Search results for ""author dick"

"Mind-bendingly brilliant and fearlessly strange." – Frances Hardinge"A haunting, lyrical fable." – The Bookseller"Awe-inspiring." – The Times, Children's Book of the WeekFrom the multi-award-winning author of A Monster Calls comes a haunting tale of power and obsession that turns the story of Moby Dick upside down.The whales of Bathsheba's pod live for the hunt. Led by the formidable Captain Alexandra, they fight a never-ending war against men. Then the whales attack a man ship, and instead of easy prey they find the trail of a myth, a monster, perhaps the devil himself... With their relentless Captain leading the chase, they embark on the final hunt, one that will forever change the worlds of whales and men.

Read more less

Dreamscapes in Italian Cinema explores different representations of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and hypnagogic states in Italian film culture, covering the works of some of the most significant auteurs in the history of Italian cinema (Fellini, Pasolini, Moretti, Bellocchio, among others). Dreams are discussed both in a filmic context, considering the diegetic and formal techniques employed to construct and represent them, and as allegories or metaphors in a broader cultural, political, and social sense (the film industry itself as the proverbial dream factory, and dreams as hopes, aspirations or altogether parallel universes, for example). The book covers works released over different decades and spanning multiple genres (drama, gothic film, horror, comedy), and it is intended to shed light on a topic that is as suggestive as it is insufficiently studied.

Read more less

Discover the classic mystery from Dick Francis, one of the greatest thriller writers of all time'A fast-paced, exciting, gripping thriller' 5***** Reader Review'One of Dick Francis's best . . . A real page-turner' 5***** Reader Review'Deeply satisfying from beginning to end' 5***** Reader Review______Jockey and amateur photographer Philip Nore knows all too well how it feels to take a tumble from a horse. He also knows what it's like to feel the wrath of furious owners and trainers. You can't always be a winner. George Millace hated winners. As a photographer he specialized in taking pictures that exposed the failings of riders. But now he's dead - and no one seems very sorry. But when Millace's home is broken into during his funeral and Nore finds himself helping clear up, he finds something unexpected. Millace had other pictures - ones people will go to desperate lengths to possess. Now he must find out who wants them - and fast.Because if George Millace's death was no accident, then his killers are getting closer . . .Packed with intrigue and hair-raising suspense, Reflex is just one of the many blockbuster thrillers from legendary crime writer Dick Francis.Praise for Dick Francis:'As a jockey, Dick Francis was unbeatable when he got into his stride. The same is true of his crime writing' Daily Mirror'The narrative is brisk and gripping and the background researched with care . . . the entire story is a pleasure to relish' Scotsman'Dick Francis's fiction has a secret ingredient - his inimitable knack of grabbing the reader's attention on page one and holding it tight until the very end' Sunday Telegraph'A regular winner . . . as smooth, swift and lean as ever' Sunday Express'The master of suspense and intrigue' Country Life'Francis writing at his best' Evening Standard'Still the master' Racing Post

Read more less

The English Spa 1560 to 1815 dealt with not only places of healing and recreation, but also with the political, religious, social, and economic aspects of English spa life from its origins to the eighteenth century. This second volume, which incorporates a considerable amount of material and draft chapters written by Hembry, continues to the present time and is extended to include Welsh, Scottish, and Irish spas as well.

Read more less

Scottish playwright and poet Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) is a key figure in British Romantic-era theater. In recent years her writings have returned to print, her plays have been performed in North America and the United Kingdom, and she has been the subject of several monographs and a biography. This new edition of Further Letters follows the 1999 FDUP publication of Baillie's Collected Letters and brings together some two hundred and seventy new or uncollected letters. The new edition includes significant letters written to Walter Scott, Robert Southy, and Felicia Hemans. It also provides new information regarding Baillie's relationship with her contemporaries, her publishers, and the London theater world.

Read more less

Using original sources - such as newspaper articles, silent movies, letters, autobiographies, and interviews - Ilaria Serra depicts a large tapestry of images that accompanied mass Italian migration to the U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century. She chooses to translate the Italian concept of immaginario with the Latin imago that felicitously blends the double English translation of the word as 'imagery' and 'imaginary'. Imago is a complex knot of collective representations of the immigrant subject, a mental production that finds concrete expression; impalpable, yet real. The 'imagined immigrant' walks alongside the real one in flesh and rags.

Read more less

Shakespearean Performance: New Studies contains ten essays in Shakespearean performance scholarship, plus an introduction by the editor. They are papers presented at Drew University by some of the best Shakespearean scholars in the field: Andrew Gurr, Jean Howard, Arthur Kinney, Harry Keyishian, Russell Jackson, Corey Abate, Cary Mazer, Milla Riggio, Ralph Berry, and James Bulman. The essays cover such areas as the new Globe playhouse, the staging of certain plays, the film versions of several plays, cross-dressing, and the play-within-the-play, as well as other areas of interest to students of Shakespearean performance. The ten essays collected together here are all in the field of Shakespearean performance studies. They represent the areas of stage history, performance structure, Shakespeare on film, the physical playhouse, the phenomenon of cross-dressing, and cultural history reflected in stage direction.

Read more less

Christian Moraru's new book on postmodernism zeroes in on postmodern representation, which the critic seizes as a literary and cultural memory receptacle - as 'memorious discourse'. He argues that, counter to the orthodoxies that have taken hold in postmodern studies, postmodernism is not ahistorical, without cultural memory, or politically apathetic. With a wink at Borges's short story 'Funes the Memorious', he contends that this kind of representation cannot but operate digressively, and conspicuously so, through other representations, and is a picture that must latch onto other pictures to bring its object to life. While other types of discourse cover up, gloss over, or play down what they have borrowed - and therefore owe - the postmodern eagerly acknowledges its textual and cultural debt. Moreover, it turns this indebtedness into an unexpected source of creativity and originality . In his wide-ranging discussion of contemporary writers and theorists, Moraru notes that postmodernism characteristically re-presents. That is, it actively 'remembers' and, to use a musical term, 'reprises' former representations. These need not be infinite in number, as in Borges, but must be and usually are retrieved with sufficient obviousness. Memorious Discourse is organized into a largely theoretical prologue, five chapters, and an epilogue. The chapters mark off as many areas in recent Continental and American theory and narrative where the discourse apparatus, workings, and individualizing problems of postmodern representation come to light and lend themselves to rethinking through the Borgesian-inspired critical metaphor. To gauge the scope of memorious discourse, Moraru examines theoretical and narrative models developed by such writers and critics as Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joseph McElroy, Paul Auster, Kathy Acker, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, William Gibson, Mark Leyner, David Antin, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe

Read more less

Tracking Thoreau explores the constellation of three central issues in Thoreau's oeuvre: nature, culture, and technology. Here, nature's own technology-above all, it's inherent ability to stray, to wonder, to transcend boundaries, to transform itself-mirrors the subject as it cultivates its "self" through composition, narration, and style. Such expression, like nature itself, involves unriliness, a transformation in the narrative, and in the subject of narrations (its self), that likewise allows it to change, go wild, or even lose its way.

Read more less

In Struggle Over the Modern, Dennis Raverty argues that there was not one, but two, competing 'modernisms' vying for dominance of the critical field in American art during the first half of the twentieth century. The most familiar strain of this debate to us today is formalism, which emphasized 'purity' in art and culminated in the writing of the influential late modern critic, Clement Greenberg. The other critical position, he contends, is not as familiar to us today, partly because it was so overshadowed by formalist thought in the postwar period. This position emphasized the importance of 'experience' over formal purity and is evident in the writing of Greenberg's rival, Harold Rosenberg, as well as in a number of American writers and critics from the first half of the century. Struggle Over the Modern reconstitutes this neglected yet important dimension of the avant-garde debate in American art criticism decade by decade. Far more than an obscure aesthetic dispute, this was a battle over the very terms and limits appropriate to art, a competition - stretching all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century - to define art either narrowly as an exclusive self-referential endeavor, or broadly delineating the boundaries between art and experience in a more inclusive manner. Examined historiographically, critical writings can yield important information because, beyond their immediate functions of explanation and evaluation of contemporaneous art, these writings imply an unspoken strategy for capturing and dominating the field of critical discourse, thereby influencing the way people think and talk about art. The history of critical thought in twentieth-century American art is also the history of this struggle for critical dominance, a struggle within the avant-garde, over which ideas would define the era for future generations. In a sense, it was a battle for the very soul of modern art. Dominance of the critical arena was so important during the era of the emergence of modern

Read more less

This book is a detailed study of Ezra Pound’s explicit and implicit use of elements of the Neoplatonic tradition in his prose and poetry, and of the way it informed his poetics as well as his political and social-economic views.

Read more less

Broken English/Breaking English discusses the work of some prominent contemporary poets writing in English, such as Seamus Heaney, Douglas Dunn, and Robert Crawford. It examines the challenges to a poetic discourse that was claimed in immediately post-Second World War England to be ‘pure’ and ‘English.’

Read more less

Dubliners’ Dozen is an exploration of those narrative devices that make James Joyce’s Dubliners a writerly rather than a readerly text. In place of a single comprehensive theory that integrates all of the stories, Dubliners’ Dozen trades entirely in ‘micro-theories’— a term for specific fragments of larger theoretical structures.

Read more less

Encompassing discussion of more than two hundred individual poems, this study offers a coherent framework for understanding the body of work created by a major, late twentieth-century poet.

Read more less

Monteverdi in Venice tells the story of Monteverdi's arrival in Venice and his thirty years of continuous work there as Director of Music at St. Marks. Todays fads and fashions produce odd distortions of Monteverdi's musical habits. His vocal works, meant to be performed one voice to a part, are consistently given by massed choirs. For decades conductors and their audiences have swallowed the false theory that his music should be transposed, although there is no need to do so. This book describes and solves these problems, allowing the composer to shine through layers of pseudo-musicological varnish that has obscured a large part of his message.

Read more less

This anthology contains 155 poems by forty-nine poets, all of whom have connections with Cambridge University. The poems have been selected to represent a comprehensive range of responses: patriotic, protest, satirical, realistic, elegiac, pastoral, and homoerotic. The introduction provides analytical notes on all the poems. Three appendixes discuss Charles Sorley’s comments on Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon’s statement of protest, and A. E. Tomlinson’s scathing attack on Brooke. Biographical information on the poets is also included.

Read more less

Edmund Gurney (1847–88), Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, exerted a strong influence in the intellectual and artistic life of Victorian London. An exploration of Gurney’s life, published work, and correspondence, this book reveals the intellectual scope and penetration, the profound humanitarian concerns, and the steadfast integrity of the compassionate and charismatic man.

Read more less

This book is the first comprehensive examination of the remarkable singing groupsmale and femaleknown as barbershoppers. In a capella quartets and choruses, barbershoppers concentrate on a song literature that was popular in the period 1860 - 1930. Illustrated.

Read more less

Lucien A. Voorhees and William Mackenzie Thompson left Flemington, New Jersey, in high spirits in September 1862 as enlisted men in the 15th New Jersey Regiment to join the fight for the Union. They expected to do their duty and return home victorious in short order. On the march South Voorhees and Thompson each began a correspondence with the local newspapers back home to describe their activities as soldiers in the Army of the Potomac. Within just weeks of their departure from home they came face to face with the realities of war at the Battle of Fredericksburg. These young men proved to be great writers as well as patriots. Their letters, short or long, convey their feelings and the events they witnessed in vivid and colorful language. They soon discovered that their service would demand great sacrifice. 'True Jersey Blues' presents Voorhees' and Thompson's vivid accounts of life on the march, fierce firefights, and everyday occupations convey a true sense of the Civil War as experienced by the men enlisted to fight. The letters from Voorhees and Thompson cover the period from the muster of the 15th Regiment at Flemington (August 1862) through the combat deaths of both writers at Spotsylvania (May 1864). The soldiers tell the story of two failed Federal assaults on Fredericksburg, a race to Gettysburg, the subsequent chase after the Army of Northern Virginia, court-martials, executions, a dress parade for President Lincoln, picket duty, "contrabands" (escaped slaves) coming into the Union lines, and the activities contrived to keep themselves busy in winter camp. These men never lost their faith in the cause they were fighting for or their love of home. Their pens went silent at Spotsylvania in the spring of 1864 where they sacrificed their lives for the cause they believed in. Here, Voorhees and Thompson tell their story of the Civil War and their fight for victory.

Read more less

This book treats the literary work of Julia Augusta Webster within the context of Websters participation in nineteenth century British aestheticism. Websters personal life, her experience as a member of the Suffrage Society and her tenure on the London School Board, as well as her position as poetry reviewer for the Athenaeum and participation in the salon society of the 1880s, inform her later work, but her earliest poetry and fiction also reflect the beginnings of the aestheticist perspective on the transience and impermanence of life. This book makes use of extensive archival materials to provide context for a study of Websters literary work, beginning with her first volume of poetry Blanche Lisle and concluding with her posthumously published Mother and Daughter sonnets. In tracing the trajectory of Websters development as an aestheticist poet, Patricia Rigg extends Webster scholarship into areas of the writers work not previously explored.

Read more less

This study explores images of economic assistance to explain the importance of tailoring such assistance to the distinctive social needs of the targeted communities, and how third parties must consider and include local perspectives in their attempts to build a lasting peace. The book makes an important contribution to our understanding of how economic assistance impacts a divided society with a history of protracted violence. The stories reflect the importance of community development and cross-community contact through joint economic, peace and justice, and social development projects. Byrne's research brings to light a vision of how the impact and delivery of IFI and EU Peace I aid is assisting in building the peace dividend in Northern Ireland. One of the key unanswered questions related to economic aid and preventing future violence is what is the significance and importance of external economic aid in building the peace after violence. By examining the respondents' political imagery, this project significantly expands existing work on economic aid and peace building in other societies coming out of violence. Northern Ireland's changing social-economic and political context reflects the fact that economic aid and sustainable economic development is a cornerstone of the peace-building process.

Read more less

This book represents an investigation into one of the basic issues in the study of translation: how do we reconcile theory and practice? The main focus, in the form of close readings and think-aloud protocols in chapters 2 and 3, is on translations of two classic texts: Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' and Carlo Collodi's 'Le avventure di Pinocchio'. The first and last chapters respectively seek to show what translation theory is and what translation practice is. Indeed, 'Theory and Hubris', chapter 1, provides a synthesis of the development of the interdiscipline of Translation Studies, with some consideration also given to the hermeneutical questions that inevitably arise when dealing with the interpretation of language.

Read more less

A few short years after Peru had declared its independence from Spain, the attention of some people in Lima began to focus on a potential source of untold wealth that was to prove more precious than gold. This was guano, which, in its greatest concentration, was found on the diminutive Chincha Islands that lie just off the Peruvian coast, some seventy miles south of Callao. This book covers the story of this international guano trade. It outlines the fate of the unfortunates recruited to cut and load the guano. It also gives full details of the hardships endured by mariners employed in this trade. The story of those who grew rich on the proceeds of this trade is also outlined. Importantly, it explains just how the Peruvian government mismanaged the trade, to the extent that Peru became burdened with debts, rather than prospering on the proceeds of their vast new guano-based income.

Read more less

Theatrical performance is the most ephemeral of arts. Once a production closes, the living work of art disappears. Fortunately, some productions leave behind enough evidence to reconstruct in words and pictures what a performance was like and to conjecture what the audience saw and heard. Between 1889 and 1995 in America, productions of Sophocles' Electra became the project of some of the most significant directors, actresses, and producers of their day. In reconstructing eleven major productions, this book seeks to accomplish two goals: first, to preserve, albeit in imperfect written form, the productions themselves; and, second, by tracing the history of Electra's production, to highlight some of the most pivotal figures in the development of American theater, including several key women often neglected by theater historians. Along the way, for those who celebrate Greek tragedy in production, this book will allow the reader to sit vicariously in the audience and enjoy seven Electra productions on the American stage.

Read more less

Circumstances placed John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party at the center of British politics in 1912. After more than a century of struggle, Irish nationalists looked likely to return a parliament to Dublin that would allow the Irish people, as one nation, to determine their own domestic affairs. Staunch Ulster Unionists stood in opposition, determined to reject Home Rule for their region. Alongside them were Unionist Party members who declared that such an action would destroy the British Empire, wreck the constitution, and possibly foment a civil war. Over the next decade, the Home Rulers saw their cause betrayed and their party destroyed. Asquith, Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill all served to undercut Redmond and his supporters in the interests of political expediency. Four years of war in Europe, followed by four years of conflict in Ireland, led to a more radical approach to the Irish question that allowed Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army to make the nationalist cause their own. By 1922, Eamonde Valera, Michael Collins, James Craig and their followers took possession of a divided Ireland embittered by the enmity of two Irish identities and the strains of factional strife.

Read more less

For decades scholarship on Federico Fellini has focused on the figure of the director himself, while formal analysis based on the craft of filmmaking has been largely ignored. Fellini spent countless hours in the studios of Cinecitta recording, mixing, and editing music, voices, and sound effects for his films, but his unique and often revolutionary uses of cinematic sound have never been systematically studied. This book reveals the singularly important role played by music in the construction of meaning in Fellini's black and white feature-length films, and presents a substantial re-reading of the seven films made during the most creative period of Fellini's artistic development: The White Sheik, I vitellini, La strada, Il bidone, The Nights if Cabiria, La dolce vita, and 8 1/2. The editing of music in Fellini's first films represents an entirely new approach to cinematic sound. The sophistication and complexity of Fellini's soundtracks far surpasses the neorealist models that are often assumed to form the practical foundation of Fellini's earliest works, and an analysis of the editing of music in these films reveals extraordinary innovation in the pairing of music and visual image. Although these films may often seem visually conventional, the soundtracks- characterized by abrupt cuts, comic synchronization with the visual image, unrealistic passages between nondiegetic and diegetic musical sources, and the coexistence of diegetic sources with nondiegetic musical accompaniment- undermine the verisimilitude of the projected image, facilitate aesthetic distance, and emphasize artifice at the expense of 'reality.' Functioning as an ironic, often dissonant counterpoint to the narrative structure of the visual images, the manifestly artificial editing of music in Fellini's films questions the verisimilitude of cinematic narration by revealing the interpenetratin of representation and reception, being and seeming, history and story, 'truth' and fiction.

Read more less

This is the first modern selection of the poetry of Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849), best known in literary history as the self-styled 'Corn Law Rhymer' because of his savage satirical poems published in the 1830s. This edition, with a full introduction, note on the text, bibliography, and chronology, together with explanatory notes, brings Elliott's work into the public domain for the first time since his death. It will be of interest to students of Victorian literature and history, and indeed to anyone interested in the politics, poetics, aesthetics, and social history of the nineteenth century. Elliott's poetry is of much more than merely historical interest, just as his work is wider in its reach than his concern with the Corn Laws: there is much here that is personal, even elegiac, and much that is celebratory of his beloved Yorkshire countryside, especially around Rotherham, where he was born, and Sheffield, where he spent most of his adult life. His radical views retain their resonance today. This selection includes poems from all the stages of his long career, with lengthy extracts from The Village Patriarch, The Ranter, The Splendid Village, The Corn Law Rhymes, and many of his numerous miscellaneous poems.

Read more less

This book explores the legal landscape of early modern London, its legal institutions and court cases that influenced the building of the first London theaters and the creation of the early modern drama. Beginning with an overview of the Inns of Court, this work treats the members of the legal fraternity and their relationship to the emerging dramatic industry.

Read more less

This book explores the creation of imperial identities in Britain and several of its colonies_South Africa, India, Australia, and Wales_and the ways in which the Victorian press around the world shaped and reflected these identities.

Read more less

This performance-oriented study proposes the dramatic sub genre `comedies of forgiveness’ to describe four Shakespeare plays that have been traditionally been staged as if they were romantic comedies. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, All’s Well that Ends Well, and Measure for Measure all feature young heroes who behave badly, apologize weakly, yet quickly earn the complete forgiveness of their societies. This book suggests feminist stagings of the comedies of forgiveness designed to reveal how society deals with masculine fickleness, suspicion, lust, and sexual irresponsibility by channeling male erotic desire toward courtship, marriage, legitimate procreation, and child rearing.

Read more less

East Anglian dramatic manuscripts record a vigorous, long lived, and spectacular theater that flourished in the late Middle Ages. Staging Faith explores the relationship between production methods, dramatic structure, iconography, and the medieval reception of these plays. It explores how different modes of production resulted in types of dramatic organization and how varied playwrights exploited the symbolic potential of various settings, props and dramatic actions.

Read more less

These annotated letters present the first personal glimpse of this Scottish playwright as she wrote and lived. It documents her problems with publishers, describes her encounters with Wordsworth, Byron, Southey, Berry and other literary figures, outlines a long relationship with Scott and places an active literary woman in the historical and social setting of early to mid-nineteenth century Britain.

Read more less

Considering the importance of Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings and 2nd Earl of Moira, it is surprising that no full-length biography has been written about him. The only significant studies of his career have been analysis of his role as governor-general of India in the early nineteenth century. Paul David Nelson's study rectifies this situation by providing a well-crafted scholarly analysis of the life of Lord Hastings. He covers in depth all aspects of the man's multifaceted career as a professional soldier, peer in the House of Lords, and governor-general of India. He also provides a character study of this intelligent, affable man, pointing out his strengths as a father, husband, and friend. In the process, Nelson does not lose sight of Hastings's personal ineptitude. He shows how the marquess ran up debts of nearly 1,000,000 by the time of his death and left his family almost penniless. The most important role that Hastings played was as a soldier in the British army. He was a young officer during the American war, fighting at Bunker Hill in 1775 as a lieutenant in the grenadier company of the 5th Regiment. Distinguishing himself, he was promoted captain and appointed aide-de-camp to General Henry Clinton. He went on to lead the Volunteers of Ireland, serve as adjutant general under Clinton, and to command an independent army in South Carolina in 1780-81. As governor-general of India from 1813 to 1823, he successfully led campaigns against the Nepalese, Pindaris, and Marathas. Hastings's second most important role was as an administrator in India. Although supported by able civilian subordinates, he sometimes made poor choices in his own appointments and became mired in the cloudy dealings of the Palmer Company. He was not guilty of any chicanery, but his reputation was marred by his defense of some questionable company activities. Hastings's third role was as a politician in the House of Lords. Here he was least successful, partly because he was not ruthless enough to rise to the

Read more less

Edmund Andros, a soldier, administrator, courtier, and diplomat, served a succession of Stuart monarchs in the Old and New Worlds. This study differs from most past assessments that portray him in a negative light; instead it concentrates on his role in protecting and defending EnglandOs New World colonies as governor of New York, the Dominion of New England, and Virginia.

Read more less

This book recovers the earliest epistolary activity of one of America's most innovative and influential modernist poets. From 1902 to 1912, William Carlos Williams wrote more than 300 letters to his younger brother Edgar, an accomplished architect with whom Williams shared the desire to become 'a great artist'. This collection of 200 letters sheds new light on the aesthetic thoughts and practices with which Williams was engaged for a full decade before his unique voice emerged in the forerunner to 'Paterson', 'The Wanderer' (1914). Providing a comprehensive introduction, exhaustive annotation, images of poetry and artwork, and hundreds of letters never before seen by scholars, this critical edition provides substantially new material on Williams and will be an important addition to the study of early American modernism.

Read more less

Engaging with a wide range of texts on gift-theory, extending from Senecas De Beneficiis to Derridas Given Time, Selfish Gifts examines the importance of gift ethics and the rhetoric of honorable giving to the literature of late Elizabeth and early Stuart England. It demonstrates that the ideal of the freely given and disinterested gift shaped the language of early modern clientage, along with literary representations of patrons and patronage systems during this period. Selfish Gifts examines how early modern clients moved quickly and strategically to assimilate the language of competition and equality, characteristic of an emerging market economy, within their existing discourses of gift exchange, in order to maximize the rewards they might induce from an increasingly diverse group of patrons. To give is to exercise power and thus, as numerous modern gift-theorists and anthropologists elucidate, the gift is implicitly self-interested even as it derives value from appearing altruistic; nowhere is this paradox more significant than in a patronage economy such as that which shaped literary production in early modern England. In pursuing that paradox and its implications, Selfish Gifts highlights crucial connections and cultural tensions between political and sexual giving, between 'giving' truth and flattery, between the sovereignty and subjection of gift donor/recipient, and between strategic and so-called 'sacrificial' giving. Those tensions are examined in the context of the latter years of Elizabeth Is rule, through the contrasting reign of James I and up to the early Caroline period. Selfish Gifts demonstrates the prominence of the gift ideal in Renaissance England and suggests the disturbing social and political consequences for those who give contrary to that ideal by bestowing self-interested gifts, by refusing to give, or by giving egotistically. The book establishes the centrality of gift theory to the discourses of patronage, friendship, and sovereignty, sugg

Read more less

This is the first edition of the complete works of William Heminge (1602-c.1653), son of Shakespeare's colleague and first co-editor, John Heminge. It contains a biography, critical old-spelling texts of his two surviving plays, The Jewes Tragedy and The Fatal Contract, and the small group of poems assigned to him in contemporary manuscripts. Heminge's tragedies in particular reveal him to be an innovative writer deserving far greater critical attention than he has previously received. He is both the first dramatist in English to see the theatrical potential of Josephus's account of 'the Fall of the Temple', and the first to challenge the conventions of revenge drama by presenting a fully autonomous female avenger on the English stage. The introductions to the plays offer an investigation of Heminge's historical sources and theatrical techniques. His literary and theatrical debts to Shakespeare are investigated, together with the stage history and afterlife of the plays and the provenance of the poems' manuscripts. In the case of The Jewes Tragedy, three early modern analogues ot the narrative of the siege of Jerusalem are discussed along with the contemporary context of Roman dramas and representations of Jews on the English stage. The Fatal Contract depicts the first female revenge protagonist in English drama, and is examined in the tradition of revenge tragedy, with special reference to portrayals of cross-dressed women, Africans, and eunuchs. All copies of the first quartos of the plays available in the United Kingdom have been examined and collated, together with those in the Huntington Library. The transmission of the texts is discussed, with contextual evidence for the dates of the plays. The relationship of the variant text, The Eunuch (1687), to both The Fatal Contract and Elkanah Settle's adaptation, Love and Revenge (1675) is examined. One poem, 'A Contemplation over the Dukes Grave,' has never been previously printed. A case for the attribution to

Read more less

For more information on similar titles, please visit www.lexingtonbooks.com

Read more less

Bringing together both established and emerging scholars of the long nineteenth century, literary modernism, landscape and hemispheric studies, and contemporary fiction, New Versions of Pastoral offers a historically wide-ranging account of the Bucolic tradition, tracing the formal diversity of pastoral writing up to the present day. Dividing its analytic focus between periods, the volume contextualizes a wide range of exemplary practitioners, genres, and movements: contributors attend to early modernism's vacillation between critiquing and aestheticizing the rise of primitivist nostalgia; the ambiguous mythologization of the English estate by the twentieth-century manor house novel; and the post-national revisiting of the countryside and its sovereign status in contemporary imaginings of regional life.

Read more less

This is a wide-ranging anthology that examines, in chronological order, several genres that have been prominent in the history of Western philosophy. The programmatic introduction outlines the diverse range of genres used by philosophers (dialogue, commentary, biography, etc.) and explains how genre-based exegesis can enrich our analysis and interpretation of philosophical texts. The remaining essays examine individual texts from this perspective.

Read more less

In Hitler in the Movies: Finding Der Führer on Film, a Shakespearean and a sociologist explore the fascination our popular culture has with Adolf Hitler. What made him … Hitler? Do our explanations tell us more about the perceiver than the actual historical figure? We ask such question by viewing the Hitler character in the movies. How have directors, actors, film critics, and audiences accounted for this monster in a medium that reflects public tastes and opinions? The book first looks at comedic films, such as Chaplain’s The Great Dictator or Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), along with the Mel Brooks’s 1983 version. Then, there is the Hitler of fantasy, from trash films like The Saved Hitler’s Brain to a serious work like The Boys from Brazil where Hitler is cloned. Psychological portraits include Anthony Hopkins’s The Bunker, the surreal The Empty Mirror, and Max, a portrait of Hitler in his days in Vienna as a would-be artist. Documentaries and docudramas range from Leni Reinfenstahl’s iconic The Triumph of the Will or The Hidden Führer, to the controversial Hitler: A Film from Germany and Quentin Tarantino’s fanciful Inglourious Basterds. Hitler in the Movies also considers the ways Der Führer remains today, as a ghostly presence, if not an actual character. Why is he still with us in everything from political smears to video games to merchandise? In trying to explain this and the man himself, what might we learn about ourselves and our society?

Read more less

Donne and the Resources of Kind is the first book about Donne’s writings to focus on their relations to genre. It considers what Donne took from the resources of kind and how he transformed the resources on which he drew. Most of the chapters discuss Donne’s secular and religious verse but there is also discussion of Donne’s religious prose.

Read more less

In this “heartrending, passionate, and surprisingly humorous account of the conjunction between art and death” (Andrew Solomon, New York Times bestselling author), acclaimed opera singer Charity Tillemann-Dick recounts her remarkable journey from struggling to draw a single breath to singing at the most prestigious venues in the world after receiving not one but two double lung transplants. Charity Tillemann-Dick was a vivacious young American soprano studying at the celebrated Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest when she received devastating news: her lungs were failing, her heart was three and a half sizes too big, and she would die within five years. Medical experts advised Charity to abandon her musical dreams, but if her time was running out, she wanted to spend it doing what she loved. In just three years, she endured two double lung transplants and had to slowly learn to breathe, walk, talk, eat, and sing again. With new lungs and fierce determination, she eventually fell in love, rebuilt her career, and reclaimed her life. More than a decade after her diagnosis, she has a chart-topping album, performs around the globe, and is a leading voice for organ donation. Weaving Charity’s extraordinary tale of triumph with those of opera’s greatest heroines, The Encore illuminates the indomitable human spirit and is “an uplifting story of overcoming significant odds to fulfill a dream” (Kirkus Reviews).

Read more less

Written between 1933 and 1942, Elizabeth WaughOs letters to Edmund Wilson record a courtship both intellectual and romantic. These letters offer fascinating insights into the process of artistic creation in the novel; taken with the biographical introduction and critical afterword, they shed light on the problems faced by a woman torn between the safety of a comfortable upper-class existence and the fulfillment of artistic aspirations.

Read more less

The focus of this work is Manual Azaña, the Second Republic's preeminent statesman, and it clarifies Spain's complex politics in the 1920s and 1930s.

Read more less

This volume provides the first new edition of Cibber’s plays since 1777, and the first edition ever published that includes all of his known plays and that incorporates his extensive and often complex revisions. This modern-spelling edition features a comprehensive general introduction to Cibber’s career, and separate introductions for each play, detailing sources, performance data, and publication history. Annotations and textual notes are included to allow for additional study. Included in this volume are Love’s Last Shift, Love Makes a Man, Richard III, The Rival Queans, Woman’s Wit, and Xerxes.

Read more less

This book examines the work of three major twentieth-century Caribbean poets: one Puerto Rican, one Martinician, and one Saint Lucian. Focusing on one major work by each poet, it follows their efforts to confront the Archipelagos historical legacy of racism and colonialism through the creation of poetic personae that unceasingly alternate between the open dialogism of political engagement and the monologic closure of lyric self-articulation.

Read more less