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Actress: LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE

by Anne Enright

‘Written with all the ingenuity and twisty tautness of a thriller’ The TimesFrom the Booker-winning Irish author, a brilliant and moving novel about fame, sexual power, and a daughter’s search to understand her mother’s hidden truths. This is the story of Irish theatre legend Katherine O’Dell, as told by her daughter Norah. It tells of early stardom in Hollywood, of highs and lows on the stages of Dublin and London’s West End. Katherine’s life is a grand performance, with young Norah watching from the wings. But this romance between mother and daughter cannot survive Katherine’s past, or the world’s damage. As Norah uncovers her mother’s secrets, she acquires a few of her own. Then, fame turns to infamy when Katherine decides to commit a bizarre crime. Actress is about a daughter’s search for the truth: the dark secret in the bright star, and what drove Katherine finally mad . . .

An Actress Prepares: Women and "the Method"

by Rosemary Malague

'Every day, thousands of women enter acting classes where most of them will receive some variation on the Stanislavsky-based training that has now been taught in the U.S. for nearly ninety years. Yet relatively little feminist consideration has been given to the experience of the student actress: What happens to women in Method actor training?' An Actress Prepares is the first book to interrogate Method acting from a specifically feminist perspective. Rose Malague addresses "the Method" not only with much-needed critical distance, but also the crucial insider's view of a trained actor. Case studies examine the preeminent American teachers who popularized and transformed elements of Stanislavsky’s System within the U.S.—Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, and Hagen— by analyzing and comparing their related but distinctly different approaches. This book confronts the sexism that still exists in actor training and exposes the gender biases embedded within the Method itself. Its in-depth examination of these Stanislavskian techniques seeks to reclaim Method acting from its patriarchal practices and to empower women who act. 'I've been waiting for someone to write this book for years: a thorough-going analysis and reconsideration of American approaches to Stanislavsky from a feminist perspective ... lively, intelligent, and engaging.' – Phillip Zarrilli, University of Exeter 'Theatre people of any gender will be transformed by Rose Malague’s eye-opening study An Actress Prepares... This book will be useful to all scholars and practitioners determined to make gender equity central to how they hone their craft and their thinking.' – Jill Dolan, Princeton University

An Actress Prepares: Women and "the Method"

by Rosemary Malague

'Every day, thousands of women enter acting classes where most of them will receive some variation on the Stanislavsky-based training that has now been taught in the U.S. for nearly ninety years. Yet relatively little feminist consideration has been given to the experience of the student actress: What happens to women in Method actor training?' An Actress Prepares is the first book to interrogate Method acting from a specifically feminist perspective. Rose Malague addresses "the Method" not only with much-needed critical distance, but also the crucial insider's view of a trained actor. Case studies examine the preeminent American teachers who popularized and transformed elements of Stanislavsky’s System within the U.S.—Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, and Hagen— by analyzing and comparing their related but distinctly different approaches. This book confronts the sexism that still exists in actor training and exposes the gender biases embedded within the Method itself. Its in-depth examination of these Stanislavskian techniques seeks to reclaim Method acting from its patriarchal practices and to empower women who act. 'I've been waiting for someone to write this book for years: a thorough-going analysis and reconsideration of American approaches to Stanislavsky from a feminist perspective ... lively, intelligent, and engaging.' – Phillip Zarrilli, University of Exeter 'Theatre people of any gender will be transformed by Rose Malague’s eye-opening study An Actress Prepares... This book will be useful to all scholars and practitioners determined to make gender equity central to how they hone their craft and their thinking.' – Jill Dolan, Princeton University

The Actresses

by Barbara Ewing

They all met again at the Drama School Reunion: the Hollywood celebrity, the out-of-work soap star, the understudy, the Shakespearian hero. Thirty-six years ago, they dreamed of the great parts awaiting them. What they did not know was that the parts would soon dry up, for the actresses. Because they had stopped being young. But: once an actress, always an actress and on this hot, summer's day it becomes clear that age does not wipe out ambition. Or desire. Or memory. Or love. So when the Reunion culminates in an accusation of rape that dominates every newspaper in the country, the past – sweet, cruel, tragic – comes flooding back, and the actresses become the stars of the story. Perceptive, shocking, gripping and wise, this could only have been written by somebody who has been there.

Acts of Betrayal

by John Trenhaile

Two friends who had taken the bar together end up taking very different paths... one is about to crown his ambition with a judgeship - the other stands accused of high treason in a plot to kill the Queen.Successful attorney Frank Thornton stands accused of taking part in an IRA plot to assassinate the Queen. He is shocked when the chief witness against him turns out to be Alistair Scrutton, his law school chum. Frank calls on Roz Forbes, the deputy editor of The Times, to save him from certain execution for treason.But it is the shadowy figure of Krait, an international terrorist and assassin, who hold the key to the mystery of Thornton's plight...

Acts of Defiance

by Gary Beck

When Randy’s father takes in poor city boy Steve for the summer, the boys become fast friends destined for great adventures. From persuading a Marine Corps recruiter to enlist them at the age of thirteen, to surviving a wild storm under sail, the boys move on to college with a commitment to change the world. For Steve, this means playing by the rules and working within the system. For Randy, this means studying Chinese to read the words of Chairman Mao and joining a group committed to overthrowing the international yoke of capitalism in underprivileged countries, preferably by violence. As men, Steve and Randy’s choices lead in opposite directions. But when Randy becomes a wanted fugitive, Steve is there to help him. As much as Acts of Defiance is about different approaches to combating injustice, it is, at its heart, a story about the enduring bonds of friendship in a tumultuous era.

Acts Of Desire: Women And Sex On Stage 1800-1930

by Sos Eltis

From seduced maidens to adulterous wives, bigamists, courtesans, kept women and streetwalkers, the so-called 'fallen woman' was a ubiquitous and enduring figure on the Victorian and Edwardian stage. Acts of Desire traces the theatrical representation of illicit female sexuality from early nineteenth-century melodramas, through sensation dramas, Ibsenite sex-problem plays and suffrage dramas, to early social realism and the well-made plays of Pinero, Jones, Maugham, and Coward. This study reveals and analyses enduring plot lines and tropes that continue to influence contemporary theatre and film. Women's illicit desires became a theatrical focus for anxieties and debates surrounding gender roles, women's rights, sexual morality, class conflict, economics, eugenics, and female employment. The theatre played a central role in both establishing and challenging sexual norms, and many playwrights exploited the ambiguities and implications of performance to stage disruptive spectacles of female desire, agency, energy, and resourcefulness, using ingenuity and skill to evade the control of that ever watchful state censor, the Lord Chamberlain. Covering an astonishing range of theatrical, social, literary, and political texts, this study challenges the currency and validity of the long-established critical term 'the fallen woman', and establishes the centrality of the theatre to cultural and sexual debates throughout the period. Acts of Desire encompasses published and unpublished plays, archival material, censorship records, and contemporary reviews to reveal the surprising continuities, complex debates, covert meanings, and exuberant spectacles which marked the history of theatrical representations of female sexuality. Engaging with popular and 'high art' performances, this study also reveals the vital connections between theatre and its sister arts, tracing the exchange of influences between Victorian drama, narrative painting and the novel, and showing theatre to be a crucial but neglected element in the cultural history of women's sexuality.

Acts of Desperation: A Stylist Book of 2021 and The Times bestseller

by Megan Nolan

*A NEW STATESMAN, OBSERVER, IRISH TIMES, i AND STYLIST BOOK OF 2021*'Please believe the hype ... a seriously exciting writer' Sunday Times'The millennial author everyone should be watching right now' Daily Telegraph'Such brilliant writing about female desire... honest and visceral' Marian KeyesDiscover this bitingly honest, darkly funny debut novel about a toxic relationship and secret female desire, from an emerging star of Irish literature. Love was the final consolation, would set ablaze the fields of my life in one go, leaving nothing behind. I thought of it as a force which would clean me and by its presence make me worthy of it. There was no religion in my life after early childhood, and a great faith in love was what I had cultivated instead. Oh, don't laugh at me for this, for being a woman who says this to you. I hear myself speak. Even now, even after all that took place between us, I can still feel how moved I am by him. Ciaran was that downy, darkening blond of a baby just leaving its infancy. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. None of it mattered in the end; what he looked like, who he was, the things he would do to me. To make a beautiful man love and live with me had seemed - obviously, intuitively - the entire point of life. My need was greater than reality, stronger than the truth, more savage than either of us would eventually bear. How could it be true that a woman like me could need a man's love to feel like a person, to feel that I was worthy of life? And what would happen when I finally wore him down and took it? 'A dark, intense account of an obsessive love affair. It's great on the elation of falling in love and then its flip side, the anxiety, fixation and self-doubt. A really fine debut' David Nicholls'As disarmingly relatable as it is moving' Stylist

Acts of Faith: A Novel

by Erich Segal

They met as children, innocents from two different worlds. And from that moment their lives were fated to be forever entwined.Timothy: abandoned at birth, he finds a home and a dazzling career within the Catholic church. But the vows he takes cannot protect him from one soul-igniting passion.Daniel: the scholarly son of a great rabbi, he is destined to follow in his father's footsteps. And destined to break his father's heart.Deborah: she was raised to be docile and dutiful - the perfect rabbi's wife - but love will lead her to rebellion. And into worlds the patriarch would never dare imagine.Reaching across more than a quarter of a century, from the tough streets of Brooklyn to ultramodern Brasilia to an Israeli kibbutz, this is an unforgettable story of three extraordinary lives . . . and one forbidden love.

Acts of Infidelity: A Novel

by Lena Andersson

'A novel of heartbreak told with intellectual rigor. It gripped me from first page to last. Fantastic!'Alice SeboldWhen Ester Nilsson meets the actor Olof Sten, she falls madly in love.Olof makes no secret of being married, but he and Ester nevertheless start to meet regularly and begin to conduct a strange dance of courtship. Olof insists he doesn't plan to leave his wife, but he doesn't object to this new situation either . . . it’s far too much fun.Ester, on the other hand, is convinced that things might change. But as their relationship continues over repeated summers of distance, and winters of heated meetings in bars, she is forced to realize the truth: Ester Nilsson has become a mistress.To read Acts of Infidelity is to dive inside the mind of a brilliant, infuriating friend - Ester's and Olof’s entanglements and arguments are the stuff of relationship nightmares. Cutting, often cruel, and written with razor-sharp humour, Acts of Infidelity is clever, painful, maddening, but most of all perfectly, precisely true.Praise for Wilful Disregard'Gripped me like an airport read . . . perfect' Lena Dunham

The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights (Penguin Modern Classics)

by John Steinbeck Chase Horton

Steinbeck's first posthumously published work, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights is a reinterpretation of tales from Malory's Morte d'Arthur. In this highly successful attempt to render Malory into Modern English, Steinbeck recreated the rhythm and tone of the original Middle English.

Acts of Love: a sizzling and sexy escapist romance perfect for summer

by Talulah Riley

'I read this compulsively in one sitting - it's the best escapism you'll have all summer!' - Amazon reviewerACTS OF LOVE is a wonderfully romantic love story to make your heart soar, perfect for fans of Curtis Sittenfeld's Eligible. Bernadette knows what she wants.Tim is perfect, and she's always had a feeling that something is about to happen between them.He might have just announced his engagement to the sickeningly wonderful Elizabeth, but the ring's not on his finger yet. And when Elizabeth starts meddling in Bernie's own love life, she knows it's time to act. Yes, Elizabeth's best friend Radley might be charming, charismatic and intelligent. But he's not Tim. And Bernadette's not a woman who takes no for an answer.'Talulah Riley is an absolute force of nature. Read and revel' - Eva Rice

Acts of Love and War: A nation torn apart by war. One woman caught in the crossfire.

by Maggie Brookes

A NATION TORN APART BY WAR. ONE WOMAN CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE._____________________________1936. Civil war in Spain. A world on the brink of chaos . . .21-year-old Lucy feels content with her life in Hertfordshire - not least because she lives next door to Tom and Jamie, two very different brothers for whom she has equally great affection.But her comfortable life is turned upside down when Tom decides he must travel to Spain to fight in the bloody Spanish Civil War. He is quickly followed by Jamie who, much to Lucy's despair, is supporting General Franco.To the dismay of her irascible father, Lucy decides that the only way to bring her boys back safely is to travel to Spain herself to persuade them to come home.Yet when she sees the horrific effects of the war, she quickly becomes immersed in the lifesaving work the Quakers are doing to help the civilian population, many of whom are refugees.As the war progresses and the situation becomes increasingly perilous, Lucy realises that the challenge going forward is not so much which brother she will end up with, but whether any of them will survive the carnage long enough to decide . . .

Acts of Modernity: The Historical Novel and Effective Communication, 1814–1901 (Ashgate Series in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Studies)

by David Buchanan

In Acts of Modernity, David Buchanan reads nineteenth-century historical novels from Scotland, America, France, and Canada as instances of modern discourse reflective of community concerns and methods that were transatlantic in scope. Following on revolutionary events at home and abroad, the unique combination of history and romance initiated by Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) furthered interest in the transition to and depiction of the nation-state. Established and lesser-known novelists reinterpreted the genre to describe the impact of modernization and to propose coping mechanisms, according to interests and circumstances. Besides analysis of the chronotopic representation of modernity within and between national contexts, Buchanan considers how remediation enabled diverse communities to encounter popular historical novels in upmarket and downmarket forms over the course of the century. He pays attention to the way communication practices are embedded within and constitutive of the social lives of readers, and more specifically, to how cultural producers adapted the historical novel to dynamic communication situations. In these ways, Acts of Modernity investigates how the historical novel was repeatedly reinvented to effectively communicate the consequences of modernity as problem-solutions of relevance to people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Acts of Modernity: The Historical Novel and Effective Communication, 1814–1901 (Ashgate Series in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Studies)

by David Buchanan

In Acts of Modernity, David Buchanan reads nineteenth-century historical novels from Scotland, America, France, and Canada as instances of modern discourse reflective of community concerns and methods that were transatlantic in scope. Following on revolutionary events at home and abroad, the unique combination of history and romance initiated by Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) furthered interest in the transition to and depiction of the nation-state. Established and lesser-known novelists reinterpreted the genre to describe the impact of modernization and to propose coping mechanisms, according to interests and circumstances. Besides analysis of the chronotopic representation of modernity within and between national contexts, Buchanan considers how remediation enabled diverse communities to encounter popular historical novels in upmarket and downmarket forms over the course of the century. He pays attention to the way communication practices are embedded within and constitutive of the social lives of readers, and more specifically, to how cultural producers adapted the historical novel to dynamic communication situations. In these ways, Acts of Modernity investigates how the historical novel was repeatedly reinvented to effectively communicate the consequences of modernity as problem-solutions of relevance to people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Acts of Mutiny

by Derek Beaven

The second novel from the author of the critically acclaimed Newton’s Niece (1994).

Acts Of Naming: The Family Plot In Fiction

by Michael Ragussis

Michael Ragussis re-reads the novelistic tradition by arguing the acts of naming--bestowing, revealing, or earning a name; taking away, hiding, or prohibiting a name; slandering, or protecting and serving it--lie at the center of fictional plots from the 18th century to the present. Against the background of philosophic approaches to naming,Acts of Namingreveals the ways in which systems of naming are used to appropriate characters in novels as diverse asClarissa,Fanny Hill,Oliver Twist,Pierre,Tess of the d'Urbervilles,Remembrance of Things Past, andLolita, and identifies unnaming and renaming as the locus of power in the family's plot to control the child, and more particularly, to rape the daughter. His analysis also treats additional works by Cooper, Bront , Hawthorne, Eliot, Twain, Conrad, and Faulkner, extending the concept of the naming plot to reimagine the traditions of the novel, comparing American and British plots, female and male plots, inheritance and seduction plots, and so on.Acts of Namingends with a theoretical exploration of the "magical" power of naming in different eras and in different, even competing, forms of discourse.

Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction

by Michael Ragussis

Michael Ragussis re-reads the novelistic tradition by arguing the acts of naming--bestowing, revealing, or earning a name; taking away, hiding, or prohibiting a name; slandering, or protecting and serving it--lie at the center of fictional plots from the 18th century to the present. Against the background of philosophic approaches to naming, Acts of Naming reveals the ways in which systems of naming are used to appropriate characters in novels as diverse as Clarissa, Fanny Hill, Oliver Twist, Pierre, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Remembrance of Things Past, and Lolita, and identifies unnaming and renaming as the locus of power in the family's plot to control the child, and more particularly, to rape the daughter. His analysis also treats additional works by Cooper, Brontë, Hawthorne, Eliot, Twain, Conrad, and Faulkner, extending the concept of the naming plot to reimagine the traditions of the novel, comparing American and British plots, female and male plots, inheritance and seduction plots, and so on. Acts of Naming ends with a theoretical exploration of the "magical" power of naming in different eras and in different, even competing, forms of discourse.

Acts of Omission

by Terry Stiastny

Winner of the Paddy Power Political Novel of the Year1998: foreign minister Mark Lucas is in a dilemma. A disk containing the names of British informants to the Stasi has ended up in the hands of the government. Now he faces resistance from the diplomatic service who don't want him to return it to the Germans.Alex Rutherford, a young man working for the intelligence services, wakes up one morning with a hangover and a frightening memory that his computer is lost and, with it, the only copy of that disk.When the disk is delivered to the newspaper where journalist Anna Travers works, she finds herself unravelling not just a mystery, but many people's lives . . .Based on the true story of Stasi files of agents in the UK, Acts of Omission is suspenseful, exquisitely constructed and thought-provokingly topical - it is a novel about the leak of state secrets, the responsibility of newspapers, and the human cost of all of those.

Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance

by Nina Rapi Maya Chowdhry

The first volume to focus exclusively on lesbian performance work, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance draws on the experiences and expertise of a wide range of lesbian practitioners and theorists to explore the impact and influences of sexuality and gender on performance. It examines essays, dialogues, and performance texts from theater directors, performers, theorists, playwrights, and performance writers against social and cultural constructs and performance theories to produce a diverse and challenging portrait of lesbian live performance art. The book’s penetrating scope covers drag queens, lesbian vampires, representations of lesbian sex, solo artists, the art of collaboration, lesbian aesthetics, and lesbian playwrights writing straight and illustrates why live performance is one of the most dynamic forums in which women can create, control, and produce their work without artistic constraint.Acts of Passion explodes binary definitions of gender and sexuality by destabilizing familiar notions of the ‘real’and creating new production values and aesthetics in the process. The relationships between experience and expression, sexuality and cultural placing, context and artistic control, representation and self-representation become clearer as the book discusses: the manner in which women are represented as absent in the signifying system of patriarchal society how questions of purity, ‘authenticity,’and self-definition complicate the field of representation the power of lesbian dance performance to make the lesbian body culturally visible several ‘new wave’performers--creating work, getting seen, showing flesh, doing politics, and making money the projections, preconceptions, expectations, and general baggage attached to the performing lesbian body what the term ‘lesbian playwright’means within contemporary culture ‘It’s Queer Up North’--a British National Arts Organization the arguments for and against mainstreaming lesbian performanceAnyone interested in theater and performance, cultural studies, gender issues, and the politics of ‘positive representation’--whether playwright, performer, director, writer, academic, student, or theatre goer--will find Acts of Passion a powerful step in wrenching the power of representation away from the dominant culture. Defiant, saucy, sexy, and smart, the contributors appropriate their own spaces, identities, crafts, and languages, both within this book and without.

Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance

by Nina Rapi Maya Chowdhry

The first volume to focus exclusively on lesbian performance work, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance draws on the experiences and expertise of a wide range of lesbian practitioners and theorists to explore the impact and influences of sexuality and gender on performance. It examines essays, dialogues, and performance texts from theater directors, performers, theorists, playwrights, and performance writers against social and cultural constructs and performance theories to produce a diverse and challenging portrait of lesbian live performance art. The book’s penetrating scope covers drag queens, lesbian vampires, representations of lesbian sex, solo artists, the art of collaboration, lesbian aesthetics, and lesbian playwrights writing straight and illustrates why live performance is one of the most dynamic forums in which women can create, control, and produce their work without artistic constraint.Acts of Passion explodes binary definitions of gender and sexuality by destabilizing familiar notions of the ‘real’and creating new production values and aesthetics in the process. The relationships between experience and expression, sexuality and cultural placing, context and artistic control, representation and self-representation become clearer as the book discusses: the manner in which women are represented as absent in the signifying system of patriarchal society how questions of purity, ‘authenticity,’and self-definition complicate the field of representation the power of lesbian dance performance to make the lesbian body culturally visible several ‘new wave’performers--creating work, getting seen, showing flesh, doing politics, and making money the projections, preconceptions, expectations, and general baggage attached to the performing lesbian body what the term ‘lesbian playwright’means within contemporary culture ‘It’s Queer Up North’--a British National Arts Organization the arguments for and against mainstreaming lesbian performanceAnyone interested in theater and performance, cultural studies, gender issues, and the politics of ‘positive representation’--whether playwright, performer, director, writer, academic, student, or theatre goer--will find Acts of Passion a powerful step in wrenching the power of representation away from the dominant culture. Defiant, saucy, sexy, and smart, the contributors appropriate their own spaces, identities, crafts, and languages, both within this book and without.

Acts of Poetry: American Poets' Theater and the Politics of Performance

by Heidi R Bean

American poets’ theater emerged in the postwar period alongside the rich, performance-oriented poetry and theater scenes that proliferated on the makeshift stages of urban coffee houses, shared apartments, and underground theaters, yet its significance has been largely overlooked by critics. Acts of Poetry shines a spotlight on poets’ theater’s key groups, practitioners, influencers, and inheritors, such as the Poets’ Theatre, the Living Theatre, Gertrude Stein, Bunny Lang, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Carla Harryman, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Heidi R. Bean demonstrates the importance of poets’ theater in the development of twentieth-century theater and performance poetry, and especially evolving notions of the audience’s role in performance, and in narratives of the relationship between performance and everyday life. Drawing on an extensive archive of scripts, production materials, personal correspondence, theater records, interviews, manifestoes, editorials, and reviews, the book captures critical assessments and behind-the-scenes discussions that enrich our understanding of the intertwined histories of American theater and American poetry in the twentieth century.

Acts of supremacy (Studies in Imperialism #17)

by J. S. Bratton Richard Allen Cave Breandan Gregory Heidi J. Holder Michael Pickering

Imperialist discourse interacted with regional and class discourses. Imperialism's incorporation of Welsh, Scots and Irish identities, was both necessary to its own success and one of its most powerful functions in terms of the control of British society. Most cultures have a place for the concept of heroism, and for the heroic figure in narrative fiction; stage heroes are part of the drama's definition of self, the exploration and understanding of personal identity. Theatrical and quasi-theatrical presentations, whether in music hall, clubroom, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre or the streets and ceremonial spaces of the capital, contributed to that much-discussed national mood. This book examines the theatre as the locus for nineteenth century discourses of power and the use of stereotype in productions of the Shakespearean history canon. It discusses the development of the working class and naval hero myth of Jack Tar, the portrayal of Ireland and the Irish, and the portrayal of British India on the spectacular exhibition stage. The racial implications of the ubiquitous black-face minstrelsy are focused upon. The ideology cluster which made up the imperial mindset had the capacity to re-arrange and re-interpret history and to influence the portrayal of the tragic or comic potential of personal dilemmas. Though the British may have prided themselves on having preceded America in the abolition of slavery and thus outpacing Brother Jonathan in humanitarian philanthropy, abnegation of hierarchisation and the acceptance of equality of status between black and white ethnic groups was not part of that achievement.

Acts of supremacy (Studies in Imperialism #17)

by Michael Pickering Richard Cave J. Bratton Brendan Gregory

Imperialist discourse interacted with regional and class discourses. Imperialism's incorporation of Welsh, Scots and Irish identities, was both necessary to its own success and one of its most powerful functions in terms of the control of British society. Most cultures have a place for the concept of heroism, and for the heroic figure in narrative fiction; stage heroes are part of the drama's definition of self, the exploration and understanding of personal identity. Theatrical and quasi-theatrical presentations, whether in music hall, clubroom, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre or the streets and ceremonial spaces of the capital, contributed to that much-discussed national mood. This book examines the theatre as the locus for nineteenth century discourses of power and the use of stereotype in productions of the Shakespearean history canon. It discusses the development of the working class and naval hero myth of Jack Tar, the portrayal of Ireland and the Irish, and the portrayal of British India on the spectacular exhibition stage. The racial implications of the ubiquitous black-face minstrelsy are focused upon. The ideology cluster which made up the imperial mindset had the capacity to re-arrange and re-interpret history and to influence the portrayal of the tragic or comic potential of personal dilemmas. Though the British may have prided themselves on having preceded America in the abolition of slavery and thus outpacing Brother Jonathan in humanitarian philanthropy, abnegation of hierarchisation and the acceptance of equality of status between black and white ethnic groups was not part of that achievement.

Acts of the Assassins

by Richard Beard

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZEA charismatic cult leader is dead. One by one his followers are being assassinated. Enter Gallio.Gallio does counter-insurgency. But the theft of a body he’s supposed to be guarding ruins his career. Years later, the file is reopened when a second body appears. Gallio is called back by headquarters and ordered to track down everyone involved the first time round. The only problem is they keep dying, in ever more grotesque and violent ways. How can Gallio stay ahead of the game when the game keeps changing?

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