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Promoted ContentLiterature & Literary StudiesApril 2001
Women, theatre and performance
New histories, new historiographies
by Kate Dorney, Maggie B. Gale, Susan Williams
The first in a new annual series, Women, Theatre and Performance that will consist of themed volumes on diverse aspects of women's engagement with theatre and performance. Ranging across three hundred years the essays in this volume address key questions in women's theatre history and retrieve a number of hitherto 'hidden' histories of women performers. Resituates women's, largely neglected, creative contribution within theatre and cultural history and seeks to challenge orthodox readings of both history and text. Topics include: Susanna Centlivre and the notion of intertheatricality; gender and theatrical space; the repositioning of women performers such as Wagner's Muse, Willhelmina Schröder-Devrient, the Comédie Français' 'Mademoiselle Mars', Mme Arnould-Plessey, and the actresses of the Russian serf theatre. ;
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Promoted ContentThe ArtsNovember 2017
Vivien Leigh
Actress and icon
by Kate Dorney, Maggie B. Gale
This edited volume provides new readings of the life and career of iconic actress Vivien Leigh (1913-67), written by experts from theatre and film studies and curators from the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. The collection uses newly accessible family archives to explore the intensely complex relationship between Vivien Leigh's approach to the craft of acting for stage and screen, and how she shaped, developed and projected her public persona as one of the most talked about and photographed actresses of her era. With key contributors from the UK, France and the US, chapters range from analyses of her work on stage and screen to her collaborations with designers and photographers, an analysis of her fan base, her interior designs and the 'public ownership' of Leigh's celebrity status during her lifetime and beyond.
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Literature & Literary StudiesApril 2020Interweaving myths in Shakespeare and his contemporaries
by Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont, Charlotte Coffin
This volume proposes new insights into the uses of classical mythology by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on interweaving processes in early modern appropriations of myth. Its 11 essays show how early modern writing intertwines diverse myths and plays with variant versions of individual myths that derive from multiple classical sources, as well as medieval, Tudor and early modern retellings and translations. Works discussed include poems and plays by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others. Essays concentrate on specific plays including The Merchant of Venice and Dido Queen of Carthage, tracing interactions between myths, chronicles, the Bible and contemporary genres. Mythological figures are considered to demonstrate how the weaving together of sources deconstructs gendered representations. New meanings emerge from these readings, which open up methodological perspectives on multi-textuality, artistic appropriation and cultural hybridity.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJanuary 2026Shakespeare, memory, and modern Irish literature
by Nicholas Taylor-Collins
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Literature & Literary StudiesMarch 2026What's in a name?
How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare
by Susan Dwyer Amussen
A compelling tour of Shakespeare's England that makes a powerful contribution to the 'authorship question'. How do we know Shakespeare was Shakespeare? Could a glover's son who left school at fifteen really be the author behind such masterpieces as Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest? Yes! says historian Susan Amussen. She transports readers back to early modern England, to travel the path that carried William Shakespeare from humble origins in Stratford to literary greatness on the London stage. This was a society undergoing rapid change. Grammar schools made education in Latin and Greek available to commoners, while touring players brought the latest dramatic productions to the masses. And in London, a metropolis filled with European visitors, ordinary people had the opportunity to see courtly life up close. No serious historian doubts that Shakespeare was the author of the plays that bear his name. Susan Amussen shares what they know: that Shakespeare's England was a complex and cosmopolitan place, with everything a talented young playwright needed to develop his craft and furnish his imagination.
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Literature & Literary StudiesDecember 2005Graham Swift
by Daniel Lea, Susan Williams
This book offers an accessible critical introduction to the work of Graham Swift, one of Britain's most significant contemporary authors. Through detailed readings of his novels and short stories from 'The Sweet Shop Owner' (1980) to 'The Light of Day' (2003), Daniel Lea lucidly addresses the key themes of history, loss, masculinity and ethical redemption, to present a fresh approach to Swift. This study proposes that one of the side-effects of modernity has been the destruction of traditional pathways of self and collective belief, leading to a loss of understanding between individuals about their duties to each other and to society. Swift's writing returns repeatedly to the question of what we can believe in when all the established markers of identity - family, community, gender, profession, history - have become destabilised. Lea suggests that Swift increasingly moves towards a notion of redemption through a lived ethical practice as the only means of finding solace in a world lacking a central symbolic authority. ;
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Literature & Literary StudiesFebruary 2022Shakespeare and the supernatural
by Victoria Bladen, Yan Brailowsky, Gayle Allan, Jacquelyn Bessell, Victoria Bladen, Yan Brailowsky, William C. Carroll, Bernadette Cochrane, Alexa Huang, Laurie Johnson, Pierre Kapitaniak, Imke Lichterfeld, Florence March, Maddalena Pennacchia, Chelsea Philips, Yukari Yoshihara, Christopher Wortham
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The ArtsSeptember 2024The renewal of post-war Manchester
Planning, architecture and the state
by Richard Brook
A compelling account of the project to transform post-war Manchester, revealing the clash between utopian vision and compromised reality. Urban renewal in Britain was thrilling in its vision, yet partial and incomplete in its implementation. For the first time, this deep study of a renewal city reveals the complex networks of actors behind physical change and stagnation in post-war Britain. Using the nested scales of region, city and case-study sites, the book explores the relationships between Whitehall legislation, its interpretation by local government planning officers and the on-the-ground impact through urban architectural projects. Each chapter highlights the connections between policy goals, global narratives and the design and construction of cities. The Cold War, decolonialisation, rising consumerism and the oil crisis all feature in a richly illustrated account of architecture and planning in post-war Manchester.
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The ArtsMay 2009Auto/biography and identity
by Kate Dorney, Maggie B. Gale, Viv Gardner, Maggie B. Gale
This groundbreaking book shows how female performers - one of the first groups of professional women - used and still use autobiography and performance as both a means of expression and control of their private and public selves, the 'face and the mask'. It looks at how a range of women in the theatre - actors, managers, writers and live artists - have done this on the page and on the stage from the late eighteenth-century to the present day, testing the boundaries between gender, theatre and autobiographical form. This paperback edition facilitates connections - between texts and performances, past and present practitioners, professional and private selves, individuals and communities, all of which have in some way renegotiated identity through autobiography and the creative act. 'Auto/biography and identity' is a landmark in theatre history and performance analysis, in gender and cultural theory, and autobiographical studies. ;
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Literature & Literary StudiesMay 2000Henry V
by James Loehlin
This study examines the profound changes that twentieth-century performance has wrought on Shakespeare's complex drama of war and politics. What was accepted at the turn of the century as a patriotic celebration of a national hero has emerged in the modern theatre as a dark and troubling analysis of the causes and costs of war. The book details the theatrical innovations and political insights that have turned one of Shakespeare's most traditional-bound plays into one of his most popular and provocative. Henry V gives details analyses of several important modern productions. Beginning with a consideration of the play's political significance in Elizabethan London, the book goes on the reveal its subsequent reinvention, both as patriotic pageant and anti-war manifesto. Individual chapters consider important productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and other British and North American companies, as well as the landmark film versions. A compelling account of the theatrical revolution that has transformed one of Shakespeare's most challenging plays. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2021Post-everything
An intellectual history of post-concepts
by Herman Paul, Adriaan van Veldhuizen
Postmodern, postcolonial and post-truth are broadly used terms. But where do they come from? When and why did the habit of interpreting the world in post-terms emerge? And who exactly were the 'post boys' responsible for this? Post-everything examines why post-Christian, post-industrial and post-bourgeois were terms that resonated, not only among academics, but also in the popular press. It delves into the historical roots of postmodern and poststructuralist, while also subjecting more recent post-constructions (posthumanist, postfeminist) to critical scrutiny. This study is the first to offer a comprehensive history of post-concepts. In tracing how these concepts found their way into a broad range of genres and disciplines, Post-everything contributes to a rapprochement between the history of the humanities and the history of the social sciences.
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Literature & Literary StudiesSeptember 2025Shakespeare the Reviser
A Lover's Complaint
by Marina Tarlinskaya
The project researches the difference between a revision vs. a rewriting. The book explores the English poems and plays of the Early New English period, from the sixteenth to the beginning of seventeenth century, with over 50 entries examined. The main material is the poem A Lover's Complaint; the play Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald; the revised and rewritten post-Restoration plays such as Richard II (revised by Lewis Theobald), and The Fatal Secret (rewritten Webster's The Duchess of Malfi) by Lewis Theobald. An example of authorial revision is Sonnets 2 and 138.
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Literature & Literary StudiesNovember 2007Female performance practice on the fin-de-siècle popular stages of London and Paris
by Catherine Hindson, Kate Dorney, Maggie B. Gale
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Literature & Literary StudiesNovember 2007Female performance practice on the fin-de-siècle popular stages of London and Paris
by Catherine Hindson, Kate Dorney, Maggie B. Gale, Rebecca Mortimer
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November 2012Shakespeare
Variationen
by Shakespeare, William; Bachmann, Plinio; Bußacker, Gabriella; Calis, Nuran David; Danckwart, Gesine; Krausser, Helmut; Ostermaier, Albert; Roselt, Jens; Schimmelpfennig, Roland; Schwab, Werner; Streeruwitz, Marlene / Herausgegeben von Carstensen, Uwe B.; Herausgegeben von Lieven, Stefanie von; Herausgegeben von Walther, Bettina
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Literature & Literary StudiesNovember 2021Shakespeare and the denial of territory
by Pascale Drouet
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2026The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia
by Alexandrina Vanke