Materialist Shakespeare A History

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  materialist shakespeare a history: Materialist Shakespeare Ivo Kamps, 1995 Receptive to influences of such diverse theorists as Derrida, Jameson, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan and Althusser, materialist Shakespeare criticism has long since left behind the days of 'vulgar' Marxism and has emerged as a rich interpretive practice. The essays chosen for this book cover all of Shakespeare's dramatic genres and include works on King Lear, Othello, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew and Julius Caesar. Contributors: Paul Delany; Louis Adrian Montrose; Walter Cohen; Alan Sinfield; Stephen Greenblatt; Michael D. Bristol; Katherine Eismann Maus; James R. Andreas; Robert Weimann; Graham Holderness; Lynda E. Boose; John Drakakis; Claire McEacherm; Frederic Jameson; and Ivo Kamps.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare's History Plays Robert Watt, 2014-06-11 Shakespeare's history plays are central to his dramatic achievement. In recent years they have become more widely studied than ever, stimulating intensely contested interpretations, due to their relevance to central contemporary issues such as English, national identities and gender roles. Interpretations of the history plays have been transformed since the 1980s by new theoretically-informed critical approaches. Movements such as New Historicism and cultural materialism, as well as psychoanalytical and post-colonial approaches, have swept away the humanist consensus of the mid-twentieth century with its largely conservative view of the plays. The last decade has seen an emergence of feminist and gender-based readings of plays which were once thought overwhelmingly masculine in their concerns. This book provides an up-to-date critical anthology representing the best work from each of the modern theoretical perspectives. The introduction outlines the changing debate in an area which is now one of the liveliest in Shakespearean criticism.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare's History Plays Neema Parvini, 2017-11-01 Shakespeare's History Plays boldly moves criticism of Shakespeare's history plays beyond anti-humanist theoretical approaches. This important intervention in the critical and theoretical discourse of Shakespeare studies summarises, evaluates and ultimately calls time on the mode of criticism that has prevailed in Shakespeare studies over the past thirty years. It heralds a new, more dynamic way of reading Shakespeare as a supremely intelligent and creative political thinker, whose history plays address and illuminate the very questions with which cultural historicists have been so preoccupied since the 1980s. In providing bold and original readings of the first and second tetralogies (Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II and Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2), the book reignites old debates and re-energises recent bids to humanise Shakespeare and to restore agency to the individual in the critical readings of his plays
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare Kiernan Ryan, 2001-11-07 First published to critical acclaim in 1989, this book is now recognised as one of the most original and influential critical studies of Shakespeare to have appeared in recent times. For this brand-new edition, Kiernan Ryan has not only revised and updated the text throughout, but he has also added a great deal of new material, expanding the book to twice the size of the first edition. The section on Shakespearean comedy now includes an essay on Shakespeare's first scintillating experiment in the genre, The Comedy of Errors, and a study of his most perplexing problem play, Measure for Measure. A provocative new last chapter, 'Dreaming on things to come: Shakespeare and the Future of Criticism', reveals how much modern criticism can learn from the appropriation of Shakespeare by Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce. Students, teachers, and anyone with a passionate interest in what the plays have to say to us today, will find this modern classic of Shakespeare criticism indispensable.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Misrepresentations Graham Bradshaw, 2018-07-05 Just at the moment when conflicts between critical isms are threatening to turn the study of English literature into a game park for endangered texts, Bradshaw arrives with a work of liberating wit and insight. His subject is double: the Shakespeare he reads and the Shakespeare whom critics in the ranks of the new historicists and cultural materialists are representing (or misrepresenting).
  materialist shakespeare a history: Revisionist Shakespeare P. Cefalu, 2004-11-26 Revisionist Shakespeare appropriates revisionist history in order to both criticize traditional transitional interpretations of Shakespearean drama and to offer a new methodology for understanding representations of social conflict in Shakespeare's play and in Early Modern English culture. Rather than argue that Shakespearean drama allegorizes historical transitions and ideological polarization, Revisionist Shakespeare argues that Shakespeare's plays explore the nature of internally contradictory Early Modern institutions and belief-systems that are only indirectly related to competing political and class ideologies. Such institutions and belief-systems include Elizabethan strategies for the management of vagrancy, the nature of Jacobean statecraft, objective and subjective theories of economic value, Protestant ethical theory, and Augustinian notions of sinful habituation. The book looks at five of Shakespeare's plays: The Tempest , Coriolanus , The Merchant of Venice , King Lear , and Hamlet .
  materialist shakespeare a history: Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama Natasha Korda, 2016-02-11 Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in the period. The essays assembled here address fascinating and hitherto unexplored questions raised by the subject of labor as it was taken up in the drama of the period: How were laboring bodies and the goods they produced, marketed and consumed represented onstage through speech, action, gesture, costumes and properties? How did plays participate in shaping the identities that situated laboring subjects within the social hierarchy? In what ways did the drama engage with contemporary discourses (social, political, economic, religious, etc.) that defined the cultural meanings of work? How did players and playwrights define their own status with respect to the shifting boundaries between high status/low status, legitimate/illegitimate, profitable/unprofitable, skilled/unskilled, formal/informal, male/female, free/bound, paid/unpaid forms of work? Merchants, usurers, clothworkers, cooks, confectioners, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sheepshearers, shipbuilders, sailors, perfumers, players, magicians, servants and slaves are among the many workers examined in this collection. Offering compelling new readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays in a broad range of genres (including history plays, comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, travel plays and civic pageants), this collection considers how early modern drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.
  materialist shakespeare a history: The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare Robert Shaughnessy, 2013-05-13 Demystifying and contextualising Shakespeare for the twenty-first century, this book offers both an introduction to the subject for beginners as well as an invaluable resource for more experienced Shakespeareans. In this friendly, structured guide, Robert Shaughnessy: introduces Shakespeare’s life and works in context, providing crucial historical background looks at each of Shakespeare’s plays in turn, considering issues of historical context, contemporary criticism and performance history provides detailed discussion of twentieth-century Shakespearean criticism, exploring the theories, debates and discoveries that shape our understanding of Shakespeare today looks at contemporary performances of Shakespeare on stage and screen provides further critical reading by play outlines detailed chronologies of Shakespeare’s life and works and also of twentieth-century criticism The companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/shaughnessy contains student-focused materials and resources, including an interactive timeline and annotated weblinks.
  materialist shakespeare a history: A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Early Modern Age Naomi Conn Liebler, 2021-05-20 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.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Fantasies of Female Evil Cristina León Alfar, 2003 Focuses on Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The winter's tale. UkBU.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Neo-historicism Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer, 2000 Essays on English Renaissance culture make a major contribution to the debate on historical method.
  materialist shakespeare a history: The Book in History, the Book as History Heidi Brayman, Heidi Brayman Hackel, Jesse M. Lander, Zachary Lesser, 2016-01-01 The essays in this collection reach beyond book history to address fundamental questions about historicism with a broad range of issues such as gender and sexuality, religion, political theory, economic history, adaptation and appropriation, and quantitative analysis and digital humanities.
  materialist shakespeare a history: A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume III Richard Dutton, Jean E. Howard, 2008-04-15 This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examines each of Shakespeare’s plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems. Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre. Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century. This companion to Shakespeare’s comedies contains original essays on every comedy from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Twelfth Night as well as twelve additional articles on such topics as the humoral body in Shakespearean comedy, Shakespeare’s comedies on film, Shakespeare’s relation to other comic writers of his time, Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedies, and the geographies of Shakespearean comedy.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare Quarterly , 2005
  materialist shakespeare a history: William Shakespeare, King Lear Susan Bruce, 1998 This Critical Guide helps students sift through and make sense of nearly three centuries of Lear criticism, providing insight into different assessments of the play's merit and its place within Shakespeare's work and the canon of English literature. Highlights include excerpts from the neoclassical and Romantic receptions of King Lear -- material from John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Victor Hugo -- and a discussion of recent and current trends in criticism of the play.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare and the Middle Ages Martha W. Driver, Sid Ray, 2014-01-10 Every generation reinvents Shakespeare for its own needs, imagining through its particular choices and emphases the Shakespeare that it values. The man himself was deeply involved in his own kind of historical reimagining. This collection of essays examines the playwright's medieval sources and inspiration, and how they shaped his works. With a foreword by Michael Almereyda (director of the Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke) and dramaturge Dakin Matthews, these thirteen essays analyze the ways in which our modern understanding of medieval life has been influenced by our appreciation of Shakespeare's plays.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Renaissance Earwitnesses K. Botelho, 2009-12-21 Renaissance Earwitnesses examines how maintaining masculinity on the early modern stage is intimately tied to 'earwitnessing,' or a sense of 'judicious listening' in his reading of plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Cary, and Jonson.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare's Ocean Dan Brayton, 2012-04-12 Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. In Shakespeare’s Ocean, Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship. Shakespeare lived during a time of great expansion of geographical knowledge. The world in which he imagined his plays was newly understood to be a sphere covered with water. In vital readings of works ranging from The Comedy of Errors to the valedictory The Tempest, Brayton demonstrates Shakespeare’s remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world and reveals a powerful benthic imagination at work.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Border/lines , 1995
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare Matters Lloyd Davis, 2003 In each area, the authors discuss a range of issues by applying and debating key critical approaches to Shakespeare including new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism, and postcolonialism.--BOOK JACKET.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare's Tudor History: A Study of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 Tom McAlindon, 2017-11-01 This title was first published in 2002: An intensive study of Shakespeare's most ambitious and complex achievement in the historical mode. The book offers an account of the play's critical history from 1700 until the 1980s, deals with the aspects of Tudor history relevant to an understanding, and offers close readings of the text structured around what the author believes to be the play's three dominant concepts: time; truth; and grace. In an attempt to correct what he sees as a certain falsification of critical history, the author aligns his account of the play's reception with one of its major preoccupations - the inescapable and informing presence of the past.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare's Englishes Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, 2020 Claims that Shakespeare resists an emergent, exclusionary post-reformation ideology of 'true' Englishness in his early plays.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Mutability and Division on Shakespeare's Stage Yu Jin Ko, 2004 The book is at the same time rooted in the theater, and thus relates the theatrical conventions of Shakespeare's time to the thematic matter of the book. In particular, Ko demonstrates how the divisions explored in the plays are related to stage practices like the use of boy-actors and the volatile interplay of illusionistic and non-illusionistic modes of acting. In this context, Ko introduces a new term - charactor - that combines the fictional character and the stage actor and enables a new, nuanced exploration of stage personae.--Jacket.
  materialist shakespeare a history: The Pragmatics of Early Modern Politics: Power and Kingship in Shakespeare’s History Plays Urszula Kizelbach, 2014-10-10 Early modern kings adopted a new style of government, Realpolitik, as spelled out in Machiavelli’s writings. Tudor monarchs, well aware of their questionable right to the throne, posed as great dissimulators, similarly to the modern prince who “must learn from the fox and the lion”. This book paints a portrait of a successful politician according to early modern standards. Kingship is no longer understood as a divinely ordained institution, but is defined as goal-oriented policy-making, relying on conscious acting and the theatrical display of power. The volume offers an intriguing discussion on kingship in pragmatic terms, as the strategic face-saving behaviour of Shakespeare’s kings. It also demonstrates how an efficient or inefficient management of the king’s political face could decide his success or failure as a monarch, and how the Renaissance world of Shakespeare’s history plays is combined with modern theories of communication, politeness and face. “Many studies in historical pragmatics or historical stylistics purport to expose language use in social context, but they fall short when measured against this study. The author approaches Shakespeare with concepts from literary studies and linguistic pragmatics, and weaves them together seamlessly with social history. The result is a treasure trove of insights.” – Jonathan Culpeper, Lancaster University “Exploring Machiavellian politics from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics and sociological role theory, Urszula Kizelbach’s study sheds interesting new light on Shakespeare’s stage kings. Her discussion of the strategic uses of polite speech is a particularly welcome addition to our thinking about Shakespeare’s English history plays. A promising new voice in European Shakespeare studies!” – Andreas Höfele, Munich University
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters Geraldo U. De Sousa, 2016-01-13 In this highly entertaining study, De Sousa argues that Shakespeare reinterprets, refashions and reinscribes his alien characters - Jews, Moors, Amazons and gypsies. In this way, the dramatist questions the narrowness of a European perspective which caricatures other societies and views them with suspicion. De Sousa examines how Shakespeare defines other cultures in terms of the interplay of gender, text and habitat. Written in a provocative style, this readable book provides a wealth of fascinating information both on contemporary stage productions and on race and gender relations in early modern Europe.
  materialist shakespeare a history: A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture Michael Hattaway, 2010-02-12 In this revised and greatly expanded edition of theCompanion, 80 scholars come together to offer an originaland far-reaching assessment of English Renaissance literature andculture. A new edition of the best-selling Companion to EnglishRenaissance Literature, revised and updated, with 22 newessays and 19 new illustrations Contributions from some 80 scholars including Judith H.Anderson, Patrick Collinson, Alison Findlay, Germaine Greer,Malcolm Jones, Arthur Kinney, James Knowles, Arthur Marotti, RobertMiola and Greg Walker Unrivalled in scope and its exploration of unfamiliar literaryand cultural territories the Companion offers new readingsof both ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’texts Features essays discussing material culture, sectarian writing,the history of the body, theatre both in and outside theplayhouses, law, gardens, and ecology in early modern England Orientates the beginning student, while providing advancedstudents and faculty with new directions for theirresearch All of the essays from the first edition, along with therecommendations for further reading, have been reworked orupdated
  materialist shakespeare a history: Talking to the Audience Bridget Escolme, 2005 This unique study investigates the ways in which the staging convention of direct address - talking to the audience - can construct dramatic subjectivity, or selfhood, in Shakespeare plays.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespearean Fantasy and Politics Thomas Betteridge, 2005 Why read Shakespeare? This work draws extensively on the work of Slavoj UZiUzek and other contemporary thinkers to discover the truths of Shakespeare's drama and relate them to contemporary issues within the discipline of English literature.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Catastrophizing Gerard Passannante, 2019-03-25 When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Memories of War in Early Modern England Susan Harlan, 2016-09-23 This book examines literary depictions of the construction and destruction of the armored male body in combat in relation to early modern English understandings of the past. Bringing together the fields of material culture and militarism, Susan Harlan argues that the notion of “spoiling” – or the sanctioned theft of the arms and armor of the vanquished in battle – provides a way of thinking about England’s relationship to its violent cultural inheritance. She demonstrates how writers reconstituted the spoils of antiquity and the Middle Ages in an imagined military struggle between male bodies. An analysis of scenes of arming and disarming across texts by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and tributes to Sir Philip Sidney reveals a pervasive militant nostalgia: a cultural fascination with moribund models and technologies of war. Readers will not only gain a better understanding of humanism but also a new way of thinking about violence and cultural production in Renaissance England.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Text/Events in Early Modern England Sandra Logan, 2018-01-18 Engaging with a range of events-historical moments, theatrical performances, public presentations, and courtly intrigues - and the texts that record them, this book explores representational practice as a component of Elizabethan political culture. Considering the inscriptive production of mediated, indirect experience as an authorial challenge to the value of the immediate, direct experience of events, and conversely, recognizing the multi-valent impact of theatrical performance and performativity as a reinvigoration of the immediate, this study traces the emergence of 'realness' as a textual effect and a mode of political intervention. This interactive, refractive nexus of experience and inscription comprises what Sandra Logan calls the 'text/event'. The four primary foci of this investigation - the 1558 coronation entry; the 1575 entertainments at Kenilworth; the 1590s dramatizations of the reign of Richard II; and the Essex trial of 1601 - serve as exempla of four moments in the reign of Elizabeth I which suggest an increasingly complex interaction between events and texts developing in the last half of the sixteenth century. Logan argues that, in representing England's recent and distant past, a wide range of social subjects engaged in a struggle for intellectual credibility and social viability, and in the process generated a contingent public sphere within which history, framed as a coherent narrative shaped by causal relationships, was brought to bear on the concerns of the Elizabethan present and future. Assessing how these chronicles, short prose histories, and historical dramas each made use of the materials and techniques of the others, blurring the distinctions between historiography and poetry, as well as between past and present, Logan considers the conjunctions between the development of new genres and perceptions about inscription and experience, and changing socioeconomic institutions and practices.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare’s Culture in Modern Performance M. Jones, 2003-10-23 Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance is an original study at the interface of a historicizing literary criticism and the study of modern performance. In a critical climate that views the cultural object of performance as authentic in itself, is there any point in exploring a script's original history? The writer argues for a dialogic understanding of Shakespeare's plays in performance relative to unresolved issues of modernity, in a study of modern productions on stage and screen.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Othello Philip Kolin, 2013-01-11 Including twenty-one groundbreaking chapters that examine one of Shakespeare's most complex tragedies. Othello:Critical Essays explores issues of friendship and fealty, love and betrayal, race and gender issues, and much more.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage Asuka Kimura, 2023-01-30 The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory Neema Parvini, 2012-09-06 In the 30 years since the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning overthrew traditional modes of Shakespeare criticism, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism have rapidly become the dominant modes for studying and writing about the Bard. This comprehensive guide introduces students to the key writers, texts and ideas of contemporary Shakespeare criticism and alternatives to new historicist and cultural materialist approaches suggested by a range of dissenters including evolutionary critics, historical formalists and advocates of 'the new aestheticism', and the more politically active presentists. Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory covers such topics as: - The key theoretical influences on new historicism including Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. - The major critics, from Stephen Greenblatt to Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. - Dissenting views from traditional critics and contemporary theorists. Chapter summaries and questions for discussion throughout encourage students to critically engage with contemporary Shakespeare theory for themselves. The book includes a 'Who's Who' of major critics, a timeline of key publications and a glossary of essential critical terms to give students and teachers easy access to essential information.
  materialist shakespeare a history: William Shakespeare, Richard II Martin Coyle, 1999 This Columbia Critical Guide steers a clear path through the huge body of critical material on Richard II that has accrued over the past three centuries, elucidating the play's reception by audiences, critics, and scholars since its first production. Beginning with a discussion of early commentaries, the book presents and addresses the most significant critical arguments to give the reader a clear understanding of the ways in which each generation has sought to invest Richard II with new meaning. The final section considers the radical new reading of Shakespeare's work provided by contemporary critics.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare and Senecan Tragedy Curtis Perry, 2021 Perry reveals Shakespeare derived modes of tragic characterization, previously seen as presciently modern, via engagement with Rome and Senecan tragedy.
  materialist shakespeare a history: King Henry V Joseph Candido, 2022-02-10 With its depiction of the victorious English king, Henry V has divided critical opinion and remains one of the more controversial of Shakespeare's histories. This new volume in Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition increases our knowledge of how Shakespeare's plays were received and understood by critics, editors and general readers. The volume offers, in separate sections, both critical opinions about the play across the centuries and an evaluation of their positions within and their impact on the reception of the play. The chronological arrangement of the text-excerpts engages the readers in a direct and unbiased dialogue, whereas the introduction offers a critical evaluation from a current stance, including modern theories and methods. Thus the volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of the play and of the traditions of Shakespearean criticism surrounding it as they have developed from century to century.
  materialist shakespeare a history: Shakespeare and Cultural Materialist Theory Christopher Marlow, 2017-08-24 Cultural materialism is one of the most important and one of the most provocative theories to have emerged in the last thirty years. Combining close attention to Shakespearean texts and the conditions of their production with an explicit left-wing political affiliation, cultural materialism offers readers a radical avenue through which to engage with Shakespeare and his world. Shakespeare and Cultural Materialist Theory charts the inception and development of this theory, setting out its central tenets and analysing the work of key thinkers such as Alan Sinfield, Jonathan Dollimore, Terence Hawkes and Catherine Belsey. Unlike most literary theories, cultural materialism attempts to use the study of Shakespeare to intervene in the politics of the present day, and its unsettling approach has not passed without objection, both within academia and without. This book considers the debates, scandals and controversies caused by cultural materialism, and by applying it to Shakespeare afresh, demonstrates that the theory is still very much alive and kicking.
  materialist shakespeare a history: The Lost History of "Piers Plowman" Lawrence Warner, 2011-12-07 Despite the recent outpouring of scholarship on Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner contends, we know much less about the poem's production, transmission, and readership than one might think. When did William Langland write each of the three versions of the poem, and when did they enter wide circulation? What role did scribes and other agents play in these processes? The Lost History of Piers Plowman engages with these questions to bring about a fundamental shift in our understanding of the genesis and development of the Middle English poem. According to received history, the poem exists in three distinct, chronological versions, the A, B, and C texts, with most scholars agreeing that Langland completed the B text—the version most familiar to modern readers—around 1377-78. Challenging much of the prevalent wisdom about the poem, Warner argues that the received B text is not an integral poem aligned with a single author but, rather, two groups of manuscripts, each of which, because of scribal activities, takes on varying amounts of what we now call C version matter. Through close textual analysis, he reveals that the B text is a conflation of an ur-B text with a collection of passages that belong to the C version of circa 1390, demonstrating that the circulation of the C text actually predates that of the B. The Lost History of Piers Plowman is a groundbreaking and provocative work that establishes an entirely new paradigm for the study of one of the central works of Middle English literature. It will be of interest to scholars and students of textual studies, editorial theory, and medieval history.
Materialists (2025) - IMDb
4 days ago · Materialists: Directed by Celine Song. With Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoe Winters. A young, ambitious New York City matchmaker finds herself torn …

Materialism - Wikipedia
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism according to which matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of …

Materialism | Definition, Theories, History, & Facts | Britannica
materialism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even …

The True Story That Inspired 'Materialists' - TODAY
3 days ago · "The Materialist." Atsushi Nishijima “So often the topics of romance are reduced to girl s---,” she says, adding that matters of the heart are not just for women. “The truth is, men …

Materialists review: This 'captivating' romantic drama ... - BBC
Jun 9, 2025 · Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal make for a starry love triangle in this exquisite new film from director Celine Song, who previously made the Oscar-nominated …

Drama or comedy? Matchmaker movie 'Materialists' is ... - NPR
4 days ago · TONYA MOSLEY, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. In the new romantic drama "Materialists," Dakota Johnson plays a savvy New York City matchmaker who finds herself …

Materialism: Explanation and Examples - Philosophy Terms
Materialism is the belief that everything is made of matter and energy, with no “immaterial” entities like souls, spirits, or supernatural gods. In addition, materialists do not believe in “metaphysical …

Materialists (2025) - IMDb
4 days ago · Materialists: Directed by Celine Song. With Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoe Winters. A young, ambitious New York City matchmaker finds herself torn …

Materialism - Wikipedia
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism according to which matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of …

Materialism | Definition, Theories, History, & Facts | Britannica
materialism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even …

The True Story That Inspired 'Materialists' - TODAY
3 days ago · "The Materialist." Atsushi Nishijima “So often the topics of romance are reduced to girl s---,” she says, adding that matters of the heart are not just for women. “The truth is, men …

Materialists review: This 'captivating' romantic drama ... - BBC
Jun 9, 2025 · Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal make for a starry love triangle in this exquisite new film from director Celine Song, who previously made the Oscar-nominated …

Drama or comedy? Matchmaker movie 'Materialists' is ... - NPR
4 days ago · TONYA MOSLEY, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. In the new romantic drama "Materialists," Dakota Johnson plays a savvy New York City matchmaker who finds herself …

Materialism: Explanation and Examples - Philosophy Terms
Materialism is the belief that everything is made of matter and energy, with no “immaterial” entities like souls, spirits, or supernatural gods. In addition, materialists do not believe in “metaphysical …