Gross explores our complex fascination with uncanny children in works of fiction. Ranging from Victorian to modern works-Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, Henry James's What Maisie Knew, J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy, Franz Kafka's "The Cares of a Family Man," Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita-Kenneth Gross's book delves into stories that center around the figure of a strange and dangerous child. Whether written for adults or child readers, or both at once, these stories all show us odd, even frightening visions of innocence. We see these children's uncanny powers of speech, knowledge, and play, as well as their nonsense and violence. And, in the tales, these child-lives keep changing shape. These are children who are often endangered as much as dangerous, haunted as well as haunting. They speak for lost and unknown childhoods. In looking at these narratives, Gross traces the reader's thrill of companionship with these unpredictable, often solitary creatures-children curious about the adult world, who while not accommodating its rules, fall into ever more troubling conversations with adult fears and desires. This book asks how such imaginary children, objects of wonder, challenge our ways of seeing the world, our measures of innocence and experience, and our understanding of time and memory.

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects - objects that are also actors and images of life. The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature - Collodi's cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppet-like characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke's puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth's Mickey Sabbath - as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, "Puppet" evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.

"You common cry of curs whose breath I hate / As reek o'th'rotten fens, whose loves I prize / As the dead carcasses of unburied men / That do corrupt my air: I banish you " (from "Coriolanus")
Kenneth Gross explores Shakespeare's deep fascination with dangerous and disorderly forms of speaking--especially rumor, slander, insult, vituperation, and curse--and through them offers a vision of the work of words in his plays. Coriolanus's taunts or Lear's curses force us to think not just about how Shakespeare's characters speak, but also about how they hear, overhear, and mishear what is spoken, how rumor becomes tragic knowledge for Hamlet, or opens Othello to fantastic jealousies. Gross also shows how Shakespeare's preoccupation with "noisy" speech echoed and transformed a broader cultural obsession with the perils of rumor, slander, and libel in Renaissance England.
Elegantly written and passionately argued, "Shakespeare's Noise" will challenge and delight anyone who loves his plays, from scholars to general readers, actors, and directors.

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects--objects that are also actors and images of life.

The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature--Collodi's cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppetlike characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke's puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth's Micky Sabbath--as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, "Puppet" evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.

In this edited collection, 17 internationally known authorities bring together the results of recent research on the natural history, ecology, behavior, morphology, and genetics of wasps as they pertain to the evolution of social behavior. The first part of the book opens with a review of the classification of the family Vespidae along with a revision of the subfamily Polistinae. Seven subsequent chapters deal with the natural history and social biology of each of the major taxa of social and presocial vespids. The second part of the book offers chapters on reproductive competition; worker polyethism; evolution of nest architecture, of queen number and queen control, and of exocrine glands; population genetics; the nutritional bsis of social evolution; and the nest as the locus of social life. The final chapter is a comparative discussion of social behavior in the Sphecidae, the only family of wasps besides the Vespidae in which well-developed social behavior is known. Providing a wealth of information about the biology of wasps, this comprehensive, up-to-date volume will be an essential reference for entomologists, evolutionary biologists, behavioral ecologists, ethologists, and zoologists. Contributors: James M. Carpenter. David P. Cowan. Holly A Downing. Raghavendra Gadagkar. Albert Greene. James H. Hunt. Robert L. Jeanne. Makoto Matsuura. Robert W. Matthews. Hudson K. Reeve. PeterFrank Roseler. Kenneth G. Ross. J. Philip Spradbery. Christopher K. Starr. Stefano Turillazzi. John W. Wenzel. Mary Jane West-Eberhard.

Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in "The Merchant of Venice" who famously demands a pound of flesh as security for a loan to his antisemitic tormentors, is one of Shakespeare's most complex and idiosyncratic characters. With his unsettling eloquence and his varying voices of protest, play, rage, and refusal, Shylock remains a source of perennial fascination. What explains the strange and enduring force of this character, so unlike that of any other in Shakespeare's plays? Kenneth Gross posits that the figure of Shylock is so powerful because he is the voice of Shakespeare himself.
Marvelously speculative and articulate, Gross's book argues that Shylock is a breakthrough for Shakespeare the playwright, an early realization of the Bard's power to create dramatic voices that speak for hidden, unconscious, even inhuman impulses--characters larger than the plays that contain them and ready to escape the author's control. Shylock is also a mask for Shakespeare's own need, rage, vulnerability, and generosity, giving form to Shakespeare's ambition as an author and his uncertain bond with the audience. Gross's vision of Shylock as Shakespeare's covert double leads to a probing analysis of the character's peculiar isolation, ambivalence, opacity, and dark humor. Addressing the broader resonance of Shylock, both historical and artistic, Gross examines the character's hold on later readers and writers, including Heinrich Heine and Philip Roth, suggesting that Shylock mirrors the ambiguous states of Jewishness in modernity.
A bravura critical performance, "Shylock Is Shakespeare "will fascinate readers with its range of reference, its union of rigor and play, and its conjectural--evenfictive--means of coming to terms with the question of Shylock, ultimately taking readers to the very heart of Shakespeare's humanizing genius.