A mysterious, melancholic, brooding Hamlet has gripped and fascinated four hundred years' of readers, trying to "find" and know him as he searches for and avenges his father's name. Setting itself apart from the usual discussions about Hamlet, Hunt here demonstrates that Hamlet is much more than we take him to be. Much more than the sum of his parts--more than just tragic, sexy youth and more than just vain cruelty--Hamlet is a reflection of our own aspirations and neuroses. Looking for Hamlet investigates our many searches for Hamlet, from their origins in Danish mythology through the complex problems of early printed texts, through the centuries of shifting interpretations of the young prince to our own time when Hamlet is more compelling and perplexing than ever before. Hunt presents Hamlet as a sort of missing person, the idealized being inside oneself. This search for the missing Hamlet, Hunt argues, reveals a present absence readers pursue as a means of finding and identifying ourselves.

Theological and psychological interpretations of Shakespeare's most problematic play have been pursued as complementary to each other. In this bold reading, Walter N. King brings twentiethcentury Christian existentialism and post-Freudian psychological theory to bear upon Hamlet and his famous problems. King draws on the support of Paul Tillich, John Macquarrie, and Nicolai Beryaev, who radically reinterpreted the Christian doctrine of providence, and presents an unconventional thesis. He derives illuminating psychological insights from Erik Erikson, the pioneer in the modern study of identity, and Viktor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy.

In this illuminating study, Anthony Dawson surveys the stage history of Hamlet from its appearance in Shakespeare’s time to the efflorescence of new and challenging productions in our own. He vividly re-creates more than a dozen representative performances across three centuries. Bringing together theatre history and the interests of cultural criticism and performance theory, Dawson traces the Anglo-American acting tradition and provides a succinct account of the interpretative problems associated with texts, character, design, and the production of meaning. The final chapters extend the analysis to a number of film versions, notably those of Olivier, Kozintsev and Zeffirelli, as well as to several important European stage productions.

Two thousand years ago, Lucretius said that everything is atoms in the void; it's physics all the way down. Contemporary physicalism agrees. But if that's so how can we--how can our thoughts, emotions, our values--make anything happen in the physical world? This conceptual knot, the mental causation problem, is the core of the mind-body problem, closely connected to the problems of free will, consciousness, and intentionality. Anthony Dardis shows how to unravel the knot. He traces its early appearance in the history of philosophical inquiry, specifically in the work of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and T. H. Huxley. He then develops a metaphysical framework for a theory of causation, laws of nature, and the causal relevance of properties. Using this framework, Dardis explains how macro, or higher level, properties can be causally relevant in the same way that microphysical properties are causally relevant: by their relationship with the laws of nature. Smelling an orange, choosing the orange rather than the cheesecake, reaching for the one on the left instead of the one on the right-mental properties such as these take their place alongside the physical "motor of the world" in making things happen.

Adam Bede was George Eliot's first full-length novel. Set in the English Midlands of farmers and village craftsmen at the turn of the eighteenth century, the book tells a story of seduction, and is also a pioneering record of a long lost rural world.Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate, illuminating the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.The Mill on the Floss is a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age. Maggie Tulliver's love for her brother Tom turns to conflict. His bourgeois standards contrasting with her own lively intelligence, and the result, is tragedy.Silas Marner tells the tender and moving story of the unjustly exiled linen weaver, Silas Marner of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England. It tells of how he is restored to life and his sadness ended by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie.

The seemingly peaceful country village of Hayslope is the setting for this ambitious first novel by one of the nineteenth century’s great novelists. With sympathy, wit, and unflinching realism, Adam Bede tells a story that would have been familiar to Eliot’s first readers: the seduction of a pretty farm girl by the young squire of the district. Eliot uses this story, with its tragic implications, to explore the dangers of reliance on religious and social norms to govern destructive desires. As this edition demonstrates, Adam Bede addresses profound questions of morality, religion, and the role of women in society, while at the same time seeking to establish a new aesthetic for fiction. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a rich selection of appendices, including selections from Eliot’s letters and journals, contemporary reviews of the novel, and accounts of the murder trial of Mary Voce, the woman whose story formed part of the inspiration for the novel.

The essays in Hypermedia and Literary Studies discuss the theoretical and practical opportunities and challenges posed by the convergence of hypermedia systems and traditional written texts.Consider a work from Shakespeare. Imagine, as you read it, being able to call up instantly the Elizabethan usage of a particular word, variant texts for any part of the work, critical commentary, historically relevant facts, or oral interpretations by different sets of actors. This is the sort of richly interconnected, immediately accessible literary universe that can be created by hypertext (electronically linked texts) and hypermedia (the extension of linkages to visual and aural material). The essays in Hypermedia and Literary Studies discuss the theoretical and practical opportunities and challenges posed by the convergence of hypermedia systems and traditional written texts. They range from the theory and design of literary hypermedia to reports of actual hypermedia projects from secondary school to university and from educational and scholarly to creative applications in poetry and fiction.ContentsHypertext, Hypermedia, and Literary Studies - Theory - Reading and Writing the Electronic Book - From Electronic Books to Electronic Libraries: Revisiting Reading and Writing the Electronic Book. - The Rhetoric of Hypermedia: Some Rules for Authors - Topographic Writing: Hypertext and the Electronic Writing Space - Reading from the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of Forking Paths. - Poem Descending a Staircase: Hypertext and the Simultaneity of Experience - Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium - Threnody: Psychoanalytic Digressions on the Subject of Hypertexts - Applications - Biblical Studies and Hypertext - Ancient Materials, Modern Media: Shaping the Study of Classics with Hypertext - Linking Together Books: Adapting Published Material into Intermedia Documents - The Shakespeare Project - The Emblematic Hyperbook - HyperCard Stacks for Fielding's Joseph Andrews: Issues of Design and Content - Hypertext for the PC: The Rubén Dario Project - Hypermedia in Schools