This volume considers the influential revival of ancient philosophical skepticism in the 16th and early 17th centuries and investigates, from a comparative perspective, its reception in early modern English, Spanish and French drama, dedicating detailed readings to plays by Shakespeare, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Rotrou, Desfontaines, and Cervantes. While all the plays employ similar dramatic devices for "putting skepticism on stage", the study explores how these dramas, however, give different "answers" to the challenges posed by skepticism in relation to their respective historico-cultural and "ideological" contexts.
What does it mean to contemplate? In the Middle Ages, more than merely thinking with intensity, it was a religious practice entailing utter receptiveness to the divine presence. Contemplation is widely considered by scholars today to have been the highest form of devotional prayer, a rarified means of experiencing God practiced only by the most devout of monks, nuns, and mystics. Yet, in this groundbreaking new book, Eleanor Johnson argues instead for the pervasiveness and accessibility of contemplative works to medieval audiences. By drawing together ostensibly diverse literary genres—devotional prose, allegorical poetry, cycle dramas, and morality plays—Staging Contemplation paints late Middle English contemplative writing as a broad genre that operated collectively and experientially as much as through radical individual disengagement from the world. Johnson further argues that the contemplative genre played a crucial role in the exploration of the English vernacular as a literary and theological language in the fifteenth century, tracing how these works engaged modes of disfluency—from strained syntax and aberrant grammar, to puns, slang, code-switching, and laughter—to explore the limits, norms, and potential of English as a devotional language. Full of virtuoso close readings, this book demonstrates a sustained interest in how poetic language can foster a participatory experience of likeness to God among lay and devotional audiences alike.
Staging Women's Lives in Academia demonstrates how ostensibly personal decisions are shaped by institutions and advocates for ways that workplaces, not women, must be changed. Addressing life stages ranging from graduate school through retirement, these essays represent a gamut of institutions and women who draw upon both personal experience and scholarly expertise. The contributors contemplate the slipperiness of the very categories we construct to explain the stages of life and ask key questions, such as what does it mean to be a graduate student at fifty? Or a full professor at thirty-five? The book explores the ways women in all stages of academia feel that they are always too young or too old, too attentive to work or too overly focused on family. By including the voices of those who leave, as well as those who stay, this collection signals the need to rebuild the house of academia so that women can have not only classrooms of their own but also lives of their own.
This original and thought-provoking book takes a new approach to engaging with organizational theory and making sense of organizations. Consisting of seven plays written by the author, each is followed by a stimulating commentary by a noted scholar, exploring the wider contexts and values of applying theatre to organisational environments and management education. As the first work of this type in organisational theatre, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of organisational learning, leadership training, art management, arts-based learning and creativity innovation. Alongside the scholarly discussion, the author provides the reader with the opportunity to experience the plays and apply them to education, research and the workplace. Including seven plays and commentaries Soft Targets- Capitalist Pigs- Blasphemy & Doubt- Cow Going Abstract- The Invisible Foot The Age of Loneliness- Through the Reading Glasses
"Illustrating this thesis through an examination of the plays themselves, Staging Faith explores how different modes of production resulted in different types of dramatic organization, different relationships between the audience and the dramatic action, and how dramatists exploited the symbolic and affective potential of different types of settings, props, and dramatic actions. The simple place-and-scaffold play accommodated an oppositional structure, one that could be embodied spatially in the arrangement of the scaffolds and further articulated in processional action. The symbolic images in these dramas often have a strongly devotional character and attempt to unite the play's audience around a central devotional object or scene."--BOOK JACKET.
THE encyclopedic guide to hepatology – for consultation by clinicians and basic scientists Previously the Oxford Textbook of Clinical Hepatology, this two-volume textbook is now with Blackwell Publishing. It covers basic, clinical and translational science (converting basic science discoveries into the practical applications to benefit people). Edited by ten leading experts in the liver and biliary tract and their diseases, along with outstanding contributions from over 200 international clinicians, this text has global references, evidence and extensive subject matter – giving you the best science and clinical practice discussed by the best authors. It includes unique sections on: Symptoms and signs in liver disease Industrial diseases affecting the liver The effects of diseases of other systems on the liver The effects of liver diseases on other systems It's bigger and more extensive than other books and discusses new areas in more depth such as stem cells, genetics, genomics, proteomics, transplantation, mathematics and much more. Plus, it comes with a fully searchable CD ROM of the entire content. Click here to view a sample chapter on the liver and coagulation
Staging Britain's Past is the first study of the early modern performance of Britain's pre-Roman history. The mythic history of the founding of Britain by the Trojan exile Brute and the subsequent reign of his descendants was performed through texts such as Norton and Sackville's Gorboduc, Shakespeare's King Lear and Cymbeline, as well as civic pageants, court masques and royal entries such as Elizabeth I's 1578 entry to Norwich. Gilchrist argues for the power of performed history to shape early modern conceptions of the past, ancestry, and national destiny, and demonstrates how the erosion of the Brutan histories marks a transformation in English self-understanding and identity. When published in 1608, Shakespeare's King Lear claimed to be a “True Chronicle History”. Lear was said to have ruled Britain centuries before the Romans, a descendant of the mighty Trojan Brute who had conquered Britain and slaughtered its barbaric giants. But this was fake history. Shakespeare's contemporaries were discovering that Brute and his descendants, once widely believed as proof of glorious ancient origins, were a mischievous medieval invention. Offering a comprehensive account of the extraordinary theatrical tradition that emerged from these Brutan histories and the reasons for that tradition's disappearance, this study gathers all known evidence of the plays, pageants and masques portraying Britain's ancient rulers. Staging Britain's Past reveals how the loss of England's Trojan origins is reflected in plays and performances from Gorboduc's powerful invocation of history to Cymbeline's elegiac erosion of all notions of historical truth.
E. K. Chambers's seminal four-volume account of the private, public, and court stages, together with other forms of drama and spectacle surviving from earlier times, from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth until the death of Shakespeare. Haled as a comprehensive compendium of 'practically all the discoverable evidence upon the various parts of the subject, collected, weighed, sorted, classified and built up with immense care into a logical and beautiful structure' (New Statesman), the work is still much consulted by today's scholars and historians.
