The Shakespeare Book is the perfect primer to the works of William Shakespeare, packed with witty illustrations and inspirational quotes.

This bold book covers every work, from the comedies of Twelfth Night and As You Like It to the tragedies of Julius Caesar and Hamlet, plus lost plays and less well-known works of poetry. Easy-to-understand graphics and illustrations bring the themes, plots, characters and language of Shakespeare to life, including illustrated timelines which offer an at-a-glance summary of the action for each play. With detailed plot summaries and an in-depth analysis of the major characters and themes, this is a brilliant, innovative exploration of the entire canon of Shakespeare plays, sonnets and poetry.

Whether you're a Shakespeare scholar or a student of the great Bard, The Shakespeare Book offers a fuller appreciation of his phenomenal talent and lasting legacy.

This study provides a detailed account of the "Fables," including humour, the representation of animals, the literary qualities and the "moraliste" core. Dr Slater brings to light veiled satirical attacks, allusion to forgotten works and literature, and traces the obscure currents of thought, all this in the service of explicating the "fable" element.

The Renaissance woman, whether privileged or of the artisan or the middle class, was trained in the expressive arts of needlework and painting, which were often given precedence over writing. "Pens and Needles" is the first book to examine all these forms as interrelated products of self-fashioning and communication.Because early modern people saw verbal and visual texts as closely related, Susan Frye discusses the connections between the many forms of women's textualities, including notes in samplers, alphabets both stitched and penned, initials, ciphers, and extensive texts like needlework pictures, self-portraits, poetry, and pamphlets, as well as commissioned artwork, architecture, and interior design. She examines works on paper and cloth by such famous figures as Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Bess of Hardwick, as well as the output of journeywomen needleworkers and miniaturists Levina Teerlinc and Esther Inglis, and their lesser-known sisters in the English colonies of the New World. Frye shows how traditional women's work was a way for women to communicate with one another and to shape their own identities within familial, intellectual, religious, and historical traditions. "Pens and Needles" offers insights into women's lives and into such literary texts as Shakespeare's "Othello" and "Cymbeline" and Mary Sidney Wroth's "Urania."

Foreword by George C. Schoolfield>

An enhanced exam section: expert guidance on approaching exam questions, writing high-quality responses and using critical interpretations, plus practice tasks and annotated sample answer extracts. Key skills covered: focused tasks to develop analysis and understanding, plus regular study tips, revision questions and progress checks to help students track their learning. The most in-depth analysis: detailed text summaries and extract analysis to in-depth discussion of characters, themes, language, contexts and criticism, all helping students to reach their potential.

The poetry of Michelangelo offers an insight into one of the greatest artists of all time, and is a notable literary achievement in its own right. This text lays out the broad chronological evolution of the poems and clarifies both their meaning and the verbal artistry that shaped their construction. The poetry is always quoted in Italian and in translation.

A scholarly edition of the poems of Thomas Gray. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Presents eight essays on translations and reinterpretations of Old Norse myth and saga from the eighteenth century.

Literary history is a problematic and shifting discourse, especially in the multilingual, post-colonial South African situation. In this book, the author draws on his intimate knowledge of documents written in Dutch during the 17th century and the texts that were produced in this language and its variations as it gradually became Afrikaans by the end of the 19th century. A History of South African Literature: Afrikaans Literature 17th-19th centuries brings an important expansion and regeneration of Afrikaans historiography within the context of South African literary history. A History of South African Literature: Afrikaans Literature 17th-19th centuries is divided into three broad historical periods: the Dutch colonial time (1652-1795), British colonial time (first part of the 19th century) and the time of the language movements (latter half of the 19th century). It follows an inclusive approach, discussing and contextualising a wide variety of documents, like travelogues and personal as well as official journals and other "non-literary texts". The thorough analyses of previously neglected works, like those produced at Genadendal, provide a rich and textured image of the history of writing in South Africa.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's great drama of ambition, desire and guilt. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of Macbeth in performance, takes a detailed look at specific productions, and recommends film versions. Included in this edition are three interviews with leading directors - Rupert Goold, Gregory Doran and Trevor Nunn - providing an illuminating insight into the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible. This edition also includes an essay on Shakespeare's career and Elizabethan theatre, and enables the reader to understand the play as it was originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed. Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare editions offer a fresh, accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDES TO EXAM SUCCESS from York Notes - the UK's favourite English Literature Study Guides. York Notes for AS & A2 have been specifically designed to help AS and A2 studnets to get the very best grade you can. They are comprehensive, easy to use, packed with valuable features and written by experienced examiners and teachers to give you an expert understanding of the text, critical approaches and the all-important exam. This edition covers Macbeth and includes: An enhanced exam skills section which includes essay plans, expert guidance on understanding questions and sample answers. You'll know exactly what you need to do and say to get the best grades. A wealth of useful content like key quotations, revision tasks and vital study tips that'll help you revise, remember and recall all the most important information. The widest coverage and the best, most in-depth analysis of characters, themes, language, form, context and style to help you demonstrate an exhaustive understanding of all aspects of the text. York Notes for AS & A2 are also available for these popular titles: The Bloody Chamber(9781447913153) Doctor Faustus(9781447913177) Frankenstein (9781447913214) The Great Gatsby(9781447913207) The Kite Runner(9781447913160) Othello(9781447913191) WutheringHeights(9781447913184)

How do communities tell and retell stories of catastrophe to explain their own origins, imagine their future, and work for their survival? This book contends that such stories are central to how communities claim a position within history. It explores this question, so vital for our present moment, through narratives produced in eighteenth-century France: a tumultuous period when a new understanding of a properly 'modern' national history was being elaborated. Who gets to belong to the modern era? And who or what is relegated to a gothic, barbarous or medieval past? Is an enlightened future assured, or is a return to a Dark Age inevitable? Following barbarians, bastards, usurpers, prophets and Revolutionary martyrs through stories of catastrophes real and imagined, the book traces how narrative temporalities become historicities: visions of the laws which govern the past, present and future. Ultimately it argues that the complex temporality of catastrophe offers a privileged insight into how a modern French historical consciousness was formed out of the multiple pasts and possible futures that coexisted alongside the age of Enlightenment. Further, examining the tension between a desire to place the imagined community definitively beyond catastrophic times, and a fascination with catastrophe in its revelatory or regenerative aspect, it offers an important historical perspective on the presence of this same tension in the stories of catastrophe that we tell in our own multiple, tumultuous present.

Although posterity has generally known Bernardin de Saint-Pierre for his bestselling Paul et Virginie, his output was encyclopaedic. Using new sources, this monograph explores the many facets of a celebrity writer in the Ancien Regime, the Revolution and the early nineteenth century. Bernardin attracted a readership to whom, irrespective of age, gender or social situation, he became a guide to living. He was nominated by Louis XVI to manage the Jardin des plantes, by Revolutionary bodies to teach at the Ecole normale and to membership of the Institut. He deplored unquestioning adherence to Newtonian ideas, materialistic atheism and human misdeeds in what could be considered proto-ecological terms. He bemoaned analytical, reductionist approaches: his philosophy placed human beings at the centre of the universe and stressed the interconnectedness of cosmic harmony. Bernardin learned enormously from travel to Eastern Europe and the Indian Ocean. He attacked slavery, championed a national education system and advocated justice for authors. Fresh information and interpretation show that he belonged to neither the philosophe or anti-philosophe camp. A reformist, he envisioned a regenerated France as a nation of liberty offering asylum for refugees. This study demonstrates the range of thought and expression of an incontournable polymath in an age of transformation.

How can we look afresh at Shakespeare as a writer of sonnets? What new light might they shed on his career, personality, and sexuality? Shakespeare wrote sonnets for at least thirty years, not only for himself, for professional reasons, and for those he loved, but also in his plays, as prologues, as epilogues, and as part of their poetic texture. This ground-breaking book assembles all of Shakespeare's sonnets in their probable order of composition. An inspiring introduction debunks long-established biographical myths about Shakespeare's sonnets and proposes new insights about how and why he wrote them. Explanatory notes and modern English paraphrases of every poem and dramatic extract illuminate the meaning of these sometimes challenging but always deeply rewarding witnesses to Shakespeare's inner life and professional expertise. Beautifully printed and elegantly presented, this volume will be treasured by students, scholars, and every Shakespeare enthusiast.

In a speech delivered in 1794, roughly one year after the execution of Louis XVI, Robespierre boldly declared Terror to be an 'emanation of virtue'. In adapting the concept of virtue to Republican ends, Robespierre was drawing on traditions associated with ancient Greece and Rome. But Republican tradition formed only one of many strands in debates concerning virtue in France and elsewhere in Europe, from 1680 to the Revolution. This collection focuses on moral-philosophical and classical-republican uses of 'virtue' in this period - one that is often associated with a 'crisis of the European mind'. It also considers in what ways debates concerning virtue involved gendered perspectives. The texts discussed are drawn from a range of genres, from plays and novels to treatises, memoirs, and libertine literature. They include texts by authors such as Diderot, Laclos, and Madame de Stael, plus other, lesser-known texts that broaden the volume's perspective. Collectively, the contributors to the volume highlight the central importance of virtue for an understanding of an era in which, as Daniel Brewer argues in the closing chapter, 'the political could not be thought outside its moral dimension, and morality could not be separated from inevitable political consequences'.

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the increasing accuracy and legibility of cartographic projections, the proliferation of empirically based chorographies, and the popular vogue for travel narratives served to order, package, and commodify space in a manner that was critical to the formation of a unified Britain. In tandem with such developments, however, a trenchant anti-cartographic skepticism also emerged. This critique of the map can be seen in many literary works of the period that satirize the efficacy and value of maps and highlight their ideological purposes. Against the Map argues that our understanding of the production of national space during this time must also account for these sites of resistance and opposition to hegemonic forms of geographical representation, such as the map. This study utilizes the methodologies of critical geography, as well as literary criticism and theory, to detail the conflicted and often adversarial relationship between cartographic and literary representations of the nation and its geography. While examining atlases, almanacs, itineraries, and other materials, Adam Sills focuses particularly on the construction of heterotopias in the works of John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and Jane Austen. These "other" spaces, such as neighborhood, home, and country, are not reducible to the map but have played an equally important role in the shaping of British national identity. Ultimately, Against the Map suggests that nation is forged not only in concert with the map but, just as important, against it.

Taking in works from writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte, John Keats, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, this book spans approximately 300 years and unpacks how bodily liquidity, porosity and petrification recur as a pattern and underlie the chequered history of the body and genders in literature. Lennartz examines the precarious relationship between porosity and its opposite - closure, containment and stoniness - and explores literary history as a meandering narrative in which 'female' porosity and 'manly' stoniness clash, showing how different societies and epochs respond to and engage with bodily porosity. This book considers the ways that this relationship is constantly renegotiated and where effusive and 'feminine' genres, such as 'sloppy' letters and streams of consciousness, are pitted against stony and astringent forms of masculinity, like epitaphs, sonnets and the Bildungsroman.