No writer has served as such a powerful source of inspiration for other writers, or attracted such varied and widespread comment, as William Shakespeare. From West Side Story, Ivan Turgenev's A Lear of the Steppes, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead to Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert's "Elegy for Fortinbras," Shakespeare's presence in literature and theater has been powerful and pervasive.
Now, in After Shakespeare, editor John Gross brings together a lively gathering of writings that testify to that presence. More passionate and more personal than most Shakespeare criticism, these pieces reveal much more directly Shakespeare's effect on the generations of writers and thinkers who came after him. Novelists, poets, and playwrights are all represented, as one would expect. But Shakespeare's influence extends beyond the expected to philosophers, historians, composers, film-makers, and politicians. Here we see how Shakespearean characters and motifs fueled the genius of Goethe and Dostoevsky, Aldous Huxley and Emily Dickenson, John Updike and Duke Ellington, Marcel Proust and Grigor Kozintsev. We see Shakespeare the man firing the imaginations of Kipling, Joyce, Borges, and Burgess. Herman Melville writes a poem about Falstaff. D. H. Lawrence anatomizes Hamlet, (revealing much about his own aesthetic in the process). R. K. Narayan describes a Shakespeare lesson in an Indian classroom. John Osborne adapts Coriolanus. Eugene Ionescu reworks Macbeth. We even see Shakespeare's power to console the lonely prisoner in the writings of Alfred Dreyfus and Nelson Mandela. Wide-ranging, surprising, and written with refreshing immediacy, After Shakespeare brings together a collection of writings that not only reflects Shakespeare's enduring spirit but brilliantly embodies it.

Boudewijn heeft altijd mythes nodig gehad. Gerard Reve zegt ergens: "Ik speel de rol die ik ben." Boudewijn lijkt meer uit te gaan van de stelregel: "Ik speel de rol die ik wil zijn." Of al die verhalen nou waar zijn of niet doet er niet toe: in beide gevallen heeft hij veel te verbergen.
Als het allemaal waar is, is het tragisch en triest; en is het allemaal niet waar, dan is dat op zichzelf ook weer tragisch en triest. In beide gevallen kun je je het best verbergen - in verhalen die je hebt verzonnen, zodat niemand weet waar die aan toe is. Wil je dat niemand je ziet, schep een dubbelganger die iedereen misleidt en ga zelf de andere kant op.
Zijn aandoeningen zijn daarom geen aandoeningen, het zijn taalspelletjes. "Ik ben zeer depressief," zegt Boudewijn te pas en te onpas, maar altijd met een vrolijk gezicht, en nadat hij weer een wereldreis heeft gemaakt, een succesboek heeft geschreven of volle zalen heeft getrokken in de provincie. En het publiek lacht. Maar die aandoening, die depressie heeft hij nodig en schept hij, creëert hij, omdat het een mooi kader is waarin hij zijn spelletjes kan spelen. Die lach bij het publiek komt door de incongruentie die men voelt tussen de depressieve boodschap en de blijmoedige, gezellige omgeving. Zijn echte aandoening is natuurlijk niet zijn depressie, of zijn doodsverlangen, of zijn romantische pedofilie, of het gejaag op zijn vader. Zijn echte aandoening is zijn onbedwingbare, voor mijn part pathologische lust om te verzinnen, te scheppen. In taal. Zoals het een dichter betaamt. Vandaar dat hij een keiharde werker is - altijd maar schrijven, schrijven, schrijven, wat natuurlijk vluchten, vluchten, vluchten is, voor de waarheid of de leugen.

Spiritual Shakespeares is the first book to explore the scope for reading Shakespeare spiritually in the light of contemporary theory and current world events. Ewan Fernie has brought together an exciting cast of critics in order to respond to the 'religious turn' in recent literary theory and to the spiritualized politics of terrorism and the 'War on Terror'.

Exploring a genuinely new perspective within Shakespeare Studies, the volume suggests that experiencing the spiritual intensities of the plays could lead us back to dramatic intensity as such. It tests spirituality from a political perspective, as well as subjecting politics to an unusual spiritual critique. Amongst its controversial and provocative arguments is the idea that a consideration of spirituality might point the way forward for materialist criticism.

Reaching across and beyond literary studies to offer challenging and powerful contributions from leading scholars, this book offers unique readings of some very familiar plays.

Why is Shakespeare as highly regarded now as he ever has been? This book's answer to this question counters claims that Shakespeare's iconic status is no more than an accident of history. The plays, Belsey argues, entice us into a world we recognize by retelling traditional fairy tales with a difference, each chapter providing a detailed reading.

Why did Shakespeare write drama? Did he have specific reasons for his choice of this art form? Did he have clearly defined aesthetic aims in what he wanted drama to do - and why? Pauline Kiernan opens up a new area of debate for Shakespearean criticism in showing that a radical, complex defence of drama which challenged the Renaissance orthodox view of poetry, history and art can be traced in Shakespeare's plays and poems. This study, first published in 1996, examines different stages in the canon to show that far from being restricted by the 'limitations' of drama, Shakespeare consciously exploits its capacity to accommodate temporality and change, and its reliance on the physical presence of the actor. This lively, readable book offers an original and scholarly insight into what Shakespeare wanted his drama to do and why.

De tragische vriendschap tussen Willem Kloos en Jacques Perk heeft hun levens getekend en is van grote invloed geweest op de ontwikkeling van de Nederlandse literatuur. Al snel na de kennismaking op 15 mei 1880 is hun relatie zo intens dat zij liefdesgedichten voor elkaar schrijven. Later wordt Kloos steeds veeleisender, totdat zijn vriend het niet meer volhoudt en in het voorjaar van 1881 het contact verbreekt. Kloos blijft gebroken achter. Wanneer hij niet veel later hoort dat Perk doodziek is, doet hij alles om zijn vriend nog te zien, maar Perk wil niet meer van hem weten. Nadat Perk is gestorven, schrijft Kloos een daverend in memoriam. Kloos leeft voor twee. Hij trotseert de stortvloed van honende reacties op dit artikel en probeert intussen de literaire nalatenschap van Perk in handen te krijgen. Hij wil nog maar één ding: zijn dode en nog vrijwel onbekende vriend door een bundeling van diens gedichten onsterfelijk maken. In 'Onder de blauwe oneindigheid' geeft Bart Slijper een schitterend beeld van dit ontroerende liefdesverhaal.

Overzicht van de belangrijkste schrijvers en stromingen, van Wolfram von Eschenbach tot Gabrielle Wohmann

In Engendering the Republic of Letters Susan Dalton analyses the lives of four of the most famous salon women in France and the Venetian republic in the late eighteenth-century - Julie de Lespinasse, Marie-Jeanne Roland, Giustina Renier Michiel, and Elisabetta Mosconi Contarini who all lived through the events that transformed Western culture, including the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars.Being women provided them with a particular perspective, expressed first-hand through their letters. Dalton shows how Lespinasse, Roland, Renier Michiel, and Mosconi grappled with differences of ideology, social status, and community, often through networks that mixed personal and professional relations, thus calling into question the actual separation between public and private spheres. Building on the work of Dena Goodman and Daniel Gordon, Dalton shows how a variety of conflicts were expressed in everyday life and sheds new light on Venice as an important eighteenth-century cultural centre.

The history of the black women writers in America, their struggle for recognition, and their contributions to American literature.

Nadine Gordimer began her writing life at a relatively young age. In 1991, that life received the ultimate recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In this volume, Gordimer, who has been described by her peers as a formidable visitor from the future, the leviathan of South African letters and almost always as a gifted writer with extraordinary powers of observation, is paid homage by fellow writers from South Africa and other parts of the world. The book comprises readings, tributes, fiction, poetry, interviews and photographs which engage directly and indirectly with Gordimer's work and her still unfolding legacy.

Literatuurwetenschappelijke essays over Nederlandse dichters.

Walkers well-focused, clearly written essays demonstrate the conformity and the challenges to conventional expectations defining 'women poets.' Walker's work makes a significant contribution to an often neglected area of American literary history. --Library Journal

Based on close reading and explication of the texts, Walker brings fresh insights to each poet. --Choice

... Walker has devised an original analysis that puts a new spin on the works and lives of these poets. --New Directions for Women

Concentrating on Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Louise Bogan, Walker analyzes the highly stylized self-images--from Lowell's androgyne to Millay's body-conscious romantic--projected by these women who attempted to renegotiate the terms upon which they could function successfully as poets.

Offering new and theatrically informed readings of plays by a broad range of Renaissance dramatists - including Marlowe, Jonson, Marston, Webster, Middleton and Ford - this new book addresses the question of pleasure: both erotic pleasure as represented on stage and aesthetic pleasure as experienced by readers and spectators. Some of the issues raised (the distribution of pleasure by gender, the notion of consent) intersect with feminist reinterpretations of Renaissance culture.

This book explores the changing representation on the early modern stage of the built environment of London. It covers a period in which the city underwent rapid growth to become the country's first metropolis, and it examines how the urban environment becomes part of the frame of reference of the drama that is set there.

We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices.

My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age.

We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer will be judged as her best work yet.

Der vaderen boek gaat over de beoefening van de Middelnederlandse letterkunde, en met name over de geschiedenis ervan. In zeventien bijdragen schetsen moderne specialisten in dit vak leven en werk van een aantal van hun voorgangers. Wie de galerij van deze, chronologisch geordende, geschreven portretten van 'vak-vaders' langsloopt, ziet een beeld opdoemen van het ontstaan, de opkomst en de voortschrijdende professionalisering van de medioneerlandistiek.
De vakbeoefening begint met het verzamelen van oude handschriften met Middelnederlandse teksten. De teksten vindt men aanvankelijk vooral de moeite waard vanwege hun historische en taalkundige betekenis. Maar in de loop van de negentiende eeuw begint men oog te krijgen voor de literaire waarde en de charme ervan. Om de teksten goed te kunnen bestuderen worden omvangrijke projecten aangevat, zoals het Middelnederlandsch woordenboek, maar ook worden in deze periode belangrijke tekstedities gepubliceerd. Met deze werkinstrumenten binnen handbereik komt de tekststudie goed op gang, om in de twintigste eeuw al snel uit te waaieren in een steeds rijker spectrum van specialisaties en benaderingswijzen, van volkskunde tot analytische bibliografie, van retorica tot receptie-esthetica, uitmondend in de cultuurhistorische benadering van de Middelnederlandse letterkunde.

An international guide to women's writing throughout the ages, containing over 5000 fully cross-referenced entries. The essays introduce women's writing by area and period, followed by a comprehensive alphabetical reference section which includes authors, texts and up-to-date bibliographies for further research. The guide ranges from Sappho to Chinese writers post-Tiananmen Square, from South-East Asia to Romania and Bulgaria.

Drie essays over de Duitse dichter Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), met name over diens jood-zijn.

An account of the literary life of one of twentieth-century America's most widely read and most reclusive writers, J.D. Salinger.

Tien beroemde schrijvers van internationale afkomst en betekenis, die worden beschouwd als de (mede)grondleggers van het 'modernisme' in de literatuur, worden behandeld.

Since the nineteenth century, the great Russian writer Alexander Pushkin has been a cultural myth, a figure absolutely central to Russian culture, even to "Russianness" itself. In this volume distinguished American Slavists address Pushkin's writings from a multiplicity of contemporary literary perspectives and investigate some of the most puzzling issues in the poet's life and work.