Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English at Sussex University, gathers here seventeen of his literary essays which were previously published in a diversity of locations. The authors discussed include: Shakespeare, Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, Maupassant, Kipling, O. Henry, Anthony Hope, Conan Doyle, John Buchan, John Galsworthy, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Graham Greene.

A study of remembrance in post-Reformation England in religious and secular artworks and texts by Shakespeare, Milton, and women writers.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Between Religion and Ethnicity: Twentieth-Century Jewish Émigrés and the Shaping of Postwar Culture" that was published in Religions

The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation explores the dynamics of adapted Shakespeare across a range of literary genres and new media forms. This comprehensive reference and research resource maps the field of Shakespeare adaptation studies, identifying theories of adaptation, their application in practice and the methodologies that underpin them. It investigates current research and points towards future lines of enquiry for students, researchers and creative practitioners of Shakespeare adaptation. The opening section on research methods and problems considers definitions and theories of Shakespeare adaptation and emphasises how Shakespeare is both adaptor and adapted.A central section develops these theoretical concerns through a series of case studies that move across a range of genres, media forms and cultures to ask not only how Shakespeare is variously transfigured, hybridised and valorised through adaptational play, but also how adaptations produce interpretive communities, and within these potentially new literacies, modes of engagement and sensory pleasures. The volume's third section provides the reader with uniquely detailed insights into creative adaptation, with writers and practice-based researchers reflecting on their close collaborations with Shakespeare's works as an aesthetic, ethical and political encounter. The Handbook further establishes the conceptual parameters of the field through detailed, practical resources that will aid the specialist and non-specialist reader alike, including a guide to research resources and an annotated bibliography.

Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage collects significant work from the 2013 Blackfriars Conference. The conference, sponsored by the American Shakespeare Center, brings together scholars, actors, directors, dramaturges, and students to share important new work on the staging practices used by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The volume’s contributors range from renowned scholars and editors to acclaimed directors, highly-trained actors, and budding researchers. The topics cover a similarly wide range: a close reading of an often-cut scene from Henry V meets an account of staging pregnancy; a meticulous review of early modern contract law collides with an analysis of an actor in a bear costume; an account of printed punctuation from the 1600s encounters a study of audience interaction and empowerment in King Lear; the identification of candid doubling in A Comedy of Errors meets the troubling of gender categories in The Roaring Girl. The essays focus on the practical applications of theory, scholarship, and editing to performance of early modern plays.

In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare’s relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare’s specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism’s likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. Education in the canon of pagan classics bound Shakespeare together with other writers in what was the dominant tradition of English and European poetry and drama, up through the nineteenth and even well into the twentieth century. Second—and no less central—is the idea of classics as such, that of books whose perceived value, exceeding that of most in their era, justifies their protection against historical and cultural change. The volume’s organizing insight is that as Shakespeare was made a classic in this second, antiquarian sense, his work’s reception has more and more come to resemble that of classics in the first sense—of ancient texts subject to labored critical study by masses of professional interpreters who are needed to mediate their meaning, simply because of the texts’ growing remoteness from ordinary life, language, and consciousness. The volume presents overviews and argumentative essays about the presence of Latin and Greek literature in Shakespeare’s writing. They coexist in the volume with thought pieces on the uses of the classical as a historical and pedagogical category, and with practical essays on the place of ancient classics in today’s Shakespearean classrooms.

Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy is an international collection of fresh digital approaches for teaching Shakespeare. It describes 15 methodologies, resources and tools recently developed, updated and used by a diverse range of contributors in Great Britain, Australia, Asia and the United States. Contributors explore how these digital resources meet classroom needs and help facilitate conversations about academic literacy, race and identity, local and global cultures, performance and interdisciplinary thought. Chapters describe each case study in depth, recounting needs, collaborations and challenges during design, as well as sharing effective classroom uses and offering accessible, usable content for both teachers and learners. The book will appeal to a broad range of readers. College and high school instructors will find a rich trove of usable teaching content and suggestions for mounting digital units in the classroom, while digital humanities and education specialists will find a snapshot of and theories about the field itself. With access to exciting new content from local archives and global networks, the collection aids teaching, research and reflection on Shakespeare for the 21st century.

"The Shaping of Text pays homage to the work of the late John Porter Houston, who wrote extensively on style, rhetoric, and narrative and poetic techniques in Western European literature. It is appropriate that the essays in this volume focus on the form of the literary work and the ways in which form determines meaning." "William Calin's essay on the saint's life analyzes the use of antithesis as a poetic and structural device that illustrates the saint's fundamental understanding of the relationship between the ephemeral reality of his physical existence and the absolute, timeless reality to which he aspires. Raymond LaCharite's study of Rabelais focuses on the author's self-conscious awareness of this relationship and of Renaissance preoccupation with reading as both an act of creation and interpretation. George Joseph's study of three Renaissance poets focuses on the use of paradox as both a figure of speech and as a genre that serves both as a structure and as a basis for the interaction in the poetry. David Rubin's essay on La Fontaine emphasizes the ways in which the register of style in the Fables is used to set the tone and control the meaning of the language." "In the chapters devoted to nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature one can see the continuing closer relationship between the book as a work of art and the reality in which it interacts. Suzanne Nash analyzes the strategy Mme. de Stael uses in writing De l'Allemagne, a book written less to present an accurate portrayal of Germany than to promote her own republican ideals for France. Ross Chambers's essay probes the question of the theme of melancholy in Romantic writing and its relationship to the social and political structures of the period; Edward Kaplan shows how a growing ethical, social concern can be seen in Baudelaire's revised Les Fleurs du Mal; Rima Reck and Edward Kaplan reflect the growing use of literature as a vehicle for influencing public opinion." "Stirling Haig analyzes Flaubert's careful use of style and his awareness that reality is ultimately shaped by the beholder's perspective. Finnally, Virginia La Charite's chapter on Proust returns to the idea of a structure within a structure, in this case the architecture of the cathedral as a metaphor of synthesis, an aesthetic device that gives an intelligible structure to Proust's enormous but intricately complex, mass of details." "If John Porter Houston focused on form and style, it is because he understood the semiotic nature of all things: that a writer's style is a subtle form of refined communication or, as Houston wrote, "style is an absolute manner of seeing things for Proust, a question of vision, and so constitutes the ultimate reality of literature.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Includes essays on Shakespeare originally published 1987-1997.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 40 of the most important scholars and intellectuals writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.