Shakespeare's last plays

Shakespeare's Last Plays was the first of E. M. W. Tilyard's influential works on Shakespeare. In it, Dr Tilyard argues that the last plays – Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest – develop patterns found in the earlier works. He shows how Shakespeare intertwines reconciliation (the final phase of the tragedies) with an awareness of possible worlds (where the ‘natural' and supernatural have equal status), and concludes that The Tempest, by subordinating his tragic pattern, is his greatest achievement.

Shakespeare's Last Plays

History

Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard

World

Athlone Pr

Today's perception of science as a secular profession was developed in the Victorian period, the same time that the natural history museum was invented. The architecture of British natural history museums reveals the complex definitions of nature in the Nineteenth Century, raising many questions: what is nature; how is nature defined; how can nature best be presented to diverse audiences? Natural knowledge was locally-produced; this assertion is proven here through careful social historical accounts of the buildings, their displays, and their reception. By embracing contradictory concepts of nature (from nature as resource to be capitalised by the empire, to nature as the second book of God), Nature's Museums allows the buildings themselves to act as a guide to the Victorians' understanding of the natural world.

Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display

Yanni, Carla

The Three Ecologies

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Guattari, Fèlix

Psychology & Counseling

Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture

Performance on the Edge takes the reader on a journey across geographical borders and conceptual boundaries in order to map out the new territory of contemporary theatre, dance, media arts and activism. Working across social, cultural and political fault lines, the book explores performance as both process and contact, as the commitment to political activism and the reconstruction of community, as site-specific intervention into the social and technological structures of abandonment, and as the highly charged embodiment of erotic fantasies. Performance on the Edge addresses the politics of community-oriented and reconstructive artmaking in an era marked by the AIDS crisis, cultural and racial polarization, warfare, separatism and xenophobia. Provocatively illustrated with work from North and Central America and Eastern and Western Europe, the book challenges our assumptions about the relations between media and activism, technological imperatives and social processes and bodily identities and virtual communities.

Arts & Photography

Birringer, Johannes H.

Performing Arts

The Visual in Social Theory

The distinction between understanding sight as a natural faculty - vision - and understanding it as an historical and social construct - visuality - has had significant impact in the visual arts. Not so in social theory where, notwithstanding the efforts of the classical theorists, the practical scientific necessity of privileging visuality over vision has been lost.The Visual in Social Theory argues that, because of its uncritical use of terms like modernity, postmodernity, globalisation, and the Third Way, contemporary social theory has become a participant in rather than a critic of 'promotional culture'. In short, in forgetting its past social theory has effectively forsaken its future.The Visual in Social Theory aims to restore the self-discipline and critical edge intrinsic to any analytical work on visuality. The book will be essential reading not only for those interested in contemporary debates around vision but a for broader readership concerned for the critical relevance of contemporary social theory.

Politics & Social Sciences

Woodiwiss, Anthony

Social Sciences

Critical and Cultural Theory: Thematic Variations

This radical, new book brings together the key concepts, issues and debates in critical and cultural theory today. Each chapter presents a self-contained analysis of each concept as well providing a range of discussion questions and further reading. Throughout, text-links connect related material across chapters, enabling the reader to pursue their own line of disciplinary or cross-disciplinary inquiry.

Cavallaro, Dani

Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of the Subject

French philosophy and cultural theory continue to hold a prestigious and influential position in European thought. One of the central themes of contemporary French philosophy is its concern with the theoretical and political status of the subject, a question which has been broached by structuralists and poststructuralists through an analysis of the construction of the subject in and by language, discourse, power and ideology.Contemporary French Philosophy outlines the construction of the subject in modern philosophy, focusing in particular on the seminal work of Althusser, Lacan, Derrida and Foucault. The book interrogates some of the most influential perspectives on the question of the subject to contest those postmodern voices which announce its disappearance or death. It argues instead that the question of the subject persists, even in those perspectives which seek to abandon it altogether.Providing a broad introduction to the field and an original analysis of some of the most influential theorists of the 20th Century, the book will be of great interest to political and literary theorists, cultural historians, as well as to philosophers.

Williams, Caroline

Anthony Woodiwiss

Anthropology

After the New Criticism

This work is the first history and evaluation of contemporary American critical theory within its European philosophical contexts. In the first part, Frank Lentricchia analyzes the impact on our critical thought of Frye, Stevens, Kermode, Sartre, Poulet, Heidegger, Sussure, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault, among other, less central figures. In a second part, Lentricchia turns to four exemplary theorists on the American scene--Murray Krieger, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom--and an analysis of their careers within the lineage established in part one. Lentricchia's critical intention is in evidence in his sustained attack on the more or less hidden formalist premises inherited from the New Critical fathers. Even in the name of historical consciousness, he contends, contemporary theorists have often cut literature off from social and temporal processes. By so doing he believes that they have deprived literature of its relevant values and turned the teaching of both literature and theory into a rarefied activity. All along the way, with the help of such diverse thinkers as Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Bloom, Lentricchia indicates a strategy by which future critical theorists may resist the mandarin attitudes of their fathers.

Lentricchia, Frank

Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey was the senior British officer concerned with the building of the notorious "Bridge over the River Kwai". This responsible and dangerous position forced him to make many critical decisions, but his dilemma was not that presented by Pierre Boulle in his fictional work. Toosey understood form the very beginning that he only real issue was how to ensure that s many of his men as possible should survive their captivity. He appreciated to the full that he bridge would be built with or without his co-operation and set himself the task of mitigating the terrible conditions under which the work was to be completed. Many thousands who knew how Toosey stood up to their oppressors at great personal risk were incensed by Alec Guinness's brilliant portrayal of 'Colonel Nicholson' in the film version of Boulle's book. The present work is designed to provide an accurate historical account of the terrible events during which more than 16,000 POWs died while building the Thai-Burma railway, of which "the bridge" formed an essential part. It also places the whole sorry episode into a correct historic perspective, to demonstrate how one, rather special, individual reacted when faced with an immense responsibility.A memorial to Toosey, this book is also a definitive history of the building of the railway in the context of the Far Eastern theatre of World War II.

The Man Behind the Bridge: Colonel Toosey and the River Kwai

Davies, Peter N.

Asia

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