights go out, the corridors see more action than the beds, and to cap it all, the place could be haunted . . . Throw in Fanny the French maid, Detective Inspector Connors of the Vice Squad, a snake called Cecil and Tom the mynah bird, and it all makes for a chaotic cocktail of confusion leaving the would-be lovebirds not even halfway to Paradise. A tale of midlife crises, mistaken identities and misfiring sexual shenanigans, this new farce is published to coincide with the world premiere at the Playhouse, Liverpool, in December 2014.
A Midsummer Night's Dream: Arden Performance Editions (Arden Performance Editions)
by William Shakespeare Abigail Rokison-WoodallFor the first time, the world-renowned Arden Shakespeare is producing Performance Editions, aimed specifically for use in the rehearsal room. Published in association with the Shakespeare Institute, the text features easily accessible facing page notes – including short definitions of words, key textual variants, and guidance on metre and pronunciation; a larger font size for easier reading; space for writing notes and reduced punctuation aimed at the actor rather than the reader. With editorial expertise from the worlds of theatre and academia, the series has been developed in association with actors and drama students. The Series Editors are distinguished scholars Professor Michael Dobson and Dr Abigail Rokison and leading Shakespearean actor, Simon Russell Beale.
The Urewera Notebook by Katherine Mansfield
by Katherine Mansfield Anna PlumridgeAn authoritative scholarly edition of Mansfield’s camping journal, offering new understandings of her colonial life Katherine Mansfield filled the first half of the Urewera Notebook during a 1907 camping tour of the central North Island, shortly before she left New Zealand forever. Her camping notes offer a rare insight into her attitude to her country of birth, not in retrospective fiction but as a nineteen year old still living in the colony. This publication is theirst scholarly edition of the Urewera Notebook, providing an original transcription, a collation of the alternative readings and textual criticism of prior editors, and new information about the politics, people and places Mansfield encountered on her journey. As a whole, this edition challenges the debate that has focused on Mansfield’s happiness or dissatisfaction throughout her last year in New Zealand to reveal a young writer closely observing aspects of a country hitherto beyond her experience and forming a complex critique of her colonial homeland. Key Features: A new, more accurate transcription of the notebook Textual notes provide significant variant readings from other extant editions of the notebook An introductory essay draws on important new developments in New Zealand literary criticism, advances in historiography of the period and legal history Includes a route map, revised itinerary and authoritative annotation for the text Includes 20 photographs, many previously unpublished, from Beauchamp family photograph albums at the Alexander Turnbull Library and Ebbett Papers at the Hawke’s Bay Museum
The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Christian Theology
by Daniel WhistlerBridges the gap between Plutarch Studies and Achaemenid Studies through analysis of key texts
Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor
by Helena Michie Robyn WarholTwo Literary Critics Romancing the Archive at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Part biography, part detective novel, part love story, and part meditation on archival research,　Love Among the Archives　is an experiment in writing a life. This is the story of two literary critics’　attempts to track down Sir George Scharf, the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, famous in his day and strangely obscure in our own. After discovering Scharf’s scrapbook of menus and invitations from England’s most stately homes, the authors began their adventures in the archives of London, searching Scharf’s diaries, sketchbooks, and letters for traces of the man who so loved dining out. Addicted to Victorian novels, the authors looked for a marriage plot, but found Scharf’s passionate attachment to a younger man who had hidden from him a secret engagement; they looked for a Bildungsroman, but found that Scharf never left his beloved mother.　Always short of money, self-educated, talented, irascible, gregarious, prolific, and snobbish, this son of a poor immigrant artist was to become the right-hand man of an earl he called　“my best friend.†?　The written record of his nightmares, debts, gifts, and dinner parties　comes together to produce a rich Victorian character whose personal and professional lives challenge what we think we know about sex, class, and profession in his time. Helena Michie is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor in Humanities and Professor of English at Rice University.　 She is the author of Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal (2006), Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture (1991) and The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies (1987) and co-editor with Ronald Thomas of Nineteenth-Century Geographies: From the Victorian Age to the American Century (2002). Robyn Warhol is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University, where she is a core faculty member of Project Narrative.　 She is the author of Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop Culture Forms (2003) and Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (1989) and co-editor with Susan S. Lanser of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (2015).
Islands (Modern Plays)
by Caroline HortonThis is my world, I am the king, I make the rules and everyone else can go to hell. This is off-shore.Oxfam estimate that there is $18.5 trillion siphoned out of the world economy into tax havens by wealthy individuals alone. Christian Aid has calculated that 1,000 children die every day as a result of tax evasion. This is not just a political or social challenge: this is a matter of human rights.Islands is an illuminating, absurd and powerful new show about tax havens, little empires, enormous greed, and the few who have it all. Hilarious and unnerving, this ink-black comedy with music plunges you into a monstrous, secretive world where it really seems that no-one has to pay…. for anything. Head off-shore and frolic with those who have it all worked out as they feed their addiction to wealth, power and material stuff.The play received its world premiere at the Bush Theatre, London, on 15 January 2015.
City Stories (Modern Plays)
by James PhillipsWhat happens when someone tells you that you're the answer to the riddle of life? What happens when a stranger in Starbucks gives you something that will change your world forever? What happens if the world starts to fall asleep, hour by hour?City Stories is a new type of cabaret drama, a sequence of interwoven love stories, and a love-letter to London. Composed up of five discrete yet interwoven stories, each taking the form of a monologue or duologue, and performed with specifically composed songs, City Stories looks at a variety of experiences of love and loss via a range of people living in the UK's capital. Elegantly written and beautifully constructed, these pieces look at the varieties of love and how it might save us, showing James Phillips's writing at his very best. City Stories received its world premiere at St James's Theatre, London, in 2013 and has since gone on to establish a year-long residency at the theatre.
Julius Caesar's Self-Created Image and Its Dramatic Afterlife (Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception)
by Miryana DimitrovaThe book explores the extent to which aspects of Julius Caesar's self-representation in his commentaries, constituent themes and characterization have been appropriated or contested across the English dramatic canon from the late 1500s until the end of the 19th century. Caesar, in his own words, constructs his image as a supreme commander characterised by exceptional celerity and mercifulness; he is also defined by the heightened sense of self-dramatization achieved by the self-referential use of the third person and emerges as a quasi-divine hero inhabiting a literary-historical reality. Channelled through Lucan's epic Bellum Civile and ancient historiography, these Caesarean qualities reach drama and take the shape of ambivalent hubris, political role-playing, self-institutionalization, and an exceptional relationship with temporality.Focusing on major dramatic texts with rich performance history, such as Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Handel's opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto and Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra but also a number of lesser known early modern plays, the book encompasses different levels of drama's active engagement with the process of reception of Caesar's iconic and controversial personality.
Euripides: A Satyr Play (Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy)
by Carl A. ShawWith its ribald chorus of ithyphallic, half-man / half-horse creatures, satyr drama was a peculiar part of the Athenian theatrical experience. Performed three times each year after a trilogy of tragedies, it was an integral part of the 5th- and 4th-century City Dionysia, a large festival in honour of the god Dionysus. Euripides: Cyclops is the first book-length study of this fascinating genre's only complete, extant play, a theatrical version of Odysseus' encounter with the monster Polyphemus. Shaw begins with a look at the history of the genre, following its development from early 6th-century religious processions up to the Hellenistic era. He then offers a comprehensive analysis of the Cyclops' plot and performance, using the text (alongside ancient literary fragments and visual evidence) to determine the original viewing experience: the stage, masks, costumes, actions and emotions. A detailed examination of the text reveals that Euripides associates and distinguishes his version of the story from previous iterations of the myth, especially book nine of Homer's Odyssey. Euripides handles many of the same themes as his predecessors, but he updates the Cyclops for the Athenian stage, adapting his work to reflect and comment upon contemporary religious, philosophical and literary-musical trends.
A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival
by Paul Edmondson Paul Prescott Erin SullivanA Year of Shakespeare gives a uniquely expert and exciting overview of the largest Shakespeare celebration the world has ever known: the World Shakespeare Festival 2012. This is the only book to describe and analyse each of the Festival's 73 productions in well-informed,lively reviews by eminent and up-and-coming scholars and critics from the UK and around the world. A rich resource of critical interest to all students, scholars and lovers of Shakespeare, the book also captures the excitement of this extraordinary event.A Year of Shakespeare provides:• a ground-breaking collection of Shakespearean reviews, covering all of the Festival's productions;• a dynamic visual record through a wide range of production photographs;• incisive analysis of the Festival's significance in the wider context of the Cultural Olympiad 2012.All the world really is a stage, and it's time for curtain-up…