Shakespeare And Civil Unrest In Britain And The United States

Download or read book Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States written by Mark Bayer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States extends the growing body of scholarship on Shakespeare’s appropriation by examining how the plays have been invoked during periods of extreme social, political, and racial turmoil. How do the ways that Shakespeare is adapted, studied, and discussed during periods of civil conflict differ from wars between nations? And how have these conflicts, in turn, affected how Shakespeare has been understood in these two countries that, more than any others, continue to be deeply shaped by Shakespeare’s complex, enduring, and multivalent legacy? The essays in this volume collectively disclose a fascinating genealogy of how Shakespeare became a dynamic presence in factional discourse and explore the "war of words" that has accompanied civil wars and other instances of domestic disturbance. Whether as part of violent confrontations, mutinies, rebellions, or within the universal struggle for civil rights, Shakespeare’s repeated appearance during such turbulent moments is more than mere historical coincidence. Rather, its inflections on the contested meanings of citizenship, community, and political legitimacy demonstrate the generative influence of the plays on our understanding of internecine strife in both countries.

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Second World War written by Irena Makaryk and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare’s works occupy a prismatic and complex position in world culture: they straddle both the high and the low, the national and the foreign, literature and theatre. The Second World War presents a fascinating case study of this phenomenon: most, if not all, of its combatants have laid claim to Shakespeare and have called upon his work to convey their society’s self-image. In wartime, such claims frequently brought to the fore a crisis of cultural identity and of competing ownership of this ‘universal’ author. Despite this, the role of Shakespeare during the Second World War has not yet been examined or documented in any depth. Shakespeare and the Second World War provides the first sustained international, collaborative incursion into this terrain. The essays demonstrate how the wide variety of ways in which Shakespeare has been recycled, reviewed, and reinterpreted from 1939–1945 are both illuminated by and continue to illuminate the War today.

Download or read book Shakespeare in a Divided America written by James Shapiro and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land. “In this sprightly and enthralling book . . . Shapiro amply demonstrates [that] for Americans the politics of Shakespeare are not confined to the public realm, but have enormous relevance in the sphere of private life.” —The Guardian (London) The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned. From Abraham Lincoln’s and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth’s, competing Shakespeare obsessions to the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated, Shakespeare in a Divided America reveals how no writer has been more embraced, more weaponized, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history.

Download or read book The Shakespeare Riots written by Nigel Cliff and published by Random House (NY). This book was released on 2007 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sample Text

Download or read book New Essays on History and Form in Early Modern English Literature written by Nick Moschovakis and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-19 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume convenes eight noted scholars with varied positions at the interface of formal and historical literary criticism. The editors’ introduction—a far-reaching account of how both methods have intersected in studies of early modern English texts since the 1990s—is the first such survey in more than 15 years, making it invaluable to scholars entering this area. Three essays address foundational questions about genre, fictionality, and formlessness; five feature close readings of texts or passages ranging from the more canonical (Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton) to the less so (an official record of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference). For scholars and students alike, the book thus models a variety of ways both to conceptualize and to analyze the value of literature at the formal–historical interface. Encompassing drama, lyric, satirical and polemical prose, and metrical as well as rhetorical and logical forms, the collection closes with an afterword by theorist Caroline Levine.

Download or read book Shakespeare and the American Nation written by Kim C. Sturgess and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-06-17 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do so many Americans celebrate Shakespeare, a long-dead English poet and playwright? By the nineteenth century newly-independent America had chosen to reject the British monarchy and Parliament, class structure and traditions, yet their citizens still made William Shakespeare a naturalized American hero. Today the largest group of overseas visitors to Stratford-upon-Avon, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Bankside's Shakespeare's Globe Theatre come from America. Why? Is there more to Shakespeare's American popularity than just a love of men in doublet and hose speaking soliloquies? This book tells the story of America's relationship with Shakespeare. The story of how and why Shakespeare became a hero within American popular culture. Sturgess provides evidence of a comprehensive nineteenth-century appropriation of Shakespeare to the cause of the American Nation and shows that, as America entered the twentieth century a new world power, for many Americans Shakespeare had become as American as George Washington.

Download or read book Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos written by Jonathan P. A. Sell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos: Person, Audience, Language breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates experiences of sublime pathos, for which audiences have been prepared by the sublime ethos described in the companion volume, Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare’s model of mutualistic character, in which "entangled" language brokers a psychic communion between fictive persons and real-life audiences and readers. In the process, Sublime Critical platitudes regarding Shakespeare’s liberating ambiguity and invention of the human are challenged, while the sympathetic imagination is reinstated as the linchpin of the playwright’s sublime effects. As the argument develops, the Shakespearean sublime emerges as an emotional state of vulnerable exhilaration leading to an ethically uplifting openness towards others and an epistemologically bracing awareness of human unknowability. Taken together, Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos and Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.