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      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 1996

        In contact with the Gods?

        Directors talk theat

        by Maria M. Delgado, P. P. Heritage

        In 1994 the Arts Council of Great Britain brought together a number of theatre directors as part of the City of Drama celebrations. This is a collection of interviews and discussions with directors who have helped shape the development of theatre in the last 20 years. They include Peter Brook, Peter Stein, Augusto Boal, Jorge Lavelli, Lluis Pasqual, Lev Dodin, Maria Irene Fornes, Jonathan Miller, Jatinder Verma, Peter Sellars, Declan Donnellan, Ariane Mnouchkine, Ion Caramitru, Yukio Ninagawa and Robert Wilson. In addition to the art and craft of directing, there are discussions on multiculturalism; the "classical" repertoire; theatre companies and institutions; working in a foreign language; opera; Shakespeare; new technologies; the art of acting; design; international festivals; politics and aesthetics; the audience; and theatre and society. Finally, there is an epilogue by Peter Brook, Jonathan Miller and Oliver Sacks. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2016

        A Fig for Fortune by Anthony Copley

        A Catholic response to The Faerie Queene

        by Susannah Monta, J. B. Lethbridge, Susannah Monta

        Anthony Copley's A Fig for Fortune was the first major poetic response to Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Written by a Catholic Englishman with an uneasy relationship to the English regime, A Fig for Fortune offers a deeply contestatory, richly imagined answer to sixteenth-century England's greatest poem. Through its sophisticated response to Spenser, A Fig for Fortune challenges a contemporary literary culture in which Protestant habits of thought and representation were gaining dominance. This book comprises the poem's first scholarly edition. It offers a carefully annotated edition of the 2000-line poem, an overview of English Catholic history in the sixteenth century, a full biography of Anthony Copley, an assessment of his engagement with Spenser's Faerie Queene, and information on the book's early print history. Extensive support for student readers makes it possible to teach Copley's poem alongside The Faerie Queene for the first time. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2016

        Pastoral poetry of the English Renaissance

        An anthology

        by Sukanta Chaudhuri, J. B. Lethbridge, Sukanta Chaudhuri

        Renaissance pastoral poetry is gaining new interest for its distinctive imaginative vein, its varied allusive content, and the theoretical implications of the genre. This is by far the biggest ever anthology of English Renaissance pastoral poetry, with 277 pieces spanning two centuries. Spenser, Sidney, Jonson and Drayton are amply represented alongside their many contemporaries. There is a wide range of pastoral lyrics, weightier allusive pieces, and translations from classical and vernacular pastoral poetry; also, more unusually, pastoral ballads and poems set in all kinds of prose works. Each piece has been freshly edited from the original sources, with full apparatus and commentary. This book will be complemented by a second volume, to be published in 2017, which includes a book-length introduction, textual notes and analytic indices. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        August 1994

        Political Shakespeare

        Essays in cultural materialism

        by Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield

        The new wave of cultural materialists in Britain and new historicists in the United States here join forces to depose the sacred icon of the "eternal bard" and argue for a Shakespeare who meditates and exploits political, cultural and ideological forces. Ten years on, this second edition presents additional essays by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        November 2015

        Same–sex desire in early modern England, 1550–1735

        An anthology of literary texts and contexts

        by Marie H. Loughlin

        Balancing long-overlooked and well-known works from early modern England, Same-sex desire in early modern England, 1550-1735: An anthology of literary texts and contexts is a collection of English texts about homoerotic love, relationships, desires, and sexual acts. The anthology's core texts are selections from works of drama, fiction, romance, poetry, essays and translation. These core texts are carefully introduced and annotated, and supplemented with illuminating contextual material from other early modern disciplines such as law, medicine, and theology. Juxtaposing literary and non-literary representations of same-sex erotic desire, this anthology explores a rich tradition of works both celebrating and condemning same-sex erotic love.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        November 2015

        Same–sex desire in early modern England, 1550–1735

        An anthology of literary texts and contexts

        by Marie H. Loughlin

        Balancing long-overlooked and well-known works from early modern England, Same-sex desire in early modern England, 1550-1735: An anthology of literary texts and contexts is a collection of English texts about homoerotic love, relationships, desires, and sexual acts. The anthology's core texts are selections from works of drama, fiction, romance, poetry, essays and translation. These core texts are carefully introduced and annotated, and supplemented with illuminating contextual material from other early modern disciplines such as law, medicine, and theology. Juxtaposing literary and non-literary representations of same-sex erotic desire, this anthology explores a rich tradition of works both celebrating and condemning same-sex erotic love.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        November 2015

        Transporting Chaucer

        by Helen Barr

        This book draws on the work of the British sculptor Antony Gormley alongside more traditional literary scholarship to argue for new relationships between Chaucer's poetry and works by others. Chaucer's playfulness with textual history and chronology anticipates how his own work is figured in later (and earlier) texts. Conventional models of source and analogue study are re-energised to reveal unexpected, and sometimes unsettling, literary cohabitations and re-placements. The author presents innovative readings of relationships between medieval texts and early modern drama, and between literary texts and material culture. Associations between medieval architecture, pilgrim practice, manuscript illustration and the soundscapes of dramatic performance reposition how we read Chaucer's oeuvre and what gets made of it. An invaluable resource for scholars and students of all levels with an interest in medieval English literary studies and early modern drama, Transporting Chaucer offers a new approach to how we encounter texts through time.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        November 2015

        Transporting Chaucer

        by Helen Barr

        This book draws on the work of the British sculptor Antony Gormley alongside more traditional literary scholarship to argue for new relationships between Chaucer's poetry and works by others. Chaucer's playfulness with textual history and chronology anticipates how his own work is figured in later (and earlier) texts. Conventional models of source and analogue study are re-energised to reveal unexpected, and sometimes unsettling, literary cohabitations and re-placements. The author presents innovative readings of relationships between medieval texts and early modern drama, and between literary texts and material culture. Associations between medieval architecture, pilgrim practice, manuscript illustration and the soundscapes of dramatic performance reposition how we read Chaucer's oeuvre and what gets made of it. An invaluable resource for scholars and students of all levels with an interest in medieval English literary studies and early modern drama, Transporting Chaucer offers a new approach to how we encounter texts through time.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        July 2013

        The Henry VI plays

        by Stuart Hampton-Reeves, Carol Chillington Rutter

        The Henry VI plays are Shakespeare's earliest, most theatrically exciting plays and in their day, they were among his most popular works. In a story which stretches over thirty years, Shakespeare dramatises the fall of the House of Lancaster and creates some of his most compelling characters, among them the Queen Margaret and the wildly ambitious Richard, Duke of Gloucester (the future Richard III). Modern productions have become landmark works that have defined institutions such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the English Shakespeare Company. This book, the first major study of the Henry VI plays in performance, focuses on the cultural context of modern British productions on stage and screen which have explored Shakespeare's troubling depiction of England in crisis and related those themes to contemporaneous questions of national identity.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        November 2011

        The Humorous Magistrate (Arbury)

        by Edited by Margaret Jane Kidnie

        The Humorous Magistrate is a seventeenth-century satiric comedy extant in two highly distinctive manuscripts. This, the earliest and clearly working draft of the play is bound with three other plays (including The Emperor's Favourite, published by the Malone Society in 2010) in a volume in the library of the Newdigate family of Arbury Hall, Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The second version, showing yet another stage of revision not found in the Arbury manuscript and orientated towards performance, was purchased by the University of Calgary from the English antiquarian Edgar Osborne in 1972. The relationship between the manuscripts was discovered in 2005. The anonymous play has been attributed to John Newdigate III (1600-1642). Like The Emperor's Favourite, it takes aim at the court; its particular object of satire is governmental strategies under the Personal Rule of Charles I. The play appears in print for the first time in these separate editions. The volumes are illustrated with several plates, some provided for comparative purposes.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        October 2012

        Writers in Conflict in Sixteenth-Century France

        Essays in honour of Malcolm Quainton

        by Elizabeth Vinestock, David Foster

        These essays written to celebrate the distinguished career of Renassiance scholar, Professor Malcolm Quainton, confirm the idea that the sixteenth-century in France was deeply marked by conflict, but readers expecting to find a volume wholly devoted to studies of war and religious disputation will be intrigued to discover that these rare not the only topics discussed. A number of subtle analyses reveal the stresses of internal conflict experienced by writers and woven into the fabric of their compositions. The three sections focus respectively on living and writing in conflict, the Wars of Religion, and intertextuality as conflict. Subjects include Ronard, Baïf, Du Bellay, D'Aubigné, sonnets by Mary Queen of Scots and the political role of court festivities, while a previously unknown riposte to Clément Marot is first published here. This book will appeal to scholars and students of French language, literature and culture, and sixteenth-century European history.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        January 2009

        Three Renaissance usury plays

        The Three Ladies of London, Englishmen for My Money, The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl

        by Edited by Lloyd Kermode

        This book provides for the first time modern-spelling, fully annotated editions of three important Elizabeth and Jacobean 'usury plays' - The Three Ladies of London, Englishmen for My Money, The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl. The edition includes an extensive scholarly introduction to the attitudes toward money-lending in early modern England, and to the authors, texts and historical contexts of this drama. The plays included in this edition also represent examples of 'city plays' and 'alien plays', thus making them widely relevant to scholars and teachers in many areas of early modern studies. They are also gaining new appreciation in their own right. As befits a volume in the RPCL series, the edition is academically advanced to cater for specialised scholars. However, the introduction, editing and annotation remain accessible for undergraduates and theatregoers.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        July 2013

        Playing for time

        Stories of lost children, ghosts and the endangered present in contemporary theatre

        by Geraldine Cousin

        Playing for time explores connections between theatre time, the historical moment and fictional time. Geraldine Cousin persuasively argues that a crucial characteristic of contemporary British theatre is its preoccupation with instability and danger, and traces images of catastrophe and loss in a wide range of recent plays and productions. The diversity of the texts that are examined is a major strength of the book. In addition to plays by contemporary dramatists, Cousin analyses staged adaptations of novels, and productions of plays by Euripides, Strindberg and Priestley. A key focus is Stephen Daldry's award-winning revival of Priestley's An Inspector Calls, which is discussed in relation both to other Priestley 'time' plays and to Caryl Churchill's apocalyptic Far Away. Lost children are a recurring motif: Bryony Lavery's Frozen, for example, is explored in the context of the Soham murders (which took place while the play was in production at the National Theatre), whilst three virtually simultaneous productions of Euripides' Hecuba are interpreted with regard to the Beslan massacre of schoolchildren.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        July 2013

        Playing for time

        Stories of lost children, ghosts and the endangered present in contemporary theatre

        by Geraldine Cousin

        Playing for time explores connections between theatre time, the historical moment and fictional time. Geraldine Cousin persuasively argues that a crucial characteristic of contemporary British theatre is its preoccupation with instability and danger, and traces images of catastrophe and loss in a wide range of recent plays and productions. The diversity of the texts that are examined is a major strength of the book. In addition to plays by contemporary dramatists, Cousin analyses staged adaptations of novels, and productions of plays by Euripides, Strindberg and Priestley. A key focus is Stephen Daldry's award-winning revival of Priestley's An Inspector Calls, which is discussed in relation both to other Priestley 'time' plays and to Caryl Churchill's apocalyptic Far Away. Lost children are a recurring motif: Bryony Lavery's Frozen, for example, is explored in the context of the Soham murders (which took place while the play was in production at the National Theatre), whilst three virtually simultaneous productions of Euripides' Hecuba are interpreted with regard to the Beslan massacre of schoolchildren.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        July 2012

        Playing for time

        Stories of lost children, ghosts and the endangered present in contemporary theatre

        by Geraldine Cousin

        Playing for time explores connections between theatre time, the historical moment and fictional time. Geraldine Cousin persuasively argues that a crucial characteristic of contemporary British theatre is its preoccupation with instability and danger, and traces images of catastrophe and loss in a wide range of recent plays and productions. The diversity of the texts that are examined is a major strength of the book. In addition to plays by contemporary dramatists, Cousin analyses staged adaptations of novels, and productions of plays by Euripides, Strindberg and Priestley. A key focus is Stephen Daldry's award-winning revival of Priestley's An Inspector Calls, which is discussed in relation both to other Priestley 'time' plays and to Caryl Churchill's apocalyptic Far Away. Lost children are a recurring motif: Bryony Lavery's Frozen, for example, is explored in the context of the Soham murders (which took place while the play was in production at the National Theatre), whilst three virtually simultaneous productions of Euripides' Hecuba are interpreted with regard to the Beslan massacre of schoolchildren.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        July 2013

        Odoevsky's four pathways into modern fiction

        A comparative study

        by Neil Cornwell

        This book takes four stories by the Russian Romantic author Vladimir Odoevsky to illustrate 'pathways', developed further by subsequent writers, into modern fiction. Featured here are: the artistic (musical story), the rise of science fiction, psychic aspects of the detective story, and of confession in the novel. The four chapters also examine the development of the featured categories by a wide range of subsequent writers in fiction ranging from the Romantic period up to the present century. The study works backwards from Odoevsky's stories, noting respective previous examples or traditions, before proceeding to follow the 'pathways' observed into later Russian, English and comparative fiction. Whilst appealing to specialists in Russian and comparative literature, these chapters are accessible to a student readership taking courses involving the main areas featured - including the arts in literature, fictional artistic biography, interplanetary flight and civilisations, detective fiction, and novelistic confession.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        July 2013

        Odoevsky's four pathways into modern fiction

        A comparative study

        by Neil Cornwell

        This book takes four stories by the Russian Romantic author Vladimir Odoevsky to illustrate 'pathways', developed further by subsequent writers, into modern fiction. Featured here are: the artistic (musical story), the rise of science fiction, psychic aspects of the detective story, and of confession in the novel. The four chapters also examine the development of the featured categories by a wide range of subsequent writers in fiction ranging from the Romantic period up to the present century. The study works backwards from Odoevsky's stories, noting respective previous examples or traditions, before proceeding to follow the 'pathways' observed into later Russian, English and comparative fiction. Whilst appealing to specialists in Russian and comparative literature, these chapters are accessible to a student readership taking courses involving the main areas featured - including the arts in literature, fictional artistic biography, interplanetary flight and civilisations, detective fiction, and novelistic confession.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800
        July 2012

        Odoevsky's four pathways into modern fiction

        A comparative study

        by Neil Cornwell

        This book takes four stories by the Russian Romantic author Vladimir Odoevsky to illustrate 'pathways', developed further by subsequent writers, into modern fiction. Featured here are: the artistic (musical story), the rise of science fiction, psychic aspects of the detective story, and of confession in the novel. The four chapters also examine the development of the featured categories by a wide range of subsequent writers in fiction ranging from the Romantic period up to the present century. The study works backwards from Odoevsky's stories, noting respective previous examples or traditions, before proceeding to follow the 'pathways' observed into later Russian, English and comparative fiction. Whilst appealing to specialists in Russian and comparative literature, these chapters are accessible to a student readership taking courses involving the main areas featured - including the arts in literature, fictional artistic biography, interplanetary flight and civilisations, detective fiction, and novelistic confession.

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