The Romantics invented Shakespeare studies, and in losing contact with our origins, we have not been able to develop an adequate alternative foundation on which to build our work. This book asserts that among Shakespeareans at present, the level of conviction required to sustain a healthy critical practice is problematically if not dangerously low, and the qualities which the Romantics valued in an engagement with Shakespeare are either ignored these days or fundamentally misunderstood.
Grouped around four central themes – illness and impairment, disabling processes, care and control, and communication and representations – this collection offers a fresh perspective on disability research, showing how theory and data can be brought together in new and exciting ways. Disability Research Today starts by showing how engaging with issues around illness and impairment is vital to a multidisciplinary understanding of disability as a social process. The second section explores factors that affect disabled people, such as homelessness, violence and unemployment. The third section turns to social care, and how disabled people are prevented from living with independence and dignity. Finally, the last section examines how different imagery and technology impacts our understandings of disability and deafness. Showcasing empirical work from a range of countries, including Japan, Norway, Italy, Australia, India, the UK, Turkey, Finland and Iceland, this collection shows how disability studies can be simultaneously sophisticated, accessible and policy-relevant. Disability Research Today is suitable for students and researchers in disability studies, sociology, social policy, social work, nursing and health studies.
With this volume, The Shakespearean International Yearbook inaugurates a new feature-a special section, which in this issue is 'shakespeare in the Age of Cognitive Science.' The guest editor for the section is Mark Turner, Institute Professor, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Interim Chair, Department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, USA. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and new developments in contemporary Shakespeare research. Representing truly international perspectives on Shakespeare studies, in this issue contributors come from not only the US and the UK but also Japan, Denmark, Canada, and Australia. They appraise or reappraise current thinking about such diverse matters as scepticism, ethnicity, performance, theatrical and textual practices, and translations or adaptations. Essays on the plays and poems tend to focus on 'where we are now', and what has changed, is changing, or ought to change.
This important collection addresses recent developments in the teaching, studying and presentation of race across many disciplines, including sociology, politics, social geography, cultural studies and philosophy. Drawing on the latest research in all these areas, the authors provide a comprehensive account of key controversies and debates and pinpoint new directions in research and scholarship that are likely to shape the study of race and ethnicity well into the next century.
Through the discursive political lenses of Occupy Wall Street and the 99%, this volume of essays examines the study of Shakespeare and of literature more generally in today’s climate of educational and professional uncertainty. Acknowledging the problematic relationship of higher education to the production of inequity and hierarchy in our society, essays in this book examine the profession, our pedagogy, and our scholarship in an effort to direct Shakespeare studies, literary studies, and higher education itself toward greater equity for students and professors. Covering a range of topics from diverse positions and perspectives, these essays confront and question foundational assumptions about higher education, and hence society, including intellectual merit and institutional status. These essays comprise a timely conversation critical for understanding our profession in “post-Occupy” America.
This collection looks at the growing rapprochement between contemporary theory and early modern English literary-cultural studies. With sections on posthumanism and cognitive science, political theology, and rematerialism and performance, the essays incorporate recent theoretical inquiries into new readings of early modern texts.
The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism is a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on critical approaches to Shakespeare by an international team of leading scholars. It contains chapters on 20 specific critical practices, each grounded in analysis of a Shakespeare play. These practices range from foundational approaches including character studies, close reading and genre studies, through those that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that challenged the preconceptions on which traditional liberal humanism is based, including feminism, cultural materialism and new historicism. Perspectives drawn from postcolonial, queer studies and critical race studies, besides more recent critical practices including presentism, ecofeminism and cognitive ethology all receive detailed treatment. In addition to its coverage of distinct critical approaches, the handbook contains various sections that provide non-specialists with practical help: an A–Z glossary of key terms and concepts, a chronology of major publications and events, an introduction to resources for study of the field and a substantial annotated bibliography.
This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.
Dr Peter Orford and his editing team have collected articles from the next generation of Shakespeare scholars to offer a glimpse into the future of Renaissance Studies. The essays included were presented at the International British Graduate Shakespeare Conference and represent research from around the globe, either exploring new territory, or redefining the work of those before them. In his foreword, Professor Stanley Wells states that ‘The essays printed here demonstrate that the future of early modern dramatic scholarship and criticism is in good hands.” The articles included are: • “Seldom Seene: Observations from Editing The Launching of the Mary, or the Seaman’s Honest Wife” by Matteo Pangallo • “Thomas Heywood and the Construction of Taste in the Repertory of Queen Henrietta’s Men” by Eleanor Collins • “Bawdiness, Crime and Low Characters in Late Elizabethan Comedy” by Shelly Hsin-Yi Hsieh • “Print and Elizabethan Military Culture” by Dong-Ha Seo • “Actors, Audiences and Authors: The Competition for Control in Brome’s The Antipodes” by Audrey Birkett • “Shakespeare’s King Richard III: The Perverted Machiavel” by Conny Loder • “Women in the Shakespearean Audience – Recognition and Authority” by Brian Schneider • “Dis-playing History: The Case of Shakespeare’s Globe” by Kelly Jones • “‘Ever Holy and Unstained’: Illuminating the Feminist Cenci Through Mary Wollstonecraft and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus” by Kristine Johansan • “Narcissus and Modernity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets” by Will McKenzie • “Cowboys and Romans: Cymbeline and Paradigmatic Change in the Theatre” by Miles Gregory
Virtue, as a Renaissance ideal, was largely conceived as a rational governing of unruly passions. Revising this early modern commonplace, this study shows how Shakespeare dramatizes a discerning Aristotelian conception of virtue as a touchstone of excellence: executing just action at the best time, in the best way, and for the best end within the contingent world. Not only situational, Aristotelian virtue is, moreover, integrative, harmonizing passion and reason, will and understanding, towards personal and civil good. Yet as a surprising backfire on the misogynist streak in Aristotle, the resistant female characters in Shakespeare emerge as the exemplars of ethical action, appropriating traditionally male-inflected virtue. At the junction of ethical, psycho-physiological, cultural and gender studies, this approach of prudential psychology bridges an apparent but needless divergence of critical focus between affect and cognition, ethics and prudential action. Firmly situated in new historicist practices, prudential psychology goes beyond narrow discourses of power into the all-encompassing arena of virtue as the complete life, which recommends an interdisciplinary approach for a fuller understanding of Shakespeare's works.
