Worldmaking

Worldmaking PDF Author: Tom Clark
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027266166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1978, Nelson Goodman explored the relation of “worlds” to language and literature, formulating the term, “worldmaking” to suggest that many other worlds can as plausibly exist as the “world” we know right now. We cannot catch or know “the world” as such: all we can catch are the world versions - descriptions, views or workings of the world – that are expressed in symbolic systems (words, music, dancing, visual representations). Over the twenty-five years since then, creative works have played a crucial role in realigning, reshaping and renegotiating our understandings of how worlds can be made and preserved in the face of globalizing trends. The volume is divided into three sections, each engaging with worlds as malleable constructs. Central to all of the contributions is the question: how can we understand the relationships between natural, political, cultural, fictional, literary, linguistic and virtual worlds, and why does this matter?

Worldmaking

Worldmaking PDF Author: Tom Clark
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027266166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1978, Nelson Goodman explored the relation of “worlds” to language and literature, formulating the term, “worldmaking” to suggest that many other worlds can as plausibly exist as the “world” we know right now. We cannot catch or know “the world” as such: all we can catch are the world versions - descriptions, views or workings of the world – that are expressed in symbolic systems (words, music, dancing, visual representations). Over the twenty-five years since then, creative works have played a crucial role in realigning, reshaping and renegotiating our understandings of how worlds can be made and preserved in the face of globalizing trends. The volume is divided into three sections, each engaging with worlds as malleable constructs. Central to all of the contributions is the question: how can we understand the relationships between natural, political, cultural, fictional, literary, linguistic and virtual worlds, and why does this matter?

A Reference Guide for English Studies

A Reference Guide for English Studies PDF Author: Michael J. Marcuse
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520321871
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 2816

Get Book Here

Book Description


Western Drama through the Ages [2 volumes]

Western Drama through the Ages [2 volumes] PDF Author: Kimball King
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313090246
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 645

Get Book Here

Book Description
The West has a long and rich dramatic tradition, and its dramatic works typically reflect the social and political concerns of playwrights and spectators. This book surveys the Western dramatic tradition from Ancient Greece to modern America. Included are chapters on great eras of drama, such as the Renaissance; national theatres, such as the theatres of Latin America, Ireland, and Poland; important theatrical movements, such as musical theatre and African American drama; and influential theatre styles, such as realism, expressionism, and surrealism. Entries are written by leading authorities and cite works for further reading. Students of literature and drama will appreciate the book for its convenient overview of the Western theatrical tradition, while students of history and social studies will welcome its illumination of different cultures and traditions. Designed for students, the book overviews Western drama from Ancient Greece to modern America. Included are chapters on great eras of drama, such as the Renaissance; national theatres, such as the theatres of Latin America, Ireland, and Poland; important theatrical movements, such as musical theatre and African American drama; and influential theatre styles, such as realism, expressionism, and surrealism. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and offers an extended consideration of its topic and cites works for further reading. Students of drama and literature will value the book for its exploration of the Western theatrical tradition, while students of history and social studies will welcome its illumination of different cultures and traditions.

Fifteenth-Century Studies

Fifteenth-Century Studies PDF Author: William C. McDonald
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571130778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Get Book Here

Book Description
Founded in 1977 as the publication organ for the Fifteenth-Century Symposium, Fifteenth-Century Studies has appeared annually since then. It publishes essays on all aspects of life in the fifteenth century, including medicine, philosophy, painting, religion, science, philology, history, theater, ritual and custom, music, and poetry. The editors strive to do justice to the most contested medieval century, a period that is the stepchild of research. The period defies consensus on fundamental issues: some dispute, in fact, whether the fifteenth century belonged to the Middle Ages at all, arguing that it was a period of transition, a passage to modern times. At issue, therefore, is the very tenor of an age that stood under the tripartite influence of Gutenberg, the Turks, and Columbus. Volume 25 offers a rich palette of art, theology, literature, and aesthetics of the 15th century, ranging geographically from the British Isles to Tibet, and thematically from witch trials and beast epic to early modern science and a definition of courtliness. Four studies on theatre make dramatic art the point of emphasis in volume 25: Clifford Davidson's on mystery plays, Jörn Bockmann and Judith Klinger's on the English Secunda pastorum, Michelle M. Butler's on the York and Townley pageants, and Jean Marc Pastré's on the carneval plays. Included as standard features are Edelgard DuBruck's article on the current state of fifteenth-century research and a book review section. William C. McDonald is professor of German at the University of Virginia. Edelgard E. DuBruck is professor in the Modern Languages Department at Marygrove College, Detroit, Michigan.

Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage

Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage PDF Author: Jane Hwang Degenhardt
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748643206
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the threat of Christian conversion to Islam in twelve early modern English plays. In works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Massinger, and others, conversion from Christianity to Islam is represented as both tragic and erotic, as a fate worse than death and as a sexual seduction. Degenhardt examines the stage's treatment of this intercourse of faiths to reveal connections between sexuality, race, and confessional identity in early modern English drama and culture. In addition, she shows how England's encounter with Islam reanimated post-Reformation debates about the embodiment of Christian faith. As Degenhardt compellingly demonstrates, the erotics of conversion added fuel to the fires of controversies over Pauline universalism, Christian martyrdom, the efficacy of relics and rituals, and even the Knights of Malta.

A Monster with a Thousand Hands

A Monster with a Thousand Hands PDF Author: Amy J. Rodgers
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081229520X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Monster with a Thousand Hands makes visible a figure that has been largely overlooked in early modern scholarship on theater and audiences: the discursive spectator, an entity distinct from the actual bodies attending early modern English playhouses. Amy J. Rodgers demonstrates how the English commercial theater's rapid development and prosperity altered the lexicon for describing theatergoers and the processes of engagement that the theater was believed to cultivate. In turn, these changes influenced and produced a cultural projection—the spectator—a figure generated by social practices rather than a faithful recording of those who attended the theater. The early modern discursive spectator did not merely develop alongside the phenomenological one, but played as significant a role in shaping early modern viewers and viewing practices as did changes to staging technologies, exhibition practices, and generic experimentation. While audience and film studies have theorized the spectator, these fields tend to focus on the role of twentieth-century media (film, television, and the computer) in producing mass-culture viewers. Such emphases lead to a misapprehension that the discursive spectator is modernity's creature. Fearing anachronism, early modern scholars have preferred demographic studies of audiences to theoretical engagements with the "effects" of spectatorship. While demographic work provides an invaluable snapshot, it cannot account for the ways that the spectator is as much an idea as a material presence. And, while a few studies pursue the dynamics that existed among author, text, and audience using critical tools sharpened by film studies, they tend to obscure how early modern culture understood the spectator. Rather than relying exclusively on historical or theoretical methodologies, A Monster with a Thousand Hands reframes spectatorship as a subject of inquiry shaped both by changes in entertainment technologies and the interaction of groups and individuals with different forms of cultural production.

Being and Having in Shakespeare

Being and Having in Shakespeare PDF Author: Katharine Eisaman Maus
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191648590
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Get Book Here

Book Description
What is the relation between who a person is, and what he or she has? A number of Shakespeare's plays engage with this question, elaborating a 'poetics of property' centering on questions of authority and entitlement, of inheritance and prodigality, and of the different opportunities afforded by access to land and to chattel property. Being and Having in Shakespeare considers these presentations of ownership and authority. Richard II and the Henry IV plays construe sovereignty as a form of property right, largely construing imperium, or the authority over persons in a polity, as a form of dominium, the authority of the propertyholder. Nonetheless, what property means changes considerably from Richard's reign to Henry's, as the imagined world of the plays is reconfigured to include an urban economy of chattel consumables. The Merchant of Venice, written between Richard II and Henry IV, part 1, reimagines, in comic terms, some of the same issues broached in the history plays. It focuses in particular on the problem of the daughter's inheritance and on the different property obligations among kin, friends, business associates, and spouses. In the figure of the 'vagabond king', theoretically entitled but actually dispossessed, Henry VI, part 2 and King Lear both coordinate problems of entitlement with conundrums about distributive justice, raising fundamental questions about property relations and social organization.

Marlowe's Ovid

Marlowe's Ovid PDF Author: M. L. Stapleton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317100336
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first book of its kind, Marlowe's Ovid explores and analyzes in depth the relationship between the Elegies-Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Amores-and Marlowe's own dramatic and poetic works. Stapleton carefully considers Marlowe's Elegies in the context of his seven known dramatic works and his epyllion, Hero and Leander, and offers a different way to read Marlowe. Stapleton employs Marlowe's rendition of the Amores as a way to read his seven dramatic productions and his narrative poetry while engaging with previous scholarship devoted to the accuracy of the translation and to bibliographical issues. The author focuses on four main principles: the intertextual relationship of the Elegies to the rest of the author's canon; its reflection of the influence of Erasmian humanist pedagogy, imitatio and aemulatio; its status as the standard English Amores until the Glorious Revolution, part of the larger phenomenon of pan-European Renaissance Ovidianism; its participation in the genre of the sonnet sequence. He explores how translating the Amores into the Elegies profited Marlowe as a writer, a kind of literary archaeology that explains why he may have commenced such an undertaking. Marlowe's Ovid adds to the body of scholarly work in a number of subfields, including classical influences in English literature, translation, sexuality in literature, early modern poetry and drama, and Marlowe and his milieu.

Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters

Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters PDF Author: K. Attar
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137465727
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing from theatre, English studies, and art history, among others, these essays discuss the challenges and rewards of teaching medieval and early modern texts in the 21st-century university. Topics range from the intersections of race, religion, gender, and nation in cross-cultural encounters to the use of popular culture as pedagogical tools.

Shakespeare / Nature

Shakespeare / Nature PDF Author: Charlotte Scott
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350259853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shakespeare / Nature sets new agendas for the study of nature in Shakespeare's work. Offering a rich exploration of the intersections between the human and non-human worlds, the chapters focus on the contested and persuasive language of nature, both as organic matter and cultural conditioning. Rooted in close textual analysis and historical acuity, this collection addresses Shakespeare's works through the many ways in which 'nature' performs, as a cultural category, a moral marker and a set of essential conditions through which the human may pass, as well as affect. Addressing the complex conditions of the play worlds, the chapters explore the assorted forms through which Shakespeare's nature makes sense of its narratives and supports, upholds or contests its story-telling. Over the course of the collection, the contributors examine plays including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, Timon of Athens and many more. They discuss them through the various lenses of philosophy, historicism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cosmography, geography, sexuality, linguistics, environmentalism, feminism and robotics, to provide new and nuanced readings of the intersectional terms of both meaning and matter. Approaching 'nature' in all its multiplicity, this collection sets out to examine the divergent and complex ways in which the human and non-human worlds intersect and the development of a language of symbiosis that attempts to both control and create the terms of human authority. It offers an entirely new approach to the subject of nature, bringing together disparate methods that have previously been pursued independently to offer a shared investment in the intersections between the human and non-human worlds and how these discourses shape and condition the emotional, organic, cultural and psychological landscapes of Shakespeare's play worlds.