Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521294553
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
This is the most extensively annotated edition of Macbeth currently available, offering a thorough reconsideration of one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. A full and accessible introduction studies the immediate theatrical and political contexts of Macbeth's composition, especially the Gunpowder Plot and the contemporary account of an early performance at the Globe. It treats such celebrated issues as whether the Witches compel Macbeth to murder; whether Lady Macbeth is herself a witch; whether Banquo is Macbeth's accomplice in crime and what criticism is levelled against Macduff. An extensive, well-illustrated account of the play in performance examines several cinematic versions, such as those by Kurosawa and Roman Polanski, and other dramatic adaptations. Several possible new sources are suggested, and the presence of Thomas Middleton's writing in the play is proposed. Appendixes contain additional text and accompanying music.
Author: Frank Byrne
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813171458
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
Becoming Bourgeois is the first study to focus on what historians have come to call the “middling sort,” the group falling between the mass of yeoman farmers and the planter class that dominated the political economy of the antebellum South. Historian Frank J. Byrne investigates the experiences of urban merchants, village storekeepers, small-scale manufacturers, and their families, as well as the contributions made by this merchant class to the South’s economy, culture, and politics in the decades before, and the years of, the Civil War. These merchant families embraced the South but were not of the South. At a time when Southerners rarely traveled far from their homes, merchants annually ventured forth on buying junkets to northern cities. Whereas the majority of Southerners enjoyed only limited formal instruction, merchant families often achieved a level of education rivaled only by the upper class—planters. The southern merchant community also promoted the kind of aggressive business practices that New South proponents would claim as their own in the Reconstruction era and beyond. Along with discussion of these modern approaches to liberal capitalism, Byrne also reveals the peculiar strains of conservative thought that permeated the culture of southern merchants. While maintaining close commercial ties to the North, southern merchants embraced the religious and racial mores of the South. Though they did not rely directly upon slavery for their success, antebellum merchants functioned well within the slave-labor system. When the Civil War erupted, southern merchants simultaneously joined Confederate ranks and prepared to capitalize on the war’s business opportunities, regardless of the outcome of the conflict. Throughout Becoming Bourgeois, Byrne highlights the tension between these competing elements of southern merchant culture. By exploring the values and pursuits of this emerging class, Byrne not only offers new insight into southern history but also deepens our understanding of the mutable ties between regional identity and the marketplace in nineteenth-century America.
Author:
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Category : Phrenology
Languages : en
Pages : 1000
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Book Description
Author: Don H. Doyle
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146961717X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
Cities were the core of a changing economy and culture that penetrated the rural hinterland and remade the South in the decades following the Civil War. In New Men, New Cities, New South, Don Doyle argues that if the plantation was the world the slaveholders made, the urban centers of the New South formed the world made by merchants, manufacturers, and financiers. The book's title evokes the exuberant rhetoric of New South boosterism, which continually extolled the "new men" who dominated the city-building process, but Doyle also explores the key role of women in defining the urban upper class. Doyle uses four cities as case studies to represent the diversity of the region and to illuminate the responses businessmen made to the challenges and opportunities of the postbellum South. Two interior railroad centers, Atlanta and Nashville, displayed the most vibrant commercial and industrial energy of the region, and both cities fostered a dynamic class of entrepreneurs. These business leaders' collective efforts to develop their cities and to establish formal associations that served their common interests forged them into a coherent and durable urban upper class by the late nineteenth century. The rising business class also helped establish a new pattern of race relations shaped by a commitment to economic progress through the development of the South's human resources, including the black labor force. But the "new men" of the cities then used legal segregation to control competition between the races. Charleston and Mobile, old seaports that had served the antebellum plantation economy with great success, stagnated when their status as trade centers declined after the war. Although individual entrepreneurs thrived in both cities, their efforts at community enterprise were unsuccessful, and in many instances they remained outside the social elite. As a result, conservative ways became more firmly entrenched, including a system of race relations based on the antebellum combination of paternalism and neglect rather than segregation. Talent, energy, and investment capital tended to drain away to more vital cities. In many respects, as Doyle shows, the business class of the New South failed in its quest for economic development and social reform. Nevertheless, its legacy of railroads, factories, urban growth, and changes in the character of race relations shaped the world most southerners live in today.
Author: Gavin Hopps
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317061381
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 435
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Book Description
The relationship between literature and religion is one of the most groundbreaking and challenging areas of Romantic studies. Covering the entire field of Romanticism from its eighteenth-century origins in the writing of William Cowper and its proleptic stirrings in Paradise Lost to late-twentieth-century manifestations in the work of Wallace Stevens, the essays in this timely volume explore subjects such as Romantic attitudes towards creativity and its relation to suffering and religious apprehension; the allure of the 'veiled' and the figure of the monk in Gothic and Romantic writing; Miltonic light and inspiration in the work of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats; the relationship between Southey's and Coleridge's anti-Catholicism and definitions of religious faith in the Romantic period; the stammering of Romantic attempts to figure the ineffable; the emergence of a feminised Christianity and a gendered sublime; the development of Calvinism and its role in contemporary religious controversies. Its primary focus is the canonical Romantic poets, with a particular emphasis on Byron, whose work is most in need of critical re-evaluation given its engagement with the Christian and Islamic worlds and its critique of totalising religious and secular readings. The collection is an original and much-needed intervention in Romantic studies, bringing together the contextual awareness of recent historicist scholarship with the newly awakened interest in matters of form and an appreciation of the challenges of postmodern theory.
Author: Tanya Pollard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191533769
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England asks why Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights were so preoccupied with drugs and poisons and, at a deeper level, why both critics and supporters of the theater, as well as playwrights themselves, so frequently adopted a chemical vocabulary to describe the effects of the theater on audiences. Drawing upon original medical and literary research, Pollard shows that the potency of the link between drugs and plays in the period demonstrates a model of drama radically different than our own, a model in which plays exert a powerful impact on spectators' bodies as well as minds. Early modern physiology held that the imagination and emotions were part of the body, and exerted a material impact on it, yet scholars of medicine and drama alike have not recognised the consequences of this idea. Plays, which alter our emotions and thought, simultaneously change us physically. This book argues that the power of the theater in early modern England, as well as the striking hostility to it, stems from the widely held contemporary idea that drama acted upon the body as well as the mind. In yoking together pharmacy and theater, this book offers a new model for understanding the relationship between texts and bodies. Just as bodies are constituted in part by the imaginative fantasies they consume, the theater's success (and notoriety) depends on its power over spectators' bodies. Drugs, which conflate concerns about unreliable appearances and material danger, evoked fascination and fear in this period by identifying a convergence point between the imagination and the body, the literary and the scientific, the magical and the rational. This book explores that same convergence point, and uses it to show the surprising physiological powers attributed to language, and especially to the embodied language of the theater.
Author: Michelle Levy
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1554810884
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 650
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Book Description
Book History has emerged as one of the most exciting new interdisciplinary fields of study in the humanities. By focusing on the production, circulation and reception of the book in all its forms, it has transformed the study of history, literature and culture. The Broadview Book History Reader is the most complete and up-to-date introduction available to this area of study. The reader reprints 33 key essays in the field, grouped conceptually and provided with headnotes, explanatory footnotes, an introduction, a chronology, and a glossary of terms.
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Category : Southern States
Languages : en
Pages : 718
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Book Description
Author: Charlotte Boyce
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135022062
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
When novels, plays and poems refer to food, they are often doing much more than we might think. Recent critical thinking suggests that depictions of food in literary works can help to explain the complex relationship between the body, subjectivity and social structures. A History of Food in Literature provides a clear and comprehensive overview of significant episodes of food and its consumption in major canonical literary works from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. This volume contextualises these works with reference to pertinent historical and cultural materials such as cookery books, diaries and guides to good health, in order to engage with the critical debate on food and literature and how ideas of food have developed over the centuries. Organised chronologically and examining certain key writers from every period, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens, this book's enlightening critical analysis makes it relevant for anyone interested in the study of food and literature.
Author: Domenico Lovascio
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526157373
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
John Fletcher’s Rome is the first book to explore John Fletcher’s engagement with classical antiquity. Like Shakespeare and Jonson, Fletcher wrote, alone or in collaboration, a number of Roman plays: Bonduca, Valentinian, The False One and The Prophetess. Unlike Shakespeare’s or Jonson’s, however, Fletcher’s Roman plays have seldom been the subject of critical discussion. Domenico Lovascio’s ground-breaking study examines these plays as a group for the first time, thus identifying disorientation as the unifying principle of Fletcher’s portrayal of imperial Rome. John Fletcher’s Rome argues that Fletcher’s dramatization of ancient Rome exudes a sense of detachment and scepticism as to the authority of Roman models resulting from his irreverent approach to the classics. The book sheds new light on Fletcher’s intellectual life, his vision of history, and the interconnections between these plays and the rest of his canon.
