Literary studies: plays and playwrights Books

Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett's Works places sex and sexuality firmly at the heart of Beckett's ouevre. From the earliest prose to the late plays, Paul Stewart uncovers a profound mistrust of procreation and a surprising variety of...

This book focuses on the ways in which military technology, political and social trends, and shifting frontiers shaped the emergence of new forms of public authority and civic life as embodied in the "wall," an image at once intensely physical and deeply...

King Lear is believed by many feminists to be irretrievably sexist. Through detailed line readings supported by a wealth of critical commentary, Re-Visioning Lear's Daughters reconceives Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia as full characters, not stereotypes of...

The urgent debate about torture in public discourse of the twenty-first century thrusts pain into the foreground while research in neuroscience is transforming our understanding of this fundamental human experience. In late-medieval France, a country...

Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain examines ways in which British writers and readers used the idea of the Middle Ages to challenge contemporary political structures and to claim historical national rights at a time when fears that Britain would...

Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida, now in paperback for the first time, proposes a combined theory of consciousness, subjectivity, and agency stemming from analyses of junctures in Western philosophical and critical discourses...

This bold and wide-ranging study takes a fresh look at a controversial question: what do the acts and shows of grief performed in early modern drama tell us about the religious culture of the world in which they were historically staged? Many rites of...

This book deals with Shakespeare's role in contemporary culture. It looks in detail at the way that Shakespeare's plays inform modern ideas of cultural value and the work required to make Shakespeare part of modern culture. It is unique in using social...

This ground-breaking book provides an abundance of fresh insights into Shakespeare's life in relation to his lost family home, New Place. The findings of a major archaeological excavation encourage us to think again about what New Place meant to...