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A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies (Palgrave Advances)
by Bart Van EsThis book provides an authoritative guide to debate on Elizabethan England's poet laureate. It covers key topics and provides histories for all of the primary texts. Some of today's most prominent Spenser scholars offer accounts of debates on the poet, from the Renaissance to the present day. Essential for those producing new research on Spenser.
Performance And The Contemporary City: An Interdisciplinary Reader (PDF)
by Nicolas WhybrowCities, with their rising populations and complex configurations, have become key symbols of a fast-changing modernity. This timely collection gathers together various urban writings from a range of relevant disciplines, including architecture, geography, sociology, visual art, ethnography and psychoanalysis. Its focus, however, is performance. Underscoring the importance of the field, it shows how performance functions as a dynamic, interdisciplinary mechanism which is central not only to understanding the multiplicity of urban living but also to the way the identities of cities are shaped. Gathering together key writings on the city and performance by authors ranging from Walter Benjamin to Tim Etchells to Carl Lavery, the reader can be navigated in any number of ways. Supported by extensive introductory material, it will be essential and evocative reading for anyone interested in making connections between performance and urban life.
George Herbert: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
by C. MalcolmsonThis volume replaces the traditional image of George Herbert as meditative recluse with a portrait of the poet as engaged throughout his life with the religion, politics and society of his time. Instead of an isolated genius living in retreat from the world, Herbert appears as a man writing public verse, active within an important social circle, and committed to nationalistic Protestantism. The book attends to the poetic brilliance of his verse as well as the institutions and contexts that influenced him: the upper class coterie, Cambridge University, and the Church of England.
Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Early Modern History: Society and Culture)
by J. MartinThe idea that the Renaissance witnessed the emergence of the modern individual remains a powerful myth. In this important new book Martin examines the Renaissance self with attention to both social history and literary theory and offers a new typology of Renaissance selfhood which was at once collective, performative and porous. At the same time, he stresses the layered qualities of the Renaissance self and the salient role of interiority and notions of inwardness in the shaping of identity. Myths of Renaissance Individualism , in short, will interest students not only of history but also of art history, literature, music, philosophy, psychology and religion.
Film, Form and Phantasy: Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics (Language, Discourse, Society)
by M. O'PrayThis book explores the ideas of the neglected English aesthetician and art historian, Adrian Stokes. Stokes's Kleinian-based concepts of carving and modelling are analysed in relation to film, arguing that they replace the traditional notions of realism and montage in film theory and provide a set of aesthetics which encompasses mainstream and 'art' cinema. This Kleinian psychoanalytic approach is offered to the films of Eisenstein, Rossellini, Hitchcock and others.
Graham Greene: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
by Neil SinyardA new title in Palgrave Macmillan's Literary Lives series, this is a biographical narrative of Graham Greene's literary career. Among other things, it explores his motives for writing; the literary and cinematic influences that shaped his work; his writing routine and the importance of his childhood experience. Greene was elusive and enigmatic, and this book teases out the fiction from his autobiographies, the autobiography from his fictions, sharing Paul Theroux's view that you may not know Greene from his face or speech 'but from his writing, you know everything.'
British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730-1837 (PDF)
by Bridget KeeganThis study shows how poets worked within and against the available forms of nature writing to challenge their place within physical, political, and cultural landscapes. Looking at the treatment of different ecosystems, it argues that writing about the environment allowed labouring-class poets to explore important social and aesthetic questions.
The Drama, Theatre and Performance Companion (PDF)
by Michael ManganOffering essential guidance to students throughout their undergraduate studies, this companion explores the development of a discipline that is still in flux, offers practical advice about how to study it and where this study might lead, and provides a useful reference source on key practitioners, debates, performances and terms.
The British Short Story (PDF)
by Andrew Maunder Ruth Robbins Emma LigginsThe short story remains a crucial - if neglected - part of British literary heritage. This accessible and up-to-date critical overview maps out the main strands and figures that shaped the British short story and novella from the 1850s to the present. It offers new readings of both classic and forgotten texts in a clear, jargon-free way.
Sound: a Reader in Theatre Practice (PDF)
by Ross BrownBrown explores relationships between sound and theatre, focusing on sound's interdependence and interaction with human performance and drama. Suggesting different ways in which sound may be interpreted to create meaning, it includes key writings on sound design, as well as perspectives from beyond the discipline.
Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators' Seduction
by Merry PawlowskiThis unique collection of essays, edited by leading Woolf scholar, brings together for the first time a serious consideration of Virginia Woolf's writing within the political context of fascism. Virginia Woolf and Fascism probes Woolf's fiction and non-fiction from Mrs. Dalloway in 1927 to Between the Acts , 1941, for her responses not only to the growing menaces of dictators abroad, but also to mounting evidence of fascist ideology at home in England. The essays present a portrait of Woolf as a woman writer who was politically engaged, and actively protesting against a worldview which aggressively targeted women for oppression.
British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays
by M. Demata D. WuThe bicentenary of the foundation of the Edinburgh Review has provided the foremost scholars in the field with the opportunity to re-examine the pervasive significance of the most important literary review of the Romantic period. These essays assess the controversial role played by the Edinburgh Review in the development of Romantic literature and explore its sense of 'Scottishness' in the context of early nineteenth-century British culture.
The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave Histories of Literature)
by A. RobertsThe History of Science Fiction traces the origin and development of science fiction from Ancient Greece up to the present day. The author is both an academic literary critic and acclaimed creative writer of the genre. Written in lively, accessible prose it is specifically designed to bridge the worlds of academic criticism and SF fandom.
Mastery and Slavery in Victorian Writing
by J. TaylorTaking Hegel's famous " Master-Slave Dialectic " as its starting point, this wide-ranging book examines portrayals of masters, slaves and servants in works by Carlyle, Dickens, Eliot, Collins and others. The questions raised about modern mastery and slavery are pursued in relation to intriguing nineteenth-century figures as the American slave-holder, the musician, the demagogue and the Jew.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)
by J. ReidIn this fascinating book, Reid examines Robert Louis Stevenson's writings in the context of late-Victorian evolutionist thought, arguing that an interest in 'primitive' life is at the heart of his work. She investigates a wide range of Stevenson's writing, including Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Treasure Island as well as previously unpublished material from the Stevenson archive at Yale. Reid's interpretation offers a new way of understanding the relationship between his Scottish and South Seas work. Her analysis of Stevenson's engagement with anthropological and psychological debate also illuminates the dynamic intersections between literature and science at the fin de siècle.
William Blake: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
by J. BeerThis volume on Blake follows the writer's life and combines biography and critical analysis. Covering Blake's early career, his major works and his work as a visual artist, this new study will be a must for all Blake scholars and enthusiasts. Recent discoveries concerning Blake's forebears and their religion make this new study additionally timely.
English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning (Early Modern Literature in History)
by A. BradyThis book analyzes the political, aesthetic, moral and religious developments in the period 1606-1660 and discusses the works of Donne, Jonson, Milton and early modern women's writing. Brady combines Literary Theory, social and cultural History, Psychology and Anthropology to produce exciting and original readings of neglected source material.
Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain
by K. NeweyWomen's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain is the first book to make a comprehensive study of women playwrights in the British theatre from 1820 to 1918. It looks at how women playwrights negotiated their personal and professional identities as writers, and examines the female tradition of playwriting which dramatises the central experience of women's lives around the themes of home, the nation, and the position of women in marriage and the family. The book also includes an extensive Appendix of authors and plays, which will be a useful reference tool for students and scholars in nineteenth-century studies and theatre historians.
Feminist Futures?: Theatre, Performance, Theory (Performance Interventions)
by G. Harris E. AstonThis work is a timely contribution to the debates surrounding feminism, theatre and performance. The excellent, cross-generational mix of theatre scholars and practitioners engaging in lively, cutting-edge debates on critical topics make this essential reading for students and scholars in Theatre and Performance Studies as well as Gender Studies.
Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography: The Masks of the Modern Nation
by A. RiachThis fascinating new study is about cultural change and continuities. At the core of the book are discrete literary studies of Scotland and Shakespeare, Walter Scott, R.L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, the modern Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and more recent cultural and literary phenomena. The central theme of literature and popular 'representation' recontextualises literary analysis in a broader, multi-faceted picture involving all the arts and the changing sense of what 'the popular' might be in a modern nation. New technologies alter forms of cultural production and the book charts a way through these forms, from oral poetry and song to the novel, and includes studies of paintings, classical music, socialist drama, TV, film and comic books. The international context for mass media cultural production is examined as the story of the intrinsic curiosity of the imagination and the intensely local aspect of Scotland's cultural self-representation unfolds.
Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter
by S. OliverScott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter is an innovative study of Scott's and Byron's poetical engagement with borders (actual and metaphorical) and the people living on and around them. The author discusses Scott's edited collection of Border Ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and his narrative poetry, and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , cantos 1 and 2, his Eastern Tales, and his late, utopian South-Sea poem The Island. This fascinating study provides a detailed exegesis of the importance of borders to these leading poets and the public, during the early years of the Nineteenth-Century, with an emphasis on reciprocal literary influences, and on attitudes towards cultural instability.
Macbeth (The\rsc Shakespeare Series (PDF))
by William Shakespeare Jonathan Bate Eric Rasmussen Royal Shakespeare Company StaffSIR JONATHAN BATE is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, University of Warwick, UK, and the editor of The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works. He has held visiting posts at Harvard, Yale and UCLA and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of St Catherine's College, Cambridge, and a Governor and Board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. A prominent critic, award-winning biographer and broadcaster, he is the author of several books on Shakespeare, including The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador), which was praised by Sir Peter Hall, founder of the RSC, as 'the best modern book on Shakespeare.' In June 2006 he was awarded a CBE by HM The Queen 'for services to Higher Education'. ERIC RASMUSSEN is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, USA, and the Textual Editor of The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works. He is co-editor of the Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama and has edited volumes in both the Arden Shakespeare and Oxford World's Classics series. He is the General Textual Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project - one of the most visited Shakespeare websites in the world. For over nine years he has written the annual review of editions and textual studies for the Shakespeare Survey.
William Faulkner: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
by D. RamptonDespite all the studies devoted to William Faulkner, he continues to be variously perceived. Focussing on his fiction, this study of Faulkner's multifaceted literary life explores the distinctive blend of continuity and innvoation that characterizes his novels and looks at the extensive and varied reactions they have elicited.
Howard Barker: An Expository Study of His Plays and Production Work, 1988-2008
by D. RabeyBarker has been acclaimed as 'England's greatest living dramatist' in The Times and as 'the Shakespeare of our age' by Sarah Kane. His uniquely stylish work brings together startlingly original forms of classical discipline, moral ruthlessness and catastrophic eroticism. This study considers the full range of his theatrical achievements.
Performing the Body in Irish Theatre
by B. SweeneyThis title examines the representation of the body in Irish theatre alongside the specific circumstances within which Irish theatre is performed, incorporating issues of gender and embodiment, and the performance of Irishness and tradition. The author contextualizes the body in Irish theatre, and includes in-depth analysis of five key productions.