Download or read book Shakespeare Midlife and Generativity written by Karl F. Zender and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-12-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life expectancy in Shakespearean times averaged only about twenty-five to thirty-five years, but those who survived the illnesses of infancy and childhood could look forward to a long life with nearly the same level of confidence as someone living now. But even so long ago, some faced conflicts in their middle and later years that remain familiar today. In Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity, Karl F. Zender explores William Shakespeare's depictions of middle age by examining the relationships between middle-aged parents -- mainly fathers -- and their children in five of his greatest plays. He finds that the middle-aged characters in King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest -- much like their modern counterparts -- experience a fear of aging and debility. Representations of middle age occur throughout the Shakespearean canon, in forms ranging from Jaques' "seven ages" speech in As You Like It to the emphasis -- almost an obsession -- in many plays on relations between the generations. Lear, Zender shows, tries to forestall the approach of old age with a fantasy of literal rebirth in his relationship with Cordelia. Macbeth depicts an even more urgent struggle against midlife decline, while in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare portrays two characters in midlife crisis who attempt to redefine their identities by memorializing their former status and power, now lost. Drawing on Erik Erikson's theory of generativity -- a midlife shift from advancing one's own career to aiding a younger generation -- Zender explores the difficulties Shakespeare's characters face as they transfer power and authority to their children and others in the next generation. Paying careful attention to the plays' moral and ethical implications, he demonstrates how Shakespeare's innovative depiction of the midlife experience focuses on internal psychological understanding rather than external actions such as ceremony and ritual. Illuminating and engaging, Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity offers a fresh analysis of several of Shakespeare's most important plays and explores a profound, centuries-old perspective on the challenges inherent in middle age.
Download or read book Shakespeare Midlife and Generativity written by Karl F. Zender and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-12 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity is a study of relations between the generations in five of William Shakespeare's plays--King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. The book draws on Erik Erikson's theory of generativity-understood by Erikson as a midlife shift from advancing one's own career to aiding a younger generation-to examine the difficulties Shakespeare's parents (mainly fathers) have in releasing power and authority to their children or to other young people.
Download or read book Late Leisure Poems written by Eleanor Ross Taylor and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shakespeare and Faulkner written by Karl F. Zender and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2021-06-02 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and Faulkner explores the moral and ethical dilemmas that characters face inside themselves and in their interactions with others in the works of these two famed authors. Karl F. Zender’s characterological study offers insightful, critically rigorous, and at times quite personal analyses of the complicated figures who inhabit several major Shakespeare plays and Faulkner novels. The two parts of this book—the first of which focuses on the English playwright, the second on the Mississippi novelist—share a common methodology in that they originate in Zender’s history as a teacher of and writer on the two authors, who until now he generally approached separately. He emphasizes the evolving insights gleaned from reading these authors over several decades, situating their texts in relation to shifting trends in criticism and highlighting the contemporary relevance of their works. The final chapter, an extended discussion of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, attempts something unusual in Zender’s critical practice: It relies less on the close textual analysis that characterizes his previous work and instead explores the intersections between events depicted in the novel and his own life, both as a child and as an adult. Shakespeare and Faulkner speaks to the power of literature as a form of pleasure and of solace. With this work of engaged and thoughtful scholarly criticism, Zender reveals the centrality of storytelling to human beings’ efforts to make sense both of their journey through life and of the circumstances in which they live.
Download or read book Shakespeare Skin written by Ruben Espinosa and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-07-11 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a comprehensive array of readings of 'skin' in Shakespeare's works, a term that embraces the human and animal, noun and verb. Shakespeare / Skin departs from previous studies as it deliberately and often explicitly engages with issues of social and racial justice. Each of the chapters interrogates and centres 'skin' in relation to areas of expertise that include performance studies, aesthetics, animal studies, religious studies, queer theory, Indigenous studies, history, food studies, border studies, postcolonial studies, Black feminism, disease studies and pedagogy. By considering contemporary understandings of skin, this volume examines how the literature of the early modern past creates paths to constructing racial hierarchies. With contributors from the USA, UK, South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Australia, chapters are informed by an array of histories, shedding light on how skin was understood in Shakespeare's time and at key moments during the past 400 years in different media and cultures. Chapters include considerations of plays such as Titus Andronicus, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and work by Borderlands Theater, Los Colochos and Satyajit Ray, among many others. For researchers and instructors, this book will help to shape teaching and inform research through its modelling of antiracist critical practice. Collectively, the chapters in this collection allow us to consider how sustained attention to skin via cross-historical and innovative approaches can reveal to us the various uses of Shakespeare that shed light on the fraught nature of our interrelatedness. They set a path for readers to consider how much skin they have in the game when it comes to challenging structures of racism.
Download or read book Drama and the Politics of Generational Conflict in Shakespeare s England written by Stephannie Gearhart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drama and the Politics of Generational Conflict in Shakespeare’s England examines the intersection between art and culture and explains how ideas about age circulated in early modern England. Stephannie Gearhart illustrates how a variety of texts – including drama by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton – placed elders’ and youths’ voices in dialogue with one another to construct the period’s ideology of age and shape elder-youth relations.
Download or read book Antony and Cleopatra written by Marga Munkelt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-04 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume in the Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition series increases our knowledge of how Antony and Cleopatra has been received and understood by critics, editors and general readers. The volume provides, in separate sections, both critical opinions about the play across the centuries and an evaluation of their positions within and their impact on the reception of the play. The chronological arrangement of the text-excerpts engages the readers in a direct and unbiased dialogue, and the introduction offers a critical evaluation from a current stance, including modern theories and methods. This volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of the play and of the traditions of Shakespearean criticism surrounding it as they have developed from century to century.
Download or read book Victorian literary culture and ancient Egypt written by Eleanor Dobson and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection considers representations of ancient Egypt in the literature of the nineteenth-century. It addresses themes such as reanimated mummies, ancient Egyptian mythology and contemporary consumer culture across literary modes ranging from burlesque satire to historical novels, stage performances to Gothic fiction and popular culture to the highbrow. The book illuminates unknown sources of historical significance – including the first illustration of an ambulatory mummy – revising current understandings of the works of canonical writers and grounding its analysis firmly in a contemporary context. The contributors demonstrate the extensive range of cultural interest in ancient Egypt that flourished during Victoria’s reign. At the same time, they use ancient Egypt to interrogate ‘selfhood’ and ‘otherness’, notions of race, imperialism, religion, gender and sexuality.
Download or read book Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces in the Early Modern World written by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe? How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How do new disciplinary and geographic connections shape the ways we think about the early modern world, and the role of women and men in it? These are the questions that guide this volume, which includes articles by a select group of scholars from many disciplines: Art History, Comparative Literature, English, German, History, Landscape Architecture, Music, and Women's Studies. Each essay reaches across fields, and several are written by interdisciplinary groups of authors. The essays also focus on many different places, including Rome, Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and on texts and images that crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, or that portrayed real and imagined people who did. Many essays investigate topics key to the ’spatial turn’ in various disciplines, such as borders and their permeability, actual and metaphorical spatial crossings, travel and displacement, and the built environment.
Download or read book Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve s Verse written by Karen Elaine Smyth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using empirical research to explore medieval writers' imaginings of time, this study presents a new morphology by which to study narratives of time in fifteenth-century literary culture, focusing on poems of John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve. Karen Smyth begins with an overview of medieval time-keeping devices and considers collective and individual attitudes and perceptions of time. She then examines a range of Middle English authors' appropriations and innovations in relation to such perceptions, identifying competitions of tradition and innovation, allowing for an interrogation of commonly accepted medieval theories of time. An empirically based morphology emerges and is used to examine narratives of time in Lydgate and Hoccleve's work. Through a series of close readings of selected short poems and Lydgate's Troy Book, Fall of Princes, and Siege of Thebes and of Hoccleve's Regiments of Princes and Series, Karen Smyth looks at expressions of time and examples of the authors' negotiation of time consciousness, illustrating how both poets manipulate a range of cultural narratives of time in order to create multiple and sometimes competing temporalities within a single poem. Smyth simultaneously draws attention to Lydgate's and Hoccleve's underestimated artistic skills and lays out a means to re-evaluate medieval cultural attitudes towards time.
Download or read book Midlife Transformation in Literature and Film written by Steven F. Walker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Steven F. Walker considers the midlife transition from a Jungian and Eriksonian perspective, by providing vivid and powerful literary and cinematic examples that illustrate the psychological theories in a clear and entertaining way. For C.G. Jung, midlife is a time for personal transformation, when the values of youth are replaced by a different set of values, and when the need to succeed in the world gives place to the desire to participate more in the culture of one’s age and to further its development in all kinds of different ways. Erik Erikson saw "generativity," an expanded concern for others beyond one's immediate circle of family and friends, as the hallmark of this stage of life. Both psychologists saw it as a time for growth and renewal. Literary texts such Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, or Sophocles' Oedipus the King, and films such as Fellini's 8 1⁄2 and Campion's The Piano, have the capacity to represent, sometimes more vividly and with greater dramatic concentration than actual life histories or case studies, the archetypal nature of the drama and in-depth transformation associated with the midlife transition. Midlife Transformation in Literature and Film focuses on the specific male and female archetypal paradigms and presents them within the general context of midlife transformation. For men, the theme of death of the young hero presides over the crisis and the transformative ordeal, whereas for women the theme of tragic abandonment acts as the prelude to further growth and independence. This book is essential reading for anyone studying Jung, Erikson, or the midlife transition. It will interest those who have already been through a midlife transition, those who are in the midst of one, as well as those who are yet to experience this challenging period.
Download or read book Psychology According to Shakespeare written by Philip G. Zimbardo and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Shakespeare has undergone psychological analyses ever since Freud diagnosed Hamlet with an Oedipus complex. But now, two psychologists propose to turn the tables by telling how Shakespeare himself understood human behavior and the innermost workings of the human mind. Psychology According to Shakespeare: What You Can Learn About Human Nature From Shakespeare's Great Plays, is an interdisciplinary project that bridges psychological science and literature, bringing together for the first time in one volume, the breadth and depth of The Bard’s knowledge of love, jealousy, dreams, betrayal, revenge, and the lust for power and position. Even today, there is no better depiction of a psychopath than Richard III, no more poignant portrayal of dementia than King Lear, nor a more unforgettable illustration of obsessive-compulsive disorder than Lady Macbeth’s attempts to wash away the damned blood spot. What has not been revealed before, however, are the many different forms of mental illness The Bard described in terms that are now identifiable in the modern manual of disorders known as the DSM-5. But, as the book shows, the playwright’s fascination with human nature extended far beyond mental disorders, ranging across the psychological spectrum, from brain anatomy to personality, cognition, emotion, perception, lifespan development, and states of consciousness. To illustrate, we have stories to tell involving astrology, potions, poisons, the four fluids called “humors,” anatomical dissections of freshly hanged criminals, and a mental hospital called Bedlam—all showing how his perspective was grounded in the medicine and culture of his time. Yet, Will Shakespeare’s intellect, curiosity, and temperament allowed him to see other ideas and issues that would become important in psychological science centuries later. Many of these connections between Shakespeare and psychology lie scattered in books, articles, and web pages across the public domain, but they have never been brought together into a single volume. So, here the authors retell of his fashioning the felicitous phrase, nature-nurture for Prospero to utter in frustration with Caliban and of how the nature-nurture dichotomy would become central in psychology’s quest to understand the tension between heredity and environment. But that was still far from all, for they discovered that his work anticipated multiple other psychological tensions. For example, in Measure for Measure, he made audiences puzzle over which exerts the greater influence on human behavior: internal traits or the external situation. And in Hamlet, he explored the equally enigmatic push-pull between reason and emotion in the mind of the dithering prince. Aside from bringing together The Bard’s known psychology, the book is unique in several other respects. It reveals how his interest in mind and behavior ranged across the full spectrum of psychology, including topics that we now call biopsychology and neuroscience, social psychology, thinking and intelligence, motivation and emotion, and reason vs intuition. Further, we show how the psychological concepts he used have evolved over the intervening centuries—for example, the Elizabethan notion of sensus communis eventually became “consciousness” and the old idea of the humors morphed into our current understanding of hormones and neurotransmitters. We also note that some of Mr. Shakespeare’s concerns seem especially timely today, as in the subplot of queer vs straight issues complicating the story of Troilus and Cressida and in Shylock’s telling of prejudices inflicted on ethnic minorities.
Download or read book 1611 written by Helen Wilcox and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1611: Authority, Gender, and the Word in Early Modern England explores issues of authority, gender, and language within and across the variety of literary works produced in one of most landmark years in literary and cultural history. Represents an exploration of a year in the textual life of early modern England Juxtaposes the variety and range of texts that were published, performed, read, or heard in the same year, 1611 Offers an account of the textual culture of the year 1611, the environment of language, and the ideas from which the Authorised Version of the English Bible emerged
Download or read book The Southern Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Power Intimacy and the Life Story written by Dan P. McAdams and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who am I? And how do I fit into the world? These are the questions individuals ask themselves to make sense of their lives. Power, Intimacy and the Life Story addresses the human quest for identity. The author reinterprets some of the classic writings in psychology as he shows how each of us constructs a life story in order to meet the identity challenge and create a sense of unity and purpose in our lives. Written for the social scientist, practicing clinician, educated layperson, and student, this compelling study describes how we construct stories that are organized by the two general life themes of power and intimacy. Using the results of questionnaires and interviews with both college students and older adults, the author illustrates an innovative way of understanding human lives in literary terms.
Download or read book Medieval Life Cycles written by Isabelle Cochelin and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection present new research into a variety of questions on birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, and old age, ordered in a more or less chronological manner according to the lifecycle. The volume exposes attitudes and representations of the lifecycle from the Anglo-Saxon period to the end of the Middle Ages as being full of inconsistencies as well as definitive categories, and of variation and stasis. This attests to the fact that medieval conceptions and representations of the stages of life and their interrelationships are much more nuanced and less idealized than is usually credited. Medieval conceptual, mental, artistic, cultural, and sociological processes are scrutinized using various approaches and methods that cross disciplinary boundaries. What is emphasized across the volume is that there were varying, context-dependent rhythms of continuity and change in every stage of life in the medieval period. The volume's selection of authors is international in scope and represents some of the leading current scholarship in the field.
Download or read book Outliving the Self written by John N. Kotre and published by John Kotre. This book was released on 1996 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using dramatic personal narratives, Kotre expands upon Erik Erikson's concept of generativity. This concept means the variety of ways people find to be fertile in their lives, from the biological task of leaving a genetic legacy, to the emotional work of nurturing and guiding children, to teaching practical skills, transmitting values, and attempting to enrich their culture.
