Ariel doesn’t believe in herself or her powers anymore, and she forgot everything about getting in love. She doesn’t nurture any illusions that she will meet Prince Charming one day. She just goes through the motions, full of resentments, unfulfilled, and almost defeated. She wouldn’t have looked twice at Max on a regular day. On the few occasions they have been thrown together, she barely tolerated his presence. However, Max turns out to be the only one who can help her in her hour of need. Will Ariel see him in a new light? Will Max be the one to lift the curse haunting her from birth?
Dorfman portrays, through visceral scenes and powerful intellect, the personal and political maelstroms underlying his migrations from Buenos Aires, on the run from Pinochet's death squads, to safe houses in Paris and Amsterdam, and eventually to America, his childhood home. The toll on Dorfman's wife and two sons, the 'earthquake of language' that is bilingualism, and his eventual questioning of his allegiance to past and party - all these crucibles of a life in exile are revealed with wry and startling honesty. Feeding on Dreams is a passionate reminder that 'we are all exiles', that we are all 'threatened with annihilation if we do not find and celebrate the refuge of common humanity', as Dorfman did during his 'decades of loss and resurrection'.
The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background. The latest generation of titles in this series also feature glossaries and visual elements that complement the classic, familiar format. In CliffsNotes on The Tempest, you follow the famous story of Prospero and his daughter Miranda. Through magic, Prospero conjures up a storm that brings a ship full of his enemies to the island on which he and Miranda live. What follows is Shakespeare's comic masterpiece that's full of intrigue and romance. Summaries and commentaries lead you, act by act, through this Shakespearean classic, and critical essays give you insight into the play as a political romance. Other features that help you study include Character analyses of the main characters A character map that graphically illustrates the relationships among the characters A section on the life and background of William Shakespeare A review section that tests your knowledge A Resource Center full of books, articles, films, and Internet sites Classic literature or modern-day treasure—you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.
Killing Physicians: Shakespeare's Blind Heroes and Reformation Saints is intended to give its reader a street-level perspective of Shakespeare's great tragedies and late plays: * Hamlet * The Tempest * King Lear * Henry VIII * Othello * The Winter's Tale * Cymbeline Diving into the social and theological tensions alive in sixteenth-century London neighborhoods, this book uncovers what may have been Shakespeare's answer to a world fraught with political and religious controversy.
"This erudite critical study...breathes new life into Plath scholarship."—Publishers Weekly, starred review When Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters was published in 1998, it was greeted with astonishment and acclaim, immediately landing on the bestseller list. Few suspected that Hughes had been at work for a quarter of a century on this cycle of poems addressed to his first wife, Sylvia Plath. In Ariel's Gift, Erica Wagner explores the destructive relationship between these two poets through their lives and their writings. She provides a commentary to the poems in Birthday Letters, showing the events that shaped them and, crucially, showing how they draw upon Plath's own work. "Both narratively engaging and scholastically comprehensive."—Thomas Lynch, Los Angeles Times "Wagner has set the poems of Hughes's Birthday Letters in the context of his marriage to Plath with great delicacy."—Times Literary Supplement
Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope is a critical introduction to the life and work of the internationally renowned writer, activist, and intellectual Ariel Dorfman. It is the first book about the author in English and the first in any language to address the full range of his writing to date. Consistently challenging assumptions and refusing preconceived categories, Dorfman has published in every major literary genre (novel, short story, poetry, drama); adopted literary forms including the picaresque, epic, noir, and theater of the absurd; and produced a vast amount of cultural criticism. His works are read as part of the Latin American literary canon, as examples of human rights literature, as meditations on exile and displacement, and within the tradition of bilingual, cross-cultural, and ethnic writing. Yet, as Sophia A. McClennen shows, when Dorfman’s extensive writings are considered as an integrated whole, a cohesive aesthetic emerges, an “aesthetics of hope” that foregrounds the arts as vital to our understanding of the world and our struggles to change it. To illuminate Dorfman’s thematic concerns, McClennen chronicles the writer’s life, including his experiences working with Salvador Allende and his exile from Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and she provides a careful account of his literary and cultural influences. Tracing his literary career chronologically, McClennen interprets Dorfman’s less-known texts alongside his most well-known works, which include How to Read Donald Duck, the pioneering critique of Western ideology and media culture co-authored with Armand Mattelart, and the award-winning play Death and the Maiden. In addition, McClennen provides two valuable appendices: a chronology documenting important dates and events in Dorfman’s life, and a full bibliography of his work in English and in Spanish.
Shakespeare’s plays have a long and varied performance history. The relevance of his plays in literary studies cannot be understated, but only recently have scholars been looking into the presence and significance of animals within the canon. Readers will quickly find—without having to do extensive research—that the plays are teeming with animals! In this Handbook, Karen Raber and Holly Dugan delve deep into Shakespeare’s World to illuminate and understand the use of animals in his span of work. This volume supplies a valuable resource, offering a broad and thorough grounding in the many ways animal references and the appearance of actual animals in the plays can be interpreted. It provides a thorough overview; demonstrates rigorous, original research; and charts new frontiers in the field through a broad variety of contributions from an international group of well-known and respected scholars.
This book represents the first collection of original critical material on Martin McDonagh, one of the most celebrated young playwrights of the last decade. Credited with reinvigorating contemporary Irish drama, his dark, despairing comedies have been performed extensively both on Broadway and in the West End, culminating in an Olivier Award for the The Pillowman and an Academy Award for his short film Six Shooter. In Martin McDonagh, Richard Rankin Russell brings together a variety of theoretical perspectives – from globalization to the gothic – to survey McDonagh’s plays in unprecedented critical depth. Specially commissioned essays cover topics such as identity politics, the shadow of violence and the role of Catholicism in the work of this most precocious of contemporary dramatists. Contributors: Marion Castleberry, Brian Cliff, Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, Maria Doyle, Laura Eldred, José Lanters, Patrick Lonergan, Stephanie Pocock, Richard Rankin Russell, Karen Vandevelde
Clear mirrors and The Geneva Bible, revolutionary innovations of the Elizabethan age, inspired Shakespeare’s drive towards a new purpose for drama. Shakespeare reversed the conventional mirror metaphor for drama, implying drama cannot reflect the substance of human nature, and developed a method of characterization, through metadrama, self-awareness and soliloquy, to project St. Paul’s idea of conscience onto the Elizabethan stage. This revolutionary method of characterization, aesthetic existence beyond performance, has long been sensed but remains frustratingly uncategorized. Shakespeare’s Mirrors charts the invention of a drama that staged the unstageable: St. Paul’s metaphysical conception of human nature glimpsed through a looking glass darkly.
