Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709-1900

Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709-1900 PDF Author: Alan R. Young
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137941
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This book examines the manner in which Shakespeare's Hamlet was perceived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and represented in the available visual media. The more than 2,000 visual images of Hamlet that the author has identified both reflected the critical reception of the play and simultaneously influenced the history of the ever-changing constructed cultural phenomenon that we refer to as Shakespeare. The visual material considered in this study offers a unique perspective that complements biographical, critical, and theater history studies by showing how a broad spectrum of the literate and not-so-literate absorbed and responded to Shakespeare's works, not necessarily in academic libraries or at play performances, but in their homes, when browsing in print shops, when reading in coffee houses, or (a far rarer experience) when visiting an art gallery or exhibition.

Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709-1900

Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709-1900 PDF Author: Alan R. Young
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137941
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Get Book

Book Description
This book examines the manner in which Shakespeare's Hamlet was perceived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and represented in the available visual media. The more than 2,000 visual images of Hamlet that the author has identified both reflected the critical reception of the play and simultaneously influenced the history of the ever-changing constructed cultural phenomenon that we refer to as Shakespeare. The visual material considered in this study offers a unique perspective that complements biographical, critical, and theater history studies by showing how a broad spectrum of the literate and not-so-literate absorbed and responded to Shakespeare's works, not necessarily in academic libraries or at play performances, but in their homes, when browsing in print shops, when reading in coffee houses, or (a far rarer experience) when visiting an art gallery or exhibition.

Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare

Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare PDF Author: Richard Meek
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351915940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This book examines Shakespeare's fascination with the art of narrative and the visuality of language. Richard Meek complicates our conception of Shakespeare as either a 'man of the theatre' or a 'literary dramatist', suggesting ways in which his works themselves debate the question of text versus performance. Beginning with an exploration of the pictorialism of Shakespeare's narrative poems, the book goes on to examine several moments in Shakespeare's dramatic works when characters break off the action to describe an absent, 'offstage' event, place or work of art. Meek argues that Shakespeare does not simply prioritise drama over other forms of representation, but rather that he repeatedly exploits the interplay between different types of mimesis - narrative, dramatic and pictorial - in order to beguile his audiences and readers. Setting Shakespeare's works in their literary and rhetorical contexts, and engaging with contemporary literary theory, the book offers new readings of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale. The book will be of particular relevance to readers interested in the relationship between verbal and visual art, theories of representation and mimesis, Renaissance literary and rhetorical culture, and debates regarding Shakespeare's status as a literary dramatist.

Talking the Walk & Walking the Talk

Talking the Walk & Walking the Talk PDF Author: Marc Shell
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823256855
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This book argues that we should regard walking and talking in a single rhythmic vision. In doing so, it contributes to the theory of prosody, our understanding of respiration and looking, and, in sum, to the particular links, across the board, between the human characteristics of bipedal walking and meaningful talk. The author first introduces the philosophical, neurological, anthropological, and aesthetic aspects of the subject in historical perspective, then focuses on rhetoric and introduces a tension between the small and large issues of rhythm. He thereupon turns his attention to the roles of breathing in poetry—as a life-and-death matter, with attention to beats and walking poems. This opens onto technical concepts from the classical traditions of rhetoric and philology. Turning to the relationship between prosody and motion, he considers both animals and human beings as both ostensibly able-bodied creatures and presumptively disabled ones. Finally, he looks at dancing and writing as aspects of walking and talking, with special attention to motion in Arabic and Chinese calligraphy. The final chapters of the book provide a series of interrelated representative case studies.

Shakespeare and the Power of the Face

Shakespeare and the Power of the Face PDF Author: James A. Knapp
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317056388
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Throughout his plays, Shakespeare placed an extraordinary emphasis on the power of the face to reveal or conceal moral character and emotion, repeatedly inviting the audience to attend carefully to facial features and expressions. The essays collected here disclose that an attention to the power of the face in Shakespeare’s England helps explain moments when Shakespeare’s language of the self becomes intertwined with his language of the face. As the range of these essays demonstrates, an attention to Shakespeare’s treatment of faces has implications for our understanding of the historical and cultural context in which he wrote, as well as the significance of the face for the ongoing interpretation and production of the plays. Engaging with a variety of critical strands that have emerged from the so-called turn to the body, the contributors to this volume argue that Shakespeare’s invitation to look to the face for clues to inner character is not an invitation to seek a static text beneath an external image, but rather to experience the power of the face to initiate reflection, judgment, and action. The evidence of the plays suggests that Shakespeare understood that this experience was extremely complex and mysterious. By turning attention to the face, the collection offers important new analyses of a key feature of Shakespeare’s dramatic attention to the part of the body that garnered the most commentary in early modern England. By bringing together critics interested in material culture studies with those focused on philosophies of self and other and historians and theorists of performance, Shakespeare and the Power of the Face constitutes a significant contribution to our growing understanding of attitudes towards embodiment in Shakespeare’s England.

Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Fiona Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521898609
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
This book examines Shakespeare's influence and popularity in all aspects of eighteenth-century literature, culture and society.

The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History

The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History PDF Author: David Wiles
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521766362
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
A wide-ranging set of essays that explain what theatre history is and why we need to engage with it.

Relational Designs in Literature and the Arts

Relational Designs in Literature and the Arts PDF Author:
Publisher: Brill
ISBN: 9401208565
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
This collection focuses on texts that address the other arts – from painting to photography, from the stage to the screen, and from avant-garde experiments to mass culture. Despite their diversity of object and approach, the essays in Relational Designs coalesce around the argument that representations are defined by relations and dynamics, rather than intrinsic features. This rationale is supported by the discourses and methodologies favoured by the book’s contributors: their approaches offer a cross section of the intellectual and critical environment of our time. The book illustrates the critical possibilities that derive from the broad range of modes of inquiry - poststructuralist criticism, gender studies, postcolonial studies, new historicism – that the book’s four sections bring to bear on a wealth of intermedial practices. But Relational Designs compounds such critical emphases with the voice of the practitioner: the book is rounded off by an interview in which a contemporary novelist discusses her attraction to the other arts in terms that extend the book’s insights and bridge the gap between academic discourse and artistic practice.

Hamlet: The State of Play

Hamlet: The State of Play PDF Author: Sonia Massai
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350117749
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This collection brings together emerging and established scholars to explore fresh approaches to Shakespeare's best-known play. Hamlet has often served as a testing ground for innovative readings and new approaches. Its unique textual history – surviving as it does in three substantially different early versions – means that it offers an especially complex and intriguing case-study for histories of early modern publishing and the relationship between page and stage. Similarly, its long history of stage and screen revival, creative appropriation and critical commentary offer rich materials for various forms of scholarship. The essays in Hamlet: The State of Play explore the play from a variety of different angles, drawing on contemporary approaches to gender, sexuality, race, the history of emotions, memory, visual and material cultures, performativity, theories and histories of place, and textual studies. They offer fresh approaches to literary and cultural analysis, offer accessible introductions to some current ways of exploring the relationship between the three early texts, and present analysis of some important recent responses to Hamlet on screen and stage, together with a set of approaches to the study of adaptation.

Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture

Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture PDF Author: Kimberly Rhodes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351555677
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Kimberly Rhodes's interdisciplinary book is the first to explore fully the complicated representational history of Shakespeare's Ophelia during the Victorian period. In nineteenth-century Britain, the shape, function and representation of women's bodies were typically regulated and interpreted by public and private institutions, while emblematic fictional female figures like Ophelia functioned as idealized templates of Victorian womanhood. Rhodes examines the widely disseminated representations of Ophelia, from works by visual artists and writers, to interpretations of her character in contemporary productions of Hamlet, revealing her as a nexus of the struggle for the female body's subjugation. By considering a broad range of materials, including works by Anna Lea Merritt, Elizabeth Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais, and paying special attention to images women produced, Rhodes illuminates Ophelia as a figure whose importance crossed class and national boundaries. Her analysis yields fascinating insights into 'high' and mass culture and enables transnational comparisons that reveal the compelling associations among Ophelia, gender roles, body image and national identity.

The Shakespearean World

The Shakespearean World PDF Author: Jill L Levenson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317696190
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 654

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Book Description
The Shakespearean World takes a global view of Shakespeare and his works, especially their afterlives. Constantly changing, the Shakespeare central to this volume has acquired an array of meanings over the past four centuries. "Shakespeare" signifies the historical person, as well as the plays and verse attributed to him. It also signifies the attitudes towards both author and works determined by their receptions. Throughout the book, specialists aim to situate Shakespeare’s world and what the world is because of him. In adopting a global perspective, the volume arranges thirty-six chapters in five parts: Shakespeare on stage internationally since the late seventeenth century; Shakespeare on film throughout the world; Shakespeare in the arts beyond drama and performance; Shakespeare in everyday life; Shakespeare and critical practice. Through its coverage, The Shakespearean World offers a comprehensive transhistorical and international view of the ways this Shakespeare has not only influenced but has also been influenced by diverse cultures during 400 years of performance, adaptation, criticism, and citation. While each chapter is a freshly conceived introduction to a significant topic, all of the chapters move beyond the level of survey, suggesting new directions in Shakespeare studies – such as ecology, tourism, and new media – and making substantial contributions to the field. This volume is an essential resource for all those studying Shakespeare, from beginners to advanced specialists.