Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader

Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader PDF Author: Efterpi Mitsi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350014176
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader offers an accessible and thought-provoking guide to this complex problem play, surveying its key themes and evolving critical preoccupations. Considering its generic ambiguity and experimentalism, it also provides a uniquely detailed and up-to-date history of the play's stage performance from Dryden's rewriting up to Mark Ravenhill and Elizabeth LeCompte's controversial 2012 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Wooster Group. Moving through to four new critical essays, the guide opens up fresh perspectives on the play's iconoclastic nature and its key themes, ranging from issues of gender and sexuality to Elizabethan politics, from the uses of antiquity to questions of cultural translation, with particular attention paid on Troilus' “Greekness”. The volume finishes with a helpful guide to critical and web-based resources. Discussing the ways in which this challenging and acerbic play can be brought to life in the classroom, it suggests performance-based strategies, designed to engage with the dramaturgical and theatrical dimensions of the text; close-reading exercises with an emphasis on rhetoric, metaphor and the practice of “troping”; and a series of tools designed to situate the play in a range of contexts, including its classical and critical frameworks.

Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader

Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader PDF Author: Efterpi Mitsi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350014176
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader offers an accessible and thought-provoking guide to this complex problem play, surveying its key themes and evolving critical preoccupations. Considering its generic ambiguity and experimentalism, it also provides a uniquely detailed and up-to-date history of the play's stage performance from Dryden's rewriting up to Mark Ravenhill and Elizabeth LeCompte's controversial 2012 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Wooster Group. Moving through to four new critical essays, the guide opens up fresh perspectives on the play's iconoclastic nature and its key themes, ranging from issues of gender and sexuality to Elizabethan politics, from the uses of antiquity to questions of cultural translation, with particular attention paid on Troilus' “Greekness”. The volume finishes with a helpful guide to critical and web-based resources. Discussing the ways in which this challenging and acerbic play can be brought to life in the classroom, it suggests performance-based strategies, designed to engage with the dramaturgical and theatrical dimensions of the text; close-reading exercises with an emphasis on rhetoric, metaphor and the practice of “troping”; and a series of tools designed to situate the play in a range of contexts, including its classical and critical frameworks.

Troilus and Cressida

Troilus and Cressida PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Troilus (Legendary character)
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Merchant of Venice: A Critical Reader

The Merchant of Venice: A Critical Reader PDF Author: Sarah Hatchuel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350082309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: - Essays on the play's critical and performance history - A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play - A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice has often been labelled a 'problem play', and throughout the ages it has been an object of both fascination and repulsion. Without neglecting the socio-political and religious issues that are at the heart of the play, this collection of critical essays invites readers to rediscover the variety of approaches that this multifaceted work calls for, exploring its gender aspects, its rich mythological background, its legal matters and the ways in which it has been adapted to the screen. Essays consider the play in relation to its sources, genre and religion, historical and socio-political context and its critical reception and performance history.

Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage

Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage PDF Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514628
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
No story was more interesting to Shakespeare and his contemporaries than that of Troy, partly because the story of Troy was in a sense the story of England, since the Trojan prince Aeneas was supposedly the ancestor of the Tudors. This book explores the wide range of allusions to Greece and Troy in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, looking not only at plays actually set in Greece or Troy but also those which draw on characters and motifs from Greek mythology and the Trojan War. Texts covered include Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles and The Tempest as well as plays by other authors of the period including Marlowe, Chettle, Ford and Beaumont and Fletcher.

Shakespeare and Forgetting

Shakespeare and Forgetting PDF Author: Peter Holland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350211508
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
What does it signify when a Shakespearean character forgets something or when Hamlet determines to 'wipe away all trivial fond records'? How might forgetting be an act to be performed, or be linked to forgiveness, such as when in The Winter's Tale Cleomenes encourages Leontes to 'forget your evil. / With them, forgive yourself'? And what do we as readers and audiences forget of Shakespeare's works and of the performances we watch? This is the first book devoted to a broad consideration of how Shakespeare explores the concept of forgetting and how forgetting functions in performance. A wide-ranging study of how Shakespeare dramatizes forgetting, it offers close readings of Shakespeare's plays, considering what Shakespeare forgot and what we forget about Shakespeare. The book touches on an equally broad range of forgetting theory from antiquity through to the present day, of forgetting in recent novels and films, and of creative ways of making sense of how our world constructs the cultural meaning of and anxiety about forgetting. Drawing on dozens of productions across the history of Shakespeare on stage and film, the book explores Shakespeare's dramaturgy, from characters who forget what they were about to say, to characters who leave the stage never to return, from real forgetting to performed forgetting, from the mad to the powerful, from playgoers to Shakespeare himself.

War on the Human

War on the Human PDF Author: Konstantinos Blatanis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443893781
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays in this collection explore the question of the human, both as a contested concept and as it relates to, and functions within, the wider global conjuncture. The authors explore the theoretical underpinnings of the term “human,” inviting the reader to reflect upon the contemporary human condition, to identify opportunities and threats in the changes ahead, and to determine what aspects of our species we should abandon or strive to maintain. The volume approaches these ideas from a myriad of perspectives, but the authors are united in their abstention from rejecting humanism outright or, indeed, fully endorsing posthumanism‘s teleological narrative of accelerated progress and perfectability. Instead, the authors argue that the term “human” itself is better understood as a concept perpetually undergoing revision, and is necessarily subject to scrutiny. The contributors here are thus concerned with investigating the following questions: What does it mean to be human, or to have a self? What is the current place or status of the human in the contemporary world? As technology is increasingly used to modify our bodies and minds, to what extent should we alter – and how can we improve – our very understanding of human nature? The authors contend that literature is the art form best placed to answer these questions. In its dynamism and discursiveness, literature has the capacity to both reflect dominant discourses and ideologies, as well as to generate and even anticipate social change; to critique and refine conventional ideas and existing cultural modes, and to envision new possibilities for the future. The human and its literary representation, in other words, are inherently intertwined.

Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology: A Dictionary

Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology: A Dictionary PDF Author: Janice Valls-Russell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350125881
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why does Bassanio compare himself to Jason? What is Hecuba to Hamlet? Is the mechanicals' staging of the Pyramus and Thisbe story funny or sad? This dictionary elucidates Shakespeare's use of mythological references in an early modern context, while bringing them to life for today's audiences and readers, at a time of renewed critical interest in the reception of the classics and fascination with classical mythology in popular culture. It is also a precious tool for practitioners who may not always know quite what to make of mythological references. Mythological figures, creatures, places and stories crowd Shakespeare's plays and poems, featuring as allusions, poetic analogies, inset shows, scene settings and characters or plots in their own right. Most of these references were familiar to Shakespeare's spectators and readers, who knew them from the writings of Ovid, Virgil and other classical authors, or indirectly through translations, commentaries, ballads and iconography. This dictionary illustrates how, far from being isolated, a mythological reference may resonate with the poetics of the text and its structure, cast light on characters and contexts, and may therefore be worth exploring onstage in a variety of ways. The 200 headings correspond to words and names actually used by Shakespeare: individual figures (Dido, Venus, Hercules), categories (Amazons, Centaurs, nymphs, satyrs), places (Colchos, Troy). Medium and longer entries also cover early modern usage and critical analysis in a cross-disciplinary approach that includes reception, textual, performance, gender and political studies.

The Testament of Cresseid

The Testament of Cresseid PDF Author: Robert Henryson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107636264
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 43

Get Book Here

Book Description
Originally published in 1926, this volume contains the full text of The Testament of Cresseid by Scottish poet Robert Henryson.

The J. Hillis Miller Reader

The J. Hillis Miller Reader PDF Author: Joseph Hillis Miller
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804750561
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 470

Get Book Here

Book Description
This anthology exhibits the diversity, inventiveness, and intellectual energy of the writings of J. Hillis Miller, the most significant North American literary critic of the twentieth century. From the 1950s onward, Miller has made invaluable contributions to our understanding of the practice and theory of literary criticism, the ethics and responsibilities of teaching and reading, and the role of literature in the modern world. He has also shown successive generations of scholars and students the necessity of comprehending the relationship between philosophy and literature. Divided into six sections, the volume provides more than twenty significant extracts from Miller’s works. In addition, there is a new interview with Miller, as well as a series of specially commissioned critical responses to Miller’s work by a number of the leading figures in literary and cultural studies today. Following a comprehensive critical introduction by the editor, each section has a brief introduction, directing the reader toward pertinent themes. There is also a comprehensive bibliography and a chronology of Miller’s professional life and activities. This reader, the first of Miller's work in English, provides an indispensable overview and introduction to one of the most original critical voices to have emerged since the inception of the teaching of English and American literature in universities in the English-speaking world.

Troilus and Criseyde, with Facing-page Il Filostrato

Troilus and Criseyde, with Facing-page Il Filostrato PDF Author: Geoffrey Chaucer
Publisher: Norton Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780393927559
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 628

Get Book Here

Book Description
The editor's lucid introduction, marginal glosses, and explanatory annotations make Troilus and Criseyde easily accessible to students with no prior knowledge of Chaucer or Middle English. Also included is Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, the poignant "sequel" to Troilus and Criseyde from fifteenth-century Scotland. "Criticism" includes ten essays by a diverse group of distinguished Chaucerians, among them C. S. Lewis, E. Talbot Donaldson, Karla Taylor, Lee Patterson, and Jill Mann, that illuminate the major scholarly issues raised by this complex and challenging poem. A Glossary and Selected Bibliography are also included