Author: Catherine Belsey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1349150479
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
In a harsh, uncaring world the family is valued as a source of warmth and stability. At the same time, we are increasingly compelled to recognize that families can be oppressive both physically and emotionally. Now for the first time in paperback, Catherine Belsey's richly illustrated account of Shakespeare's plays, in conjunction with early modern images of Adam and Eve, locates the construction of family values in cultural history and politics. She shows the pleasures and anxieties generated in the period by the domestication of desire, parental love and cruelty and the relations between siblings - and discusses how Shakespeare's plays explore these themes.
Author: Catherine Belsey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134527217
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
What makes us the people we are? Culture evidently plays a part, but how large a part? Is culture alone the source of our identities? Some have argued that human nature is the foundation of culture, others that culture is the foundation of human identity. Catherine Belsey calls for a more nuanced, relational account of what it is to be human, and in doing so puts forward a significant new theory of culture. Culture and the Real explains with Professor Belsey's characteristic lucidity the views of recent theorists, including Jean-François Lyotard, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek, as well as their debt to the earlier work of Kant and Hegel, in order to take issue with their accounts of what it is to be human. To explore the human, she demonstrates, is to acknowledge the relationship between culture and what we don't know: not the familiar world picture presented to us by culture as 'reality', but the unsayable, or the strange region that lies beyond culture, which Lacan has called 'the real'. Culture, she argues, registers a sense of its own limits in ways more subtle than the theorists allow. This volume builds on the insights of Belsey's influential Critical Practice to provide not only an accessible introduction to contemporary theories of what it is to be human, but a major new contribution to current debates about culture. Taking examples from film and art, fiction and poetry, Culture and the Real is essential reading for those studying or working in cultural criticism, within the fields of English, Cultural Studies, Film Studies and Art History.
Author: Heather Dubrow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521543491
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
This 1999 book examines Shakespeare's engagement with forms of deprivation which threatened domestic security in early modern England.
Author: Emma Whipday
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108614787
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Domestic tragedy was an innovative genre, suggesting that the lives and sufferings of ordinary people were worthy of the dramatic scope of tragedy. In this compelling study, Whipday revises the narrative of Shakespeare's plays to show how this genre, together with neglected pamphlets, ballads, and other forms of 'cheap print' about domestic violence, informed some of Shakespeare's greatest works. Providing a significant reappraisal of Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, the book argues that domesticity is central to these plays: they stage how societal and familial pressures shape individual agency; how the integrity of the house is associated with the body of the housewife; and how household transgressions render the home permeable. Whipday demonstrates that Shakespeare not only appropriated constructions of the domestic from domestic tragedies, but that he transformed the genre, using heightened language, foreign settings, and elite spheres to stage familiar domestic worlds.
Author: Andrew Mousley
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748691243
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
Revised throughout, the book includes: a new introduction which focuses attention on what is specific to literature's treatment of the human (as epitomised by Shakespeare); a section drawing on new work on literary genres as different forms of engagement
Author: B. Reynolds
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230505031
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
To 'rematerialize' in the sense of Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage is not to recover a lost material infrastructure, as Marx spoke of, nor is it to restore to some material existence its priority over the imaginary. Indeed, this collection of work by some of the most highly-regarded critics in Shakespeare studies does not offer a single theoretical stance on any of the various forms of critical materialism (Marxism, cultural materialism, new historicism, transversal poetics, gender studies, or performance criticism), but rather demonstrates that the materiality of Shakespeare is multidimensional and consists of the imagination, the intended, and the desired. Nothing returns in this rematerialization, unless it is a return in the sense of the repressed, which, when it comes back, comes back as something else. An all-star line-up of contributors includes Kate McLuskie, Terence Hawkes, Catherine Belsey and Doug Bruster.
Author: Nicholas Potter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137019093
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
Shakespeare's late plays are a 'mixed bag' with a common theme: from the fiendishly jealous Leontes to the saintly Pericles; from the ineffectual Cymbeline to the omnipotent Propspero; from the 'sprites and goblins' of The Tempest to the famous bear of The Winter's Tale, the characters have excited wonder and contempt while the range of incident is almost irresponsibly extravagant. Was Shakespeare losing his grip, or his interest, or both? Was he striking out in some bold new theatrical direction? This Guide provides a critical survey of the major debates and issues surrounding the late plays, from the earliest published accounts to the present day. Nicholas Potter offers a clear guiding narrative and an exploration of literary history, focusing on how criticism of these remarkable works, and attempts to make sense of them, have developed over the years.
Author: Andy Mousley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Re-Humanising Shakespeare argues that although Shakespeare himself contributed to the uncertainties of modern living, his work can still serve as a source of existential wisdom and guidance.
Author: M. Jones
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230597165
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance is an original study at the interface of a historicizing literary criticism and the study of modern performance. In a critical climate that views the cultural object of performance as authentic in itself, is there any point in exploring a script's original history? The writer argues for a dialogic understanding of Shakespeare's plays in performance relative to unresolved issues of modernity, in a study of modern productions on stage and screen.
Author: Lynette Hunter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317089286
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
Through exciting and unconventional approaches, including critical/historical, printing/publishing and performance studies, this study mines Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to produce new insights into the early modern family, the individual, and society in the context of early modern capitalism. Inspired by recent work in cultural materialism and the material book, it also foregrounds the ways in which the contexts and the text itself become available to the reader today. The opening material on critical/historical approaches focuses on the way that readers have frequently read and played the text to explore issues that cluster around the family, marriage, gender and sexuality. Chapter two, on the ways that actors today inhabit character and create behaviour, provides intertextual comment on acting in the early modern period, and the connections between acting and social behaviour that inform self-image and the performance of identity both then and now. The third chapter on printing/publishing approaches to the text offers a detective story about the differences between Quarto One and Quarto Two, that focuses on the curious appearance in Quarto Two of material related to the law at word, phrase, line and scene level. The next three chapters integrate a close study of the language of the play to negotiate its potential significance for the present in the areas of: Family, Marriage, Gender and Sexuality; Identity, Individualism and Humanism; and the Law, Religion and Medicine. Among the startling aspects of this book are that it: - takes the part of Juliet far more seriously than other criticism has tended to do, attributing to her agency and aspects of character that develop the part suddenly from girl to woman; - recognizes the way the play explores early modern identity, becoming a handbook for individualism and humanism in the private domestic setting of early capitalism; and - brings to light the least recognized element in the play at the moment, its demonstration of the emerging structures of state power, governance by law, the introduction of surveillance, detection and witness, and the formation of what we now call the 'subject'. The volume includes on DVD a scholarly edition with commentary of the text of Romeo & Juliet, which re-instates many of the original early modern versions of the play.
