Download or read book Rewriting Shakespeare Rewriting Ourselves written by Peter Erickson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-02 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Participants in the current debate about the literary canon generally separate the established literary order—of which Shakespeare is the most visible icon—from the emergent minority literatures. In this challenging study, Peter Erickson insists on bringing the two realms together. He asks: what impact does a revision of the literary canon have on Shakespeare's status? Part One of his book is about Shakespeare on women. In analyses of several Shakespearean works, Erickson discusses Shakespeare's ambivalence about women as a reflection of male anxiety about the cultural authority of Queen Elizabeth. Part Two is about (contemporary) women on Shakespeare. Erickson discusses Adrienne Rich's revision of the very concept of canon and discusses how several African-American women writers (in particular Maya Angelou and Gloria Naylor) have reflected on the ambivalent status of Shakespeare in their worlds. Erickson here offers a model for multicultural literary criticism and a new conceptual framework with which to discuss issues of identity politics. Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves makes an important contribution to the national debate about educational policy in the humanities.
Download or read book Hag Seed written by Margaret Atwood and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The beloved author of The Handmaid’s Tale reimagines Shakespeare’s final, great play, The Tempest, in a gripping and emotionally rich novel of passion and revenge. “A marvel of gorgeous yet economical prose, in the service of a story that’s utterly heartbreaking yet pierced by humor, with a plot that retains considerable subtlety even as the original’s back story falls neatly into place.”—The New York Times Book Review Felix is at the top of his game as artistic director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. Now he’s staging aTempest like no other: not only will it boost his reputation, but it will also heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. And also brewing revenge, which, after twelve years, arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Margaret Atwood’s novel take on Shakespeare’s play of enchantment, retribution, and second chances leads us on an interactive, illusion-ridden journey filled with new surprises and wonders of its own. Praise for Hag-Seed “What makes the book thrilling, and hugely pleasurable, is how closely Atwood hews to Shakespeare even as she casts her own potent charms, rap-composition included. . . . Part Shakespeare, part Atwood, Hag-Seed is a most delicate monster—and that’s ‘delicate’ in the 17th-century sense. It’s delightful.”—Boston Globe “Atwood has designed an ingenious doubling of the plot of The Tempest: Felix, the usurped director, finds himself cast by circumstances as a real-life version of Prospero, the usurped Duke. If you know the play well, these echoes grow stronger when Felix decides to exact his revenge by conjuring up a new version of The Tempest designed to overwhelm his enemies.”—Washington Post “A funny and heartwarming tale of revenge and redemption . . . Hag-Seed is a remarkable contribution to the canon.”—Bustle
Download or read book Citing Shakespeare written by Peter Erickson and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-03-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study finds a significant number of contemporary writers and artists who quote our most quotable author for the purpose of reconsidering and reformulating the twin themes of Shakespeare and race. The book examines Shakespeare quotation as a means of revision in the work of Nadine Gordimer, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Leon Forrest, Ishmael Reed, Caryl Phillips, Djanet Sears, Fred Wilson, and J. M. Coetzee. In addition, a pivotal chapter discusses Paul Robeson as an earlier figure whose performance of Othello poses the problem of race in Shakespeare and suggests the need for reinterpretation.
Download or read book Rewriting Shakespeare s Plays For and By the Contemporary Stage written by Michael Dobson and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-23 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why have contemporary playwrights been obsessed by Shakespeare’s plays to such an extent that most of the canon has been rewritten by one rising dramatist or another over the last half century? Among other key figures, Edward Bond, Heiner Müller, Carmelo Bene, Arnold Wesker, Tom Stoppard, Howard Barker, Botho Strauss, Tim Crouch, Bernard Marie Koltès, and Normand Chaurette have all put their radical originality into the service of adapting four-century-old classics. The resulting works provide food for thought on issues such as Shakespearean role-playing, narrative and structural re-shuffling. Across the world, new writers have questioned the political implications and cultural stakes of repeating Shakespeare with and without a difference, finding inspiration in their own national experiences and in the different ordeals they have undergone. How have our contemporaries carried out their rewritings, and with what aims? Can we still play Hamlet, for instance, as Dieter Lesage asks in his book bearing this title, or do we have to “kill Shakespeare” as Normand Chaurette implies in a work where his own creative process is detailed? What do these rewritings really share with their sources? Are they meaningful only because of Shakespeare’s shadow haunting them? Where do we draw the lines between “interpretation,” “adaptation” and “rewriting”? The contributors to this collection of essays examine modern rewritings of Shakespeare from both theoretical and pragmatic standpoints. Key questions include: can a rewriting be meaningful without the reader’s or spectator’s already knowing Shakespeare? Do modern rewritings supplant Shakespeare’s texts or curate them? Does the survival of Shakespeare in the theatrical repertory actually depend on the continued dramatization of our difficult encounters with these potentially obsolete scripts represented by rewriting?
Download or read book White People in Shakespeare written by Arthur L. Little, Jr. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-29 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What part did Shakespeare play in the construction of a 'white people' and how has his work been enlisted to define and bolster a white cultural and racial identity? Since the court of Queen Elizabeth I, through the early modern English theatre to the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, white people have used Shakespeare to define their cultural and racial identity and authority. White People in Shakespeare unravels this complex cultural history to examine just how crucial Shakespeare's work was to the early modern development of whiteness as an embodied identity, as well as the institutional dissemination of a white Shakespeare in contemporary theatres, politics, classrooms and other key sites of culture. Featuring contributors from a wide range of disciplines, the collection moves across Shakespeare's plays and poetry and between the early modern and our own time to interrogate these relationships. Split into two parts, 'Shakespeare's White People' and 'White People's Shakespeare', it explores a variety of topics, ranging from the education of the white self in Hamlet, or affective piety and racial violence in Measure for Measure, to Shakespearean education and the civil rights era, and interpretations of whiteness in more contemporary work such as American Moor and Desdemona.
Download or read book Adapting King Lear for the Stage written by Dr Lynne Bradley and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questioning whether the impulse to adapt Shakespeare has changed over time, Lynne Bradley argues for restoring a sense of historicity to the study of adaptation. Bradley compares Nahum Tate's History of King Lear (1681), adaptations by David Garrick in the mid-eighteenth century, and nineteenth-century Shakespeare burlesques to twentieth-century theatrical rewritings of King Lear, and suggests latter-day adaptations should be viewed as a unique genre that allows playwrights to express modern subject positions with regard to their literary heritage while also participating in broader debates about art and society. In identifying and relocating different adaptive gestures within this historical framework, Bradley explores the link between the critical and the creative in the history of Shakespearean adaptation. Focusing on works such as Gordon Bottomley's King Lear's Wife (1913), Edward Bond's Lear (1971), Howard Barker's Seven Lears (1989), and the Women's Theatre Group's Lear's Daughters (1987), Bradley theorizes that modern rewritings of Shakespeare constitute a new type of textual interaction based on a simultaneous double-gesture of collaboration and rejection. She suggests that this new interaction provides constituent groups, such as the feminist collective who wrote Lear's Daughters, a strategy to acknowledge their debt to Shakespeare while writing against the traditional and negative representations of femininity they see reflected in his plays.
Download or read book Looking for an Argument written by Richard Louis Levin and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects a number of Richard Levin's essays, beginning with his well-known PMLA article of 1988 on Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy and continuing through the 1990s, that examine and evaluate some of the most important aspects of the new critical approaches to the interpretations of the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries- principally the New Historicism, feminism, and revisionist versions of Marxism and Freudianism. In these essays he is looking not only for rational arguments in these approaches, but also for a rational argument with their practitioners, and therefore he reprints several of the responses that these essays have elicited (including th PMLA Forum letter signed by twenty-four people who objected to Feminist Thematics) along with his answers to them, which contribute to this critique of the present state of the discourse in this field.
Download or read book Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults written by Naomi Miller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Problem Plays written by Simon Barker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2005-04-25 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This New Casebook offers a wide-ranging selection of contemporary critical readings of Shakespeare's three 'problem plays': All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Trolius and Cressida. Together, they reflect the diversity of late twentieth-century theory and the controversy that continues to be generated by the plays, and discuss a variety of key issues. These include the meaning of the term 'problem play', the historical context and political and cultural significance of the plays, as well as issues of staging and theatre history. The volume also provides a helpful introduction which guides the reader through the critical approaches, terms and debates, as well as explanatory notes for each essay and a useful section on further reading.
Download or read book A Meaningful World written by Benjamin Wiker and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2009-09-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meaningful or meaningless? Purposeful or pointless? When we look at nature, whether at our living earth or into deepest space, what do we find? In stark contrast to contemporary claims that the world is meaningless, Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt reveal a cosmos charged with both meaning and purpose. Their journey begins with Shakespeare and ranges through Euclid's geometry, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, the periodic table of the elements, the artistry of ordinary substances like carbon and water, the intricacy of biological organisms, and the irreducible drama of scientific exploration itself. Along the way, Wiker and Witt fashion a robust argument from evidence in nature, one that rests neither on religious presuppositions nor on a simplistic view of nature as the best of all possible worlds. In their exploration of the cosmos, Wiker and Witt find all the challenges and surprises, all of the mystery and elegance one expects from a work of genius.
Download or read book Shakespeare in Theory written by Stephen Bretzius and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witty and engaging essays on the links between contemporary literary theory and Shakespearean theater
Download or read book Talking Back to Shakespeare written by Martha Tuck Rozett and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is about the way in which Shakespeare's plays have inspired readers to "talk back" and about some of the forms such talking back can assume. It is also about the way different interpretive communities, including students, read their cultural, political, and moral assumptions into Shakespeare's plays, appropriating and transforming elements of plot, character, and verbal text while challenging what they see as the ideological premises of the plays. Texts that talk back to Shakespeare pose questions, offer alternatives, take liberties, and fill in gaps. Some of the transformations discussed in Talking Back to Shakespeare challenge deeply held assumptions such as, for instance, that Hamlet is a tragic hero and Shylock a stereotypical grasping usurer. Others invent prior or subsequent lives for Shakespeare's characters (women characters in particular) so as to account for their actions and imagine their lives more fully than Shakespeare chooses to do. Very few of these works have received much critical attention, and some are virtually unknown or forgotten." "Rather than a comprehensive study of Shakespeare transformations, Talking Back to Shakespeare is an innovative exploration of the kinship between the kind of talking back that occurs in the classroom and the kind to be found in texts produced by writers who "rewrite" some of Shakespeare's most frequently taught and performed plays. Such re-visions unsettle the cultural authority of the plays and expose the accumulated lore that surrounds them to probing, often irreverent scrutiny." "Much of the talking back comes from marginalized readers: women, like Lillie Wyman, author of Gertrude of Denmark: An Interpretive Romance, and other nineteenth-century women critics, or Jewish writers, like Arnold Wesker, whose play The Merchant transforms the relationship between Antonio and Shylock. Some talking back comes from an international collection of oppositional voices of the 1960s, including Charles Marowitz, Aime Cesaire, Eugene Ionesco, and Joseph Papp. Talking Back to Shakespeare ranges from popular books like the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley to obscure, seldom-read ones like Percy MacKaye's ambitious four-play prequel, The Mystery of Hamlet, King of Denmark. What these published texts share with student journal entries and transformations is the assumption, familiar to postmodern readers, that Shakespeare's plays are essentially unstable, culturally determined constructs capable of acquiring new meanings and new forms. By bringing together these two kinds of "talking back," Rozett challenges the traditional separation between critical and pedagogical inquiry that has until recently dominated English studies."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Shakespeare Studies written by Susan Zimmerman and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres. This title features essays on Shakespeare's tragedies in the context of early modern cultural history. It also includes reviews that consider studies of such historical issues as gender and literacy, sexual practices, and England's cultural encounters with Italy.
Download or read book Confessions of the Critics written by H. Aram Veeser and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Confessions of the Critics shatters a certain silence. Autobiographical criticism has until now skated relatively free from the challenges that usually assail a new literary critical method. It has had this immunity from critique largely because feminists and third-world liberation fighters--such as Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich and Jane Gallop--ushered it to the North American academic stage. Other women and men, including Rigoberta Menchu, Nawal al-Sadawi, Mahasweta Devi and Malcolm X, wrote in the tradition and genre of testimonio . These and other unimpeachably militant backgrounds gave confessional criticism a certain cache among the largely liberal community of literary scholars. We have hesitated to express misgivings about a form that seemed intrinsically tied to the most vital, powerful strivings. Telling stories about one's own past is probably our culture's richest way of characterizing the effects of social injustice and developing what it takes to resist various kinds of victimage, writes contributor Charles Altieri. Confessions of the Critics provides a revealing look into the thoughts and experiences of some of the most influential and important critics of the 20th century. The writers included avoid pretention and gross self-misrepresentation, giving way to raw, sometimes embarrassing, always wholly believable emotion. Describing cumulative literary shocks and episodes of self-recognition, contributors offer insights to their ruling passions and works. Powerful sensations, emotions, recognitions and revelations make up the heart of Confessions of the Critics. It is a book that none will put aside or easily forget. Contributors: Charles Altieri, William Andrews, Michael F. Berube, Timothy Brennan, Gillian Brown, Cathy Davidson, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Diane Freedman, Marjorie Garber, Gerald Graff, Stephen J. Greenblatt, Michael Hill, Marianne Hirsch, Alice Yeager Kaplan, Amitava Kumar, Candace Lang, Louis Menand, Judith Lowder Newton, Linda Orr, Vincent Pecora, David Simpson, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Madelon Sprengnether, Jane Tompkins, Marianna Torgovnick, H. Aram Veeser, Jeffrey Williams, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl.
Download or read book John Gay s The Beggar s Opera 1728 2004 written by Uwe Böker and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2006 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Richard Steele remarked that the greatest Evils in human Society are such as no Law can come at, he was not able to forsee the spectacular success of John Gay's satire of society, the administration of law and crime, politics, the Italian opera and other topics. Gay's The Beggar's Opera, with its mixture of witty dialogue and popular songs, was imitated by 18th century writers, criticized by those on the seats of power, but remained a favourite of the English theatre public ever since. With N. Playfair's 1920 revival and B. Brecht's and K. Weill's 1928 Dreigroschenoper, Gay's play has been a starting-point for dramatists such as V. Havel (Zebrácká opera, 1975), W. Soyinka (Opera Wonyosi, 1977), Ch. Buarque (Ópera do Malandro, 1978), D. Fo (L'opera dello sghignazzo, 1981), A. Ayckbourn (A Chorus of Disapproval, 1984), as well as others such as Latouche, Hacks, Fassbinder, Dear, Wasserman, and Lepage. Apart from contributions by international scholars analysing the above-named plays, the editors' introduction covers other dramatists that have payed hommage to Gay. This interdisciplinary collection of essays is of particular interest for scholars working in the field of drama/theatre studies, the eighteenth century, contemporary drama, postcolonial studies, and politics and the stage.
Download or read book The Sonnets written by Sharmila Cohen and published by Nightboat Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 154 contemporary poets offer their own startling and imaginative versions of Shakespeare's sonnets
Download or read book Citing Shakespeare written by P. Erikson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on Shakespeare and race, this book addresses the status of Othello in our culture. Erickson shows that contemporary writers' revisions of Shakespeare can have a political impact on our vision of America.
