Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation: Literary Negotiation of Religious Difference explores how Shakespeare's plays dramatize key issues of the Elizabethan Reformation, the conflict between the sacred, the critical, and the disenchanted; alternatively, the Catholic, the Protestant, and the secular. Each play imagines their reconciliation or the failure of reconcilation. The Catholic sacred is shadowed by its degeneration into superstition, Protestant critique by its unintended (fissaparous) consequences, the secular ordinary by stark disenchantment. Shakespeare shows how all three perspectives are needed if society is to face its intractable problems, thus providing a powerful model for our own ecumenical dialogues. Shakespeare begins with history plays contrasting the saintly but impractical King Henry VI, whose assassination is the "primal crime," with the pragmatic and secular Henry IV, until imagining in the later 1590's how Hal can reconnect with sacred sources. At the same time in his comedies, Shakespeare imagines cooperative ways of resolving the national "comedy of errors," of sorting out erotic and marital and contemplative confusions by applying his triple lens. His late Elizabethan comedies achieve a polished balance of wit and devotion, ordinary and the sacred, old and new orders. Hamlet is Shakespeare's ultimate Elizabethan consideration of these issues, its so-called lack of objective correlation a response to the unsorted trauma of the Reformation.

Intimate Warfare: The True Story of the Arturo Gatti and Micky Ward Boxing Trilogy traces the lives and careers of two legendary fighters-Micky Ward, a humble, hardscrabble, blue-collar Irishman from Lowell, Massachusetts, and Arturo Gatti, a handsome, flashy, charismatic Italian-born star who was raised in Montreal. Dennis Taylor and John J. Raspanti paint a vivid portrait of these two fighters who ushered each other into boxing lore and formed an unlikely friendship despite their brutal battles in the ring. Gatti's life would end tragically and mysteriously just a few years later, but his name and Ward's remain tied together in boxing history. In Intimate Warfare, each of the three spectacular fights between Gatti and Ward, two of which were named The Ring magazine's "Fight of the Year," are described in detail. Multiple photographs from the trilogy highlight the intensity and power of these epic collisions. With a foreword by former world champion and International Boxing Hall of Famer Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, this book will be of interest to all fans of boxing.

‘I’m an outsider to the end of my days!’

Jude Fawley’s hopes of a university education are lost when he is trapped into marrying the earthy Arabella, who later abandons him. Moving to the town of Christminster where he finds work as a stonemason, Jude meets and falls in love with his cousin Sue Bridehead, a sensitive, freethinking ‘New Woman’. Refusing to marry merely for the sake of religious convention, Jude and Sue decide instead to live together, but they are shunned by society and poverty soon threatens to ruin them. Jude the Obscure, Hardy’s last novel, caused a public furore when it was first published, with its fearless and challenging exploration of class and sexual relationships.

This edition uses the unbowdlerized text of the first volume edition of 1895, and also includes a list for further reading, appendices and a glossary. In his introduction, Dennis Taylor examines biblical allusions and the critique of religion in Jude the Obscure, and its critical reception that led Hardy to abandon novel writing.

The question of Shakespeareas Catholic contexts has occupied many scholars in recent years, and their growing body of work has been enriched by revisionist accounts of the Reformation society and culture in which he lived and worked. This innovative book brings together sixteen original essays by leading scholars who examine Shakespeareas works in light of this new scholarship: their goal is to explore a possible interpretive consensus from Protestant, Catholic, and secular perspectives. Offering stimulating new approaches to traditional problems in Shakespeare studies, the essays provide a fully developed picture of Shakespeareas relation to the Reformationain the light of newly unearthed religious contexts. From the monastic life in Measure for Measure to Puritanism in Hamlet, the essays offer fresh understandings of such themes as majority cultures, national self-definition, hidden trauma, and concealed identity. The contributors: Dennis Taylor, Richard Dutton, Katharine Goodland, Clare Asquith, Jean-Christophe Mayer, Timothy Rosendale, Gary D. Hamilton, Regina M. Buccola, John Klause, John Freeman, R. Chris Hassel Jr., Jennifer Rust, David Beauregard, Maurice Hunt, Lisa Hopkins, Richard Mallette, and Paula McQuade.