Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage

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Author :
Publisher : Susquehanna University Press
ISBN 13 : 1575911590
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (759 download)

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Book Synopsis Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage by : Ronda Arab

Download or read book Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage written by Ronda Arab and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the author's dissertation (doctoral)--Columbia University, 2001.

Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage

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Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 1501513958
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage by : Asuka Kimura

Download or read book Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage written by Asuka Kimura and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-01-30 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192677950
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature by : Ari Friedlander

Download or read book Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature written by Ari Friedlander and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "rogue," a term that described criminals, prostitutes, vagrants, beggars, and the unemployed, dominated the pages of early modern popular crime literature. Rogue Sexuality resituates the rogue by focusing on how their menace—and their seductive appeal—emerged not only from their social marginality, but also from their supposedly excessive sexuality and prodigious sexual reproduction. Through discussions of both familiar and little-studied early modern works by William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Robert Greene, Thomas Harman, and the inventor of modern demography John Graunt, this volume posits the sexualized rogue as the avatar of a new category of "socio-sexual identity" and traces a surprising social transposition, in which socio-political elites are portrayed as appropriating the rogue's sexual vitality and performative charisma to navigate moments of crisis. By tracking the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a normative discursive register, this book challenges the distinctions that literary critics and historians tend to draw between orderly and disorderly sexuality. With its focus on reproduction, rogue sexuality also provides a new framework for what Michel Foucault called "biopolitics," the state's focus on exercising power over life. In legal, administrative, and scientific documents, this book shows that early modern writers grappled with popular pamphlets' rendering of the alleged threat of rogue reproduction. Rogue Sexuality thus offers a new approach to the political history of early modern England as a population—as a people whose aggregate sexual life and reproduction were a key part of its political imagination.

At Work in the Early Modern English Theater

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Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1611478251
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (114 download)

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Book Synopsis At Work in the Early Modern English Theater by : Matthew Kendrick

Download or read book At Work in the Early Modern English Theater written by Matthew Kendrick and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-06-11 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At Work in the Early Modern English Theater: Valuing Labor explores the economics of the theater by examining how drama seeks to make sense of changing conceptions of labor. With the growth of commerce and market relations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England came the corresponding degradation and exploitation of workers, many of whom made their frustrations known through petitions and pamphlets. Poverty affected all sectors of society in early modern England and many laborers, even London citizens from more prosperous trades, could expect to experience periods of impoverishment. This group of precarious laborers included actors and playwrights, many of whom had direct connections to London’s more established trades and occupations. Scholars have argued that dispossessed laborers turned to other forms of labor in lieu of their traditional livelihoods, including brigandage, piracy, begging, and cozening. To this list of alternative communities and applications of labor in the early modern period, Matthew Kendrick’s scholarship adds the London theaters. Each chapter is guided by the central premise that anxiety over the objectification and dispossession of labor in its various forms is enacted on stage, and that drama helps to formulate, by merit of the theater’s socioeconomic identity, an emerging laboring subjectivity engendered by the violent development of capitalism. As the nexus of a declining feudal social structure and an emerging capitalist regime of commodity production, a location in which dispossessed labor intersected with traditions of skilled labor and the unwieldy consumerist energies of the marketplace, the space of the theater was uniquely situated to channel and give dramatic form to the growing antagonisms and tensions that shaped labor. The stage offers a space in which to negotiate the value and meaning of labor in an increasingly exploitative society.

Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031355644
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (313 download)

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Book Synopsis Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama by : Ronda Arab

Download or read book Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama written by Ronda Arab and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-08-26 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defining class broadly as an identity categorization based on status, wealth, family, bloodlines, and occupation, Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama e xplores class as a complicated, contingent phenomenon modified by a wider range of social categories apart from those defining terms, including, but not limited to, race, gender, religion, and sexuality. This collection of essays – featuring a range of international contributors – explores a broad range of questions about the intersectional factors influencing class status in early modern England, including how cultural behaviors and non-class social categories affected status and social mobility, in what ways hegemonies of elite prerogatives could be disrupted or entrenched by the myriad of intersectional factors that informed social identity, and how class position informed the embodied experience and expression of affect, gender, sexuality, and race as well as relationships to place, space, land, and the natural and civic worlds.

Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317690699
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

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Book Synopsis Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater by : Ronda Arab

Download or read book Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater written by Ronda Arab and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.

Boy Actors in Early Modern England

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009116584
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Boy Actors in Early Modern England by : Harry R. McCarthy

Download or read book Boy Actors in Early Modern England written by Harry R. McCarthy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre provides a new approach to the study of early modern boy actors, offering a historical re-appraisal of these performers' physical skills in order to reassess their wide-reaching contribution to early modern theatrical culture. Ranging across drama performed from the 1580s to the 1630s by all-boy and adult companies alike, the book argues that the exuberant physicality fostered in boy performers across the early modern repertory shaped not only their own performances, but how and why plays were written for them in the first place. Harry R. McCarthy's ground-breaking approach to boy performance draws on detailed analysis of a wide range of plays, thorough interrogation of the cultural contexts in which they were written and performed, and present-day practice-based research, offering a critical reimagining of this important and unique facet of early modern theatrical culture.

Unfixable Forms

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501753517
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Unfixable Forms by : Katherine Schaap Williams

Download or read book Unfixable Forms written by Katherine Schaap Williams and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability. Figures described as "deformed," "lame," "crippled," "ugly," "sick," and "monstrous" crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should do—yet, crucially, demands the actor's embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater's exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage. Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, and close readings of little-known plays such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum For London, Williams demonstrates how disability cuts across foundational distinctions between nature and art, form and matter, and being and seeming. Situated at the intersections of early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory, Unfixable Forms locates disability on the early modern stage as both a product of cultural constraints and a spark for performance's unsettling demands and electrifying eventfulness.

The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England

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Author :
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 1496202805
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (962 download)

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Book Synopsis The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England by : Christina Luckyj

Download or read book The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England written by Christina Luckyj and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-12 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2018 Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women In the last thirty years scholarship has increasingly engaged the topic of women’s alliances in early modern Europe. The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England expands our knowledge of yet another facet of female alliance: the political. Archival discoveries as well as new work on politics and law help shape this work as a timely reevaluation of the nature and extent of women’s political alliances. Grouped into three sections—domestic, court, and kinship alliances—these essays investigate historical documents, drama, and poetry, insisting that female alliances, much like male friendship discourse, had political meaning in early modern England. Offering new perspectives on female authors such as the Cavendish sisters, Anne Clifford, Aemilia Lanyer, and Katherine Philips, as well as on male-authored texts such as Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, Swetnam the Woman-Hater, and The Maid’s Tragedy, the essays bring both familiar and unfamiliar texts into conversation about the political potential of female alliances. Some contributors are skeptical about allied women’s political power, while others suggest that such female communities had considerable potential to contain, maintain, or subvert political hierarchies. A wide variety of approaches to the political are represented in the volume and the scope will make it appealing to a broad audience.

Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134783116
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (347 download)

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Book Synopsis Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama by : Natasha Korda

Download or read book Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama written by Natasha Korda and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-11 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in the period. The essays assembled here address fascinating and hitherto unexplored questions raised by the subject of labor as it was taken up in the drama of the period: How were laboring bodies and the goods they produced, marketed and consumed represented onstage through speech, action, gesture, costumes and properties? How did plays participate in shaping the identities that situated laboring subjects within the social hierarchy? In what ways did the drama engage with contemporary discourses (social, political, economic, religious, etc.) that defined the cultural meanings of work? How did players and playwrights define their own status with respect to the shifting boundaries between high status/low status, legitimate/illegitimate, profitable/unprofitable, skilled/unskilled, formal/informal, male/female, free/bound, paid/unpaid forms of work? Merchants, usurers, clothworkers, cooks, confectioners, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sheepshearers, shipbuilders, sailors, perfumers, players, magicians, servants and slaves are among the many workers examined in this collection. Offering compelling new readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays in a broad range of genres (including history plays, comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, travel plays and civic pageants), this collection considers how early modern drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.

A Companion to Renaissance Poetry

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Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1118585127
Total Pages : 680 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (185 download)

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Book Synopsis A Companion to Renaissance Poetry by : Catherine Bates

Download or read book A Companion to Renaissance Poetry written by Catherine Bates and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive collection of essays on Renaissance poetry on the market Covering the period 1520–1680, A Companion to Renaissance Poetry offers 46 essays which present an in-depth account of the context, production, and interpretation of early modern British poetry. It provides students with a deep appreciation for, and sensitivity toward, the ways in which poets of the period understood and fashioned a distinctly vernacular voice, while engaging them with some of the debates and departures that are currently animating the discipline. A Companion to Renaissance Poetry analyzes the historical, cultural, political, and religious background of the time, addressing issues such as education, translation, the Reformation, theorizations of poetry, and more. The book immerses readers in non-dramatic poetry from Wyatt to Milton, focusing on the key poetic genres—epic, lyric, complaint, elegy, epistle, pastoral, satire, and religious poetry. It also offers an inclusive account of the poetic production of the period by canonical and less canonical writers, female and male. Finally, it offers examples of current developments in the interpretation of Renaissance poetry, including economic, ecological, scientific, materialist, and formalist approaches. • Covers a wide selection of authors and texts • Features contributions from notable authors, scholars, and critics across the globe • Offers a substantial section on recent and developing approaches to reading Renaissance poetry A Companion to Renaissance Poetry is an ideal resource for all students and scholars of the literature and culture of the Renaissance period.

Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays

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Author :
Publisher : Modern Language Association
ISBN 13 : 1603293019
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (32 download)

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Book Synopsis Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays by : Laurie Ellinghausen

Download or read book Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays written by Laurie Ellinghausen and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's history plays make up nearly a third of his corpus and feature iconic characters like Falstaff, the young Prince Hal, and Richard III--as well as unforgettable scenes like the storming of Harfleur. But these plays also present challenges for teachers, who need to help students understand shifting dynastic feuds, manifold concepts of political power, and early modern ideas of the body politic, kingship, and nationhood. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," introduces instructors to the many editions of the plays, the wealth of contextual and critical writings available, and other resources. Part 2, "Approaches," contains essays on topics as various as masculinity and gender, using the plays in the composition classroom, and teaching the plays through Shakespeare's own sources, film, television, and the Web. The essays help instructors teach works that are poetically and emotionally rich as well as fascinating in how they depict Shakespeare's vision of his nation's past and present.

Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England

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Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3030008924
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England by : Rory Loughnane

Download or read book Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England written by Rory Loughnane and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the staging and performance of normality in early modern drama. Analysing conventions and rules, habitual practices, common things and objects, and mundane sights and experiences, this volume foregrounds a staged normality that has been heretofore unseen, ignored, or taken for granted. It draws together leading and emerging scholars of early modern theatre and culture to debate the meaning of normality in an early modern context and to discuss how it might transfer to the stage. In doing so, these original critical essays unsettle and challenge scholarly assumptions about how normality is represented in the performance space. The volume, which responds to studies of the everyday and the material turn in cultural history, as well as to broader philosophical engagements with the idea of normality and its opposites, brings to light the essential role that normality plays in the composition and performance of early modern drama.

Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates

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Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1487515790
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (875 download)

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Book Synopsis Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates by : Laurie Ellinghausen

Download or read book Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates written by Laurie Ellinghausen and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining tales of notorious figures in Renaissance England, including the mercenary Thomas Stukeley, the Barbary corsair John Ward, and the wandering adventurers the Sherley brothers, Laurie Ellinghausen sheds new light on the construction of the early modern renegade and its depiction in English prose, poetry, and drama during a period of capitalist expansion. Unlike previous scholarship which has focused heavily on positioning rogue behaviour within the dialogue of race, gender, religion, and nationalism, Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates: Renegade Identities in Early Modern England shows how domestic issues of class and occupation exerted a major influence on representations of renegades, and heightened their appeal to the diverse audiences of early modern England. By looking at renegade tales from this perspective, Ellinghausen reveals a renegade, who, despite being stigmatized as an outsider, becomes a major profiteer during the period of early expansion, and ultimately a key figure in the creation of a national English identity.

Shakespearean Intersections

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Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812294769
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespearean Intersections by : Patricia Parker

Download or read book Shakespearean Intersections written by Patricia Parker and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-05-02 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does the keyword "continence" in Love's Labor's Lost reveal about geopolitical boundaries and their breaching? What can we learn from the contemporary identification of the "quince" with weddings that is crucial for A Midsummer Night's Dream? How does the evocation of Spanish-occupied "Brabant" in Othello resonate with contemporary geopolitical contexts, wordplay on "Low Countries," and fears of sexual/territorial "occupation"? How does "supposes" connote not only sexual submission in The Taming of the Shrew but also the transvestite practice of boys playing women, and what does it mean for the dramatic recognition scene in Cymbeline? With dazzling wit and erudition, Patricia Parker explores these and other critical keywords to reveal how they provide a lens for interpreting the language, contexts, and preoccupations of Shakespeare's plays. In doing so, she probes classical and historical sources, theatrical performance practices, geopolitical interrelations, hierarchies of race, gender, and class, and the multiple significances of "preposterousness," including reversals of high and low, male and female, Latinate and vulgar, "sinister" or backward writing, and latter ends both bodily and dramatic. Providing innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives on Shakespeare, from early to late and across dramatic genres, Parker's deeply evocative readings demonstrate how easy-to-overlook textual or semantic details reverberate within and beyond the Shakespearean text, and suggest that the boundary between language and context is an incontinent divide.

Shakespeare Studies, vol. 42

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Author :
Publisher : Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 0838644740
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (386 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare Studies, vol. 42 by : James R. Siemon

Download or read book Shakespeare Studies, vol. 42 written by James R. Siemon and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An annual volume containing essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from around the world. Also includes two review articles and thirteen books reviews.

The Corporate Commonwealth

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022636349X
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (263 download)

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Book Synopsis The Corporate Commonwealth by : Henry S. Turner

Download or read book The Corporate Commonwealth written by Henry S. Turner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Corporate Commonwealth traces the evolution of corporations during the English Renaissance and explores the many types of corporations that once flourished. Along the way, the book offers important insights into our own definitions of fiction, politics, and value. Henry S. Turner uses the resources of economic and political history, literary analysis, and political philosophy to demonstrate how a number of English institutions with corporate associations—including universities, guilds, towns and cities, and religious groups—were gradually narrowed to the commercial, for-profit corporation we know today, and how the joint-stock corporation, in turn, became both a template for the modern state and a political force that the state could no longer contain. Through innovative readings of works by Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes, among others, Turner tracks the corporation from the courts to the stage, from commonwealth to colony, and from the object of utopian fiction to the subject of tragic violence. A provocative look at the corporation’s peculiar character as both an institution and a person, The Corporate Commonwealth uses the past to suggest ways in which today’s corporations might be refashioned into a source of progressive and collective public action.