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For the first time, a group of distinguished authors come together
to provide an authoritative exploration of the cultural history of
tragedy in the Middle Ages. Reports of the so-called death of
medieval tragedy, they argue, have been greatly exaggerated; and,
for the Middle Ages, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Eight essays
offer a blueprint for future study as they take up the extensive
but much-neglected medieval engagement with tragic genres, modes,
and performances from the vantage points of gender, politics,
theology, history, social theory, anthropology, philosophy,
economics, and media studies. The result? A recuperated medieval
tragedy that is as much a branch of literature as it is of
theology, politics, law, or ethics and which, at long last, rejoins
the millennium-long conversation about one of the world’s most
enduring art forms. Each chapter takes a different theme as its
focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation;
communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social
theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation;
society and family, and gender and sexuality.
The period covered by this volume in the Cultural History of
Tragedy set is bookended by two shockingly similar historical
events: the beheading of a king, Charles I of England in 1649 and
Louis XIV of France in 1793. The period between these two dates saw
enormous political, social and economic changes that altered
European society’s cultural life. Tragedy, which had dominated
the European stage at the beginning of this period, gradually saw
itself replaced by new literary forms, culminating in the gradual
decline of theatrical tragedy from the heights it had reached in
the 1660s. The dominance of France’s military and cultural
prestige during this period is reflected in the important, almost
exclusive, space dedicated in this volume to the French stage. This
book covers the tragedies of France’s two greatest playwrights
— Pierre Corneille (1606-84) and Jean Racine (1639-99) — which
would dominate not only the French stage but, through translations
and adaptations, became the model of tragic theater across Europe,
finding imitators in England (Dryden), Italy (Alfieri) and as far
afield as Russia. This dominance continued well into the 18th
century with the triumph of Voltaire’s tragedies. This volume
also examines how the writings of Diderot and Lessing changed the
direction of theatre and how after the Revolution, in the writings
of Goethe, Shiller, Hegel, tragedy and the tragic were reimagined
and became the sign of European modernity. Each chapter takes a
different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance
and circulation; communities of production and consumption;
philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics
of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
This volume traces a path across the metamorphoses of tragedy and
the tragic in Western cultures during the bourgeois age of nations,
revolutions, and empires, roughly delimited by the French
Revolution and the First World War. Its starting point is the
recognition that tragedy did not die with Romanticism, as George
Steiner famously argued over half a century ago, but rather mutated
and dispersed, converging into a variety of unstable, productive
forms both on the stage and off. In turn, the tragic as a concept
and mode transformed itself under the pressure of multiple social,
historical and political-ideological phenomena. This volume
therefore deploys a narrative centred on hybridization extending
across media, genres, demographics, faiths both religious and
secular, and national boundaries. The essays also tell a story of
how tragedy and the tragic offered multiple means of capturing the
increasingly fragmented perception of reality and history that
emerged in the 19th century. Each chapter takes a different theme
as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and
circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy
and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and
nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
In this book leading scholars come together to provide a
comprehensive, wide-ranging overview of tragedy in theatre and
other media from 1920 to the present. The 20th century is often
considered to have witnessed the death of tragedy as a theatrical
genre, but it was marked by many tragic events and historical
catastrophes, from two world wars and genocide to the proliferation
of nuclear weapons and the anticipation and onset of climate
change. The authors in this volume wrestle with this paradox and
consider the degree to which the definitions, forms and media of
tragedy were transformed in the modern period and how far the
tragic tradition—updated in performance—still spoke to 20th-
and 21st-century challenges. While theater remains the primary
focus of investigation in this strikingly illustrated book, the
essays also cover tragic representation—often re-mediated,
fragmented and provocatively questioned—in film, art and
installation, photography, fiction and creative non-fiction,
documentary reporting, political theory and activism. Since 24/7
news cycles travel fast and modern crises cross borders and are
reported across the globe more swiftly than in previous centuries,
this volume includes intercultural encounters, various forms of
hybridity, and postcolonial tragic representations. Each chapter
takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of
performance and circulation; communities of production and
consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and
myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender
and sexuality.
In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from
its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position
in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the
Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations
in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays
by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance
environments, and social meanings of tragedy as it was repeatedly
reinvented. Tragedy was consistently seen as the most serious of
all dramatic genres; these essays trace a sequence of different
visions of what the most serious kind of dramatic story might be,
and the most appropriate ways of telling those stories on stage.
Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media;
sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and
consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual, and
myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender
and sexuality.
In this volume, 8 lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace
the kaleidoscopically shifting dramatic forms, performance
contexts, and social implications of tragedy throughout the period
and across geographic, political, and social references. They
attend not only to the familiar cultural lenses of English and
mainstream Continental dramas but also to less familiar European
exempla from Croatia and Hungary. Each chapter takes a different
theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and
circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy
and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and
nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
In this volume, tragedy in antiquity is examined synoptically, from
its misty origins in archaic Greece, through its central position
in the civic life of ancient Athens and its performances across the
Greek-speaking world, to its new and very different instantiations
in Republican and Imperial Roman contexts. Lively, original essays
by eminent scholars trace the shifting dramatic forms, performance
environments, and social meanings of tragedy as it was repeatedly
reinvented. Tragedy was consistently seen as the most serious of
all dramatic genres; these essays trace a sequence of different
visions of what the most serious kind of dramatic story might be,
and the most appropriate ways of telling those stories on stage.
Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media;
sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and
consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual, and
myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender
and sexuality.
In this volume, 8 lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace
the kaleidoscopically shifting dramatic forms, performance
contexts, and social implications of tragedy throughout the period
and across geographic, political, and social references. They
attend not only to the familiar cultural lenses of English and
mainstream Continental dramas but also to less familiar European
exempla from Croatia and Hungary. Each chapter takes a different
theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and
circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy
and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and
nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
This volume traces a path across the metamorphoses of tragedy and
the tragic in Western cultures during the bourgeois age of nations,
revolutions, and empires, roughly delimited by the French
Revolution and the First World War. Its starting point is the
recognition that tragedy did not die with Romanticism, as George
Steiner famously argued over half a century ago, but rather mutated
and dispersed, converging into a variety of unstable, productive
forms both on the stage and off. In turn, the tragic as a concept
and mode transformed itself under the pressure of multiple social,
historical and political-ideological phenomena. This volume
therefore deploys a narrative centred on hybridization extending
across media, genres, demographics, faiths both religious and
secular, and national boundaries. The essays also tell a story of
how tragedy and the tragic offered multiple means of capturing the
increasingly fragmented perception of reality and history that
emerged in the 19th century. Each chapter takes a different theme
as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and
circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy
and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and
nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
The period covered by this volume in the Cultural History of
Tragedy set is bookended by two shockingly similar historical
events: the beheading of a king, Charles I of England in 1649 and
Louis XIV of France in 1793. The period between these two dates saw
enormous political, social and economic changes that altered
European society's cultural life. Tragedy, which had dominated the
European stage at the beginning of this period, gradually saw
itself replaced by new literary forms, culminating in the gradual
decline of theatrical tragedy from the heights it had reached in
the 1660s. The dominance of France's military and cultural prestige
during this period is reflected in the important, almost exclusive,
space dedicated in this volume to the French stage. This book
covers the tragedies of France's two greatest playwrights - Pierre
Corneille (1606-84) and Jean Racine (1639-99) - which would
dominate not only the French stage but, through translations and
adaptations, became the model of tragic theater across Europe,
finding imitators in England (Dryden), Italy (Alfieri) and as far
afield as Russia. This dominance continued well into the 18th
century with the triumph of Voltaire's tragedies. This volume also
examines how the writings of Diderot and Lessing changed the
direction of theatre and how after the Revolution, in the writings
of Goethe, Shiller, Hegel, tragedy and the tragic were reimagined
and became the sign of European modernity. Each chapter takes a
different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance
and circulation; communities of production and consumption;
philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics
of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
For the first time, a group of distinguished authors come together
to provide an authoritative exploration of the cultural history of
tragedy in the Middle Ages. Reports of the so-called death of
medieval tragedy, they argue, have been greatly exaggerated; and,
for the Middle Ages, the stakes couldn't be higher. Eight essays
offer a blueprint for future study as they take up the extensive
but much-neglected medieval engagement with tragic genres, modes,
and performances from the vantage points of gender, politics,
theology, history, social theory, anthropology, philosophy,
economics, and media studies. The result? A recuperated medieval
tragedy that is as much a branch of literature as it is of
theology, politics, law, or ethics and which, at long last, rejoins
the millennium-long conversation about one of the world's most
enduring art forms. Each chapter takes a different theme as its
focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation;
communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social
theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation;
society and family, and gender and sexuality.
In this book leading scholars come together to provide a
comprehensive, wide-ranging overview of tragedy in theatre and
other media from 1920 to the present. The 20th century is often
considered to have witnessed the death of tragedy as a theatrical
genre, but it was marked by many tragic events and historical
catastrophes, from two world wars and genocide to the proliferation
of nuclear weapons and the anticipation and onset of climate
change. The authors in this volume wrestle with this paradox and
consider the degree to which the definitions, forms and media of
tragedy were transformed in the modern period and how far the
tragic tradition-updated in performance-still spoke to 20th- and
21st-century challenges. While theater remains the primary focus of
investigation in this strikingly illustrated book, the essays also
cover tragic representation-often re-mediated, fragmented and
provocatively questioned-in film, art and installation,
photography, fiction and creative non-fiction, documentary
reporting, political theory and activism. Since 24/7 news cycles
travel fast and modern crises cross borders and are reported across
the globe more swiftly than in previous centuries, this volume
includes intercultural encounters, various forms of hybridity, and
postcolonial tragic representations. Each chapter takes a different
theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and
circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy
and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and
nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
How have ideas of the tragic influenced Western culture? How has
tragedy been shaped by its social and cultural conditions? In a
work that spans 2,500 years, these ambitious questions are
addressed by 55 experts, each contributing their overview of a
theme applied to a period in history. Extending far beyond the
established aesthetic tradition, the volumes describe the forms
tragedy takes to represent human conflict and suffering, and how it
engages with matters of philosophy, society, politics, religion and
gender. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole,
and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are
identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of
reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following
a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of
the six. The six volumes cover: 1. – Antiquity (500 BCE - 1000
AD); 2. – Middle Ages (1000 - 1400); 3. – Early Modern Age
(1400 - 1650); 4. – Age of Enlightenment (1650 - 1800); 5. –
Age of Empire (1800 - 1920); 6. – Modern Age (1920 - present).
Themes (and chapter titles) are: Forms and Media; Sites of
Performance and Circulation; Communities of Production and
Consumption; Philosophy and Social Theory; Religion, Ritual and
Myth; Politics of City and Nation; Society and Family; and Gender
and Sexuality. The page extent is approximately 1,824pp with c. 200
illustrations. Each volume opens with Notes on Contributors, a
series preface and an introduction, and concludes with Notes,
Bibliography and an Index. The Cultural Histories Series A Cultural
History of Tragedy is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles
are available as hardcover sets for libraries needing just one
subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as
part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is
available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual
access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com. Individual volumes
for academics and researchers interested in specific historical
periods are also available in print or digitally via
www.bloomsburycollections.com.
Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw
the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and
violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight
original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's
place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to
the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward
nature as simple or univocal. Gathering together medical texts,
herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious,
philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn
of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and
unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts
focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and
climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and
European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of
the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by
volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these
compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here
wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the
nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as
they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a
whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early
writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.
This book explores how classical and Shakespearean tragedy has
shaped the temporality of crisis on the stage and in time-travel
films and videogames. In turn, it uncovers how performance and new
media can challenge common assumptions about tragic causality and
fate. Traditional tragedies may present us with a present when a
calamity is staged, a decisive moment in which everything changes.
However, modern performance, adaptation and new media can question
the premises of that kind of present crisis and its fatality. By
offering replays or alternative endings, experimental theatre,
adaptation, time travel films and videogames reinvent the tragic
experience of irreversible present time. This book offers the
reader a fresh understanding of tragic character and agency through
these new media's exposure of the genre's deep structure.
Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England brings together theories
of play and game with theatre and performance to produce new
understandings of the history and design of early modern English
drama. Through literary analysis and embodied practice, an
international team of distinguished scholars examines a wide range
of games-from dicing to bowling to role-playing to videogames-to
uncover their fascinating ramifications for the stage in
Shakespeare's era and our own. Foregrounding ludic elements
challenges the traditional view of drama as principally mimesis, or
imitation, revealing stageplays to be improvisational experiments
and participatory explorations into the motive, means, and value of
recreation. Delving into both canonical masterpieces and hidden
gems, this innovative volume stakes a claim for play as the crucial
link between games and early modern theatre, and for the early
modern theatre as a critical site for unraveling the continued
cultural significance and performative efficacy of gameplay today.
Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw
the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and
violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight
original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's
place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to
the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward
nature as simple or univocal. Gathering together medical texts,
herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious,
philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn
of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and
unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts
focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and
climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and
European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of
the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by
volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these
compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here
wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the
nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as
they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a
whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early
writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.
How have ideas of the tragic influenced Western culture? How has
tragedy been shaped by its social and cultural conditions? In a
work that spans 2,500 years, these ambitious questions are
addressed by 55 experts, each contributing their overview of a
theme applied to a period in history. Extending far beyond the
established aesthetic tradition, the volumes describe the forms
tragedy takes to represent human conflict and suffering, and how it
engages with matters of philosophy, society, politics, religion and
gender. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole,
and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are
identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of
reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following
a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of
the six. The six volumes cover: 1. - Antiquity (500 BCE - 1000 AD);
2. - Middle Ages (1000 - 1400); 3. - Early Modern Age (1400 -
1650); 4. - Age of Enlightenment (1650 - 1800); 5. - Age of Empire
(1800 - 1920); 6. - Modern Age (1920 - present). Themes (and
chapter titles) are: Forms and Media; Sites of Performance and
Circulation; Communities of Production and Consumption; Philosophy
and Social Theory; Religion, Ritual and Myth; Politics of City and
Nation; Society and Family; and Gender and Sexuality. The page
extent is approximately 1,824pp with c. 200 illustrations. Each
volume opens with Notes on Contributors, a series preface and an
introduction, and concludes with Notes, Bibliography and an Index.
The Cultural Histories Series A Cultural History of Tragedy is part
of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available as hardcover
sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a
tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a
fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available
to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via
www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com. Individual volumes for academics
and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also
available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.
The purpose of this book is to honor the scholarly legacy of
Charles R. Forker with a series of essays that address the problem
of literary influence in original ways and from a variety of
perspectives. The emphasis throughout is on the sort of careful,
exhaustive, evidence-based scholarship to which Forker dedicated
his entire professional life. Although wide-ranging and various by
design, the essays in this book never lose sight of three discrete
yet overlapping areas of literary inquiry that create a unity of
perspective amid the diversity of approaches: 1) the formation of
play texts, textual analysis, and editorial practice; 2)
performance history and the material playing conditions from
Shakespeare's time to the present, including film as well as stage
representations; and 3) the world, both cultural and literary, in
which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked and to which they
bequeathed an artistic legacy that continues to be re-interpreted
and re-defined by a whole new set of cultural and literary
pressures. Eschewing any single, predetermined ideological
perspective, the essays in this book call our attention to how the
simplest questions or observations can open up provocative and
unexpected scholarly vistas. In so doing, they invite us into a
subtly re-configured world of literary influence that draws us into
new, often unexpected, ways of seeing and understanding the
familiar.
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