Following an extended survey of the history of the play in criticism and performance, this lively study takes a thematic approach to one of Shakespeare's most widely performed plays. Drawing on current critical approaches (especially deconstructive, gender, psychoanalytical and humanistic), the book looks for unique angles and frequently offers original insights. This book aims to match the atmosphere of the play itself. The play's open-ended title, its dalliance with nature, gender and language and its appealing yet elusive characters, are thoughtfully and often playfully treated. For example, the language and the trees of the forest are seen to have a common root. Rosalind is seen to be at once dominant, fugitive, a woman, a possible bi-sexual and a creation of words. Earlier festival and 'green' literature, including Shakespeare's own earlier plays, are seen as a basis for this maturest of mature comedies. The play's political theme is raised, as is the 'escapist' challenge. From this aspect, a startling new interpretation of the play's ending is offered and the book closes on wider issues: time, space and the postmodern in relation to Shakespeare's art.

As You Like It (Twayne's New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare)

Literature & Fiction

Ward, John Powell

Dramas & Plays

Twayne Pub

This book investigates the nature of the alphabet as a medium of communication. The general thesis is that writing is not a merely transparent or empty item like air or glass; rather, the alphabet is both modifier and enabler of meaning itself: The book investigates the general implications of this thesis.

The Spell of the Song: Letters, Meaning, and English Poetry

British & Irish

UNKNO

Ward contemplates nature, relationships in society and within his family, and the position of the artist, in intelligent, well-wrought and often celebratory poems.

The Clearing

Seren Books/Poetry Wales Pr Ltd

The Poetry of R.S. Thomas

"In his first collection of poetry since 1984, John Powell Ward breaks new ground. These are edgy, urgent, relevant poems. The new forms are varied, radical and playful. Ward has moved from the pastoral pleasures of his last book, The Clearing towards a new sensibility, one concerned about the state of the world that our children will inherit and interested in the options that language can give us to explore and influence our times." "The book features several elegies such as 'Elegiac' and 'Elegy for the Accidental Dead' - sensitive explorations of our fragile mortality. Other poems are alarmed at the mechanical travel that shrinks the world, the vulnerability of the unprotected, and the poet's own unwilling complicity with it all. Yet a counterpoint spirituality pervades. Old myths and visions survive and a redeeming light shines on unexpected places; through the camera, on the motorway, or on the alphabet itself. The poems in A Certain Marvellous Thing show a comprehensive intelligence confronting the deep obsessions of modern life, secular, planetary and religious."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A Certain Marvellous Thing

Poetry

Substantial works from the five decades of John Powell Ward’s career are featured in this volume of collected poems. Profiled are his writings from early uncollected work to 1969’s The Other Man, through his 1980s volumes, To Get Clear and The Clearing, and onward toward a late flowering that included a dramatic shift in style and technique, starting with the remarkable Genesis in 1996 and leading to Late Thoughts in March in the latter half of the 1990s. The book concludes with a selection of new and uncollected poems. Ward fans learn how he evolved a startling, experimental technique focused on letters of the alphabet, and how his wider concerns—history, the human peril to the natural world, and tragic events and their aftermaths—are played out across a formal grid of beautiful complexity.

Selected Poems: John Powell Ward

Seren

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ward, John Powell. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.