Download or read book The Theatre of Civilized Excess written by Anja Müller-Wood and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jacobean tragedy is typically seen as translating a general dissatisfaction with the first Stuart monarch and his court into acts of calculated recklessness and cynical brutality. Drawing on theoretical influences from social history, psychoanalysis and the study of discourses, this innovative book proposes an alternative perspective: Jacobean tragedy should be seen in the light of the institutional and social concerns of the early modern stage and the ambiguities which they engendered. Although the stage's professionalization opened up hitherto unknown possibilities of economic success and social advancement for its middle-class practitioners, the imaginative, linguistic and material conditions of their work undermined the very ambitions they generated and furthered. The close reading of play texts and other, non-dramatic sources suggests that playwrights knew that they were dealing with hazardous materials prone to turn against them: whether the language they used or the audiences for whom they wrote and upon whose money and benevolence their success depended. The notorious features of the tragedies under discussion - their bloody murders, intricately planned revenges and psychologically refined terror - testify not only to the anxiety resulting from this multifaceted professional uncertainty but also to theatre practitioners' attempts to civilize the excesses they were staging.
Download or read book Performing Early Modern Drama Today written by Pascale Aebischer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-11 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While much attention has been devoted to performances of Shakespeare's plays today, little has been focused on modern productions of the plays of his contemporaries, such as Marlowe, Webster and Jonson. Performing Early Modern Drama Today offers an overview of early modern performance, featuring chapters by academics, teachers and practitioners, incorporating a variety of approaches. The book examines modern performances in both Britain and America and includes interviews with influential directors, close analysis of particular stage and screen adaptations and detailed appendices of professional and amateur productions. Chapters examine intellectual and practical opportunities to analyse what is at stake when the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are performed by ours. Whether experimenting with original performance practices or contemporary theatrical and cinematic ones, productions of early modern drama offer an inspiring, sometimes unusual, always interesting perspective on the plays they interpret for modern audiences.
Download or read book Mental Health Spirituality and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume continues the critical exploration of fundamental issues in the medieval and early modern world, here concerning mental health, spirituality, melancholy, mystical visions, medicine, and well-being. The contributors, who originally had presented their research at a symposium at The University of Arizona in May 2013, explore a wide range of approaches and materials pertinent to these issues, taking us from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, capping the volume with some reflections on the relevance of religion today. Lapidary sciences matter here as much as medical-psychological research, combined with literary and art-historical approaches. The premodern understanding of mental health is not taken as a miraculous panacea for modern problems, but the contributors suggest that medieval and early modern writers, scientists, and artists commanded a considerable amount of arcane, sometimes curious and speculative, knowledge that promises to be of value and relevance even for us today, once again. Modern palliative medicine finds, for instance, intriguing parallels in medieval word magic, and the mystical perspectives encapsulated highly productive alternative perceptions of the macrocosm and microcosm that promise to be insightful and important also for the post-modern world.
Download or read book Collections Journal Vol 6 1 N6 2 written by and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals" is a multi-disciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the discussion of all aspects of handling, preserving, researching, and organizing collections. Curators, archivists, collections managers, preparators, registrars, educators, students, and others contribute.
Download or read book Stages of Reality written by André Loiselle and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2012-04-12 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking collection of original essays, Stages of Reality establishes a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between stage and screen media. This comprehensive volume explores the significance of theatricality within critical discourse about cinema and television. Stages of Reality connects the theory and practice of cinematic theatricality through conceptual analyses and close readings of films including The Matrix and There Will be Blood. Contributors illuminate how this mode of address disrupts expectations surrounding cinematic form and content, evaluating strategies such as ostentatious performances, formal stagings, fragmentary montages, and methods of dialogue delivery and movement. Detailing connections between cinematic artifice and topics such as politics, gender, and genre, Stages of Reality allows readers to develop a clear sense of the multiple purposes and uses of theatricality in film.
Download or read book Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England written by Kathryn M. Moncrief and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection question the extent to which education in early modern England, an activity pursued in the home, classroom, and the church led to, mirrored and was perhaps transformed by moments of instruction on stage. Contributors examine how educational theories and practices intersect with and construct ideas about gender, class, and national identity and investigate how education was performed and performative, both on stage and off.
Download or read book Metaphors of Confinement written by Monika Fludernik and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 758 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy offers a historical survey of imaginings of the prison as expressed in carceral metaphors in a range of texts about imprisonment from Antiquity to the present as well as non-penal situations described as confining or restrictive. These imaginings coalesce into a 'carceral imaginary' that determines the way we think about prisons, just as social debates about punishment and criminals feed into the way carceral imaginary develops over time. Examining not only English-language prose fiction but also poetry and drama from the Middle Ages to postcolonial, particularly African, literature, the book juxtaposes literary and non-literary contexts and contrasts fictional and nonfictional representations of (im)prison(ment) and discussions about the prison as institution and experiential reality. It comments on present-day trends of punitivity and foregrounds the ethical dimensions of penal punishment. The main argument concerns the continuity of carceral metaphors through the centuries despite historical developments that included major shifts in policy (such as the invention of the penitentiary). The study looks at selected carceral metaphors, often from two complementary perspectives, such as the home as prison or the prison as home, or the factory as prison and the prison as factory. The case studies present particularly relevant genres and texts that employ these metaphors, often from a historical perspective that analyses development through different periods.
Download or read book The Duchess of Malfi written by John Webster and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-02-27 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major revision of this classic revenge tragedy. The comprehensive introduction covers recent developments in criticism and key theatre productions, as well as relating the play to other early modern tragedies. The edition gives students and teachers a reliable, annotated text and a stimulating overview of the play's context, critical perspectives and an exploration of its stage history. An invaluable resource for study and performance.
Download or read book Theatricality in the Horror Film written by André Loiselle and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2019-10-28 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The horror film generally presents a situation where normality is threatened by a monster. From this premise, Theatricality in the Horror Film argues that scary movies often create their terrifying effects stylistically and structurally through a radical break with the realism of normality in the form of monstrous theatricality. Theatricality in the horror fi lm expresses itself in many ways. For example, it comes across in the physical performance of monstrosity: the overthe-top performance of a chainsaw-wielding serial killer whose nefarious gestures terrify both his victims within the film and the audience in the cinema. Theatrical artifice can also appear as a stagy cemetery with broken-down tombstones and twisted, gnarly trees, or through the use of violently aberrant filmic techniques, or in the oppressive claustrophobia of a single-room setting reminiscent of classical drama. Any performative element of a film that flaunts its difference from what is deemed realistic or normal on screen might qualify as an instance of theatrical artifice, creating an intense affect in the audience. This book argues that the artificiality of the frightening spectacle is at the heart of the dark pleasures of horror.
Download or read book A Study Guide for Elizabethan Drama written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on 2016 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study Guide for "Elizabethan Drama," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Movements for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Movements for Students for all of your research needs.
Download or read book Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England written by Allison P. Hobgood and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England examines the emotional effect of stage performance on the minds of the early modern theatre audience.
Download or read book Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text written by V.G. Julie Rajan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How various mythologies challenge, enable, and inspire women artists and activists across the globe to communicate personal and historical experiences of violence is the central concern of this collection. Beginning with the observation that twentieth- and twenty-first century female writers and artists often use myth to represent their social and artistic struggles, the distinguished international scholars and writers consider mythic fabulations as spaces for contested meanings and resistant readings. The identified resistance of the mythic material to repression-working, as it were, in opposition to another celebrated drive/role of myth, that of containment-makes the use of myth particularly stimulating for twentieth-century and contemporary female artists; and it is an interest in the aesthetic and political consequences of such resistances that animates this book. Exemplifying the diverse types of engagement with myth and femininity, literary criticism, discussions of film and art, artwork, as well as original creative writing, could all be found within the boundaries of this innovative volume. Femininity, myth, and violence are here explored in contexts such as female mythopoiesis in the early twentieth century; the politics of representation in contemporary writing; revision of old myths; and creation of new myths in multicultural female experiences. Keeping the focus on the actual works of art, the editors and contributors offer scholars and teachers an inclusive way to approach literature and the arts that avoids the limits imposed by genre or national and regional boundaries.
Download or read book Literature as Dialogue written by Roger D. Sell and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is it that some texts achieve the status of literature? Partly, at least, because the relationship they allow between their writers and the people who respond to them is fundamentally egalitarian. This is the insight explored by members of the Åbo literary communication network, who in this new book develop fresh approaches to literary works of widely varied provenance. The authors examined have written in Ancient Greek, Táng Dynasty Chinese, Middle, Modern and Contemporary English, German, Romanian, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. But each and every one of them is shown as having offered their human fellows something which, despite some striking appearances to the contrary, amounts to a welcoming invitation. This their audiences have then been able to negotiate in a spirit of dialogical interchange. Part I of the book poses the question: How, in offering their invitation, have writers respected their audiences’ human autonomy? This is the province of what Åbo scholars call "communicational criticism". Part II asks how an audience negotiating a literary invitation can be encouraged to respect the human autonomy of the writer who has offered it. In Åbo parlance, such encouragement is the task of "mediating criticism". These two modes of criticism naturally complement each other, and in their shared concern for communicational ethics ultimately seek to further a post-postmodern world that would be global without being hegemonic.
Download or read book Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle written by Patrick Gill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major collection of essays on the contemporary British short story cycle, this volume offers in-depth explorations of the genre by comparing its strategies for creating coherence with those of the novel and the short story collection, inquiring after the ties that bind individual short stories into a cycle. A section on theory approaches the form from the point of view of genre theory, cognitive literary studies, and book studies. It is followed by investigations of hitherto neglected aspects of the generic tradition of the British short story cycle and how they relate to the contemporary outlook of the form. Readings of individual contemporary cycles, illustrating the form’s multifaceted uses from the presentation of sexual identities to politics and trauma, make up the third and most substantial part of the volume, placing its focus squarely on the past decades. Unique in its combination of a focus on the literary traditions, politics and markets of the UK with a thorough examination of the genre’s manifold formal and thematic potentials, the volume explores what is at the heart of the short story cycle as a literary form: the constant negotiation between unity and separateness, collective and individual, of coherence and autonomy.
Download or read book Comics as a Nexus of Cultures written by Mark Berninger and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays from various critical disciplines examine how comic books and graphic narratives move between various media, while merging youth and adult cultures and popular and high art. The articles feature international perspectives on comics and graphic novels published in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Portugal, Germany, Turkey, India, and Japan. Topics range from film adaptation, to journalism in comics, to the current manga boom.
Download or read book Teaching Comedy written by Bev Hogue and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2023-08-03 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Shakespeare to The Simpsons, comedy has long provided both entertainment and social commentary. It may critique cultural values, undermine authority, satirize sacred beliefs, and make room for the marginalized to approach the center. Comedy can be challenging to teach, but in the classroom it can help students connect with one another, develop critical thinking skills, and engage with important issues. The essays in this volume address a rich variety of texts spanning film, television, stand-up, cartoons, and memes as well as conventional literary works from different places and times. Contributors offer theoretical foundations and practical methods for a broad range of courses, including guidance on contextualizing the humor of historical works and on navigating the ways that comedy can both subvert and reinforce stereotypes. Finally, the volume argues for the value of comedy in difficult times, as a way to create community and meaning. This volume contains discussion of fiction, poetry, plays, and essays by Maya Angelou, Jane Austen, Aphra Behn, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Frances Burney, Charles W. Chesnutt, Roddy Doyle, Maria Edgeworth, Ben Jonson, Anita Loos, Emtithal Mahmoud, Thomas Middleton, Okot p'Bitek, William Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, Alma Villanueva, Paula Vogel, Oscar Wilde, John Wilmot, and William Wycherley; TV shows and films including Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, The Gold Rush, Life Is Beautiful, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Office, Office Space, Rick and Morty, and South Park; works and stand-up performances by Aziz Ansari, Samantha Bee, Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Tina Fey, Moms Mabley, Hasan Minhaj, Eddie Murphy, Trevor Noah, Richard Pryor, Issa Rae, and Wanda Sykes; and visual works and other media including Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks, Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, Nick Sousanis's Unflattening, Marvel's Hawkeye, The Onion, YouTube videos, advertisements, and memes.
Download or read book The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating written by Marion Gymnich and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2010-09-15 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death.In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine.It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture.