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Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England
by Bryan ReynoldsIn this book Bryan Reynolds argues that early modern England experienced a sociocultural phenomenon, unprecedented in English history, which has been largely overlooked by historians and critics. Beginning in the 1520s, a distinct "criminal culture" of beggars, vagabonds, confidence tricksters, prostitutes, and gypsies emerged and flourished. This community defined itself through its criminal conduct and dissident thought and was, in turn,officially defined by and against the dominant conceptions of English cultural normality.Examining plays, popular pamphlets, laws, poems, and scholarly work from the period, Reynolds demonstrates that this criminal culture, though diverse, was united by its own ideology, language, and aesthetic. Using his transversal theory, he shows how the enduring presence of this criminal culture markedly influenced the mainstream culture's aesthetic sensibilities, socioeconomic organization, and systems of belief. He maps the effects of the public theater's transformative force of transversality, such as through the criminality represented by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Dekker, on both Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the scholarship devoted to it.
Becoming Belle
by Nuala O'Connor'Luminous' SEBASTIAN BARRY'Incandescent characters and mellifluous prose' LISA CAREY'Reminiscent of Edith Wharton at her very best' LIZ NUGENT_________The true story of a woman ahead of her time . . . In 1887, Isabel Bilton is the eldest of three daughters of a middle-class military family, growing up in a small garrison town. By 1891 she is the Countess of Clancarty, dubbed "the peasant countess" by the press, and a member of the Irish aristocracy. Becoming Belle is the story of the four years in between, of Belle's rapid ascent and the people that tried to tear her down. Reimagined by a novelist at the height of her powers, Belle is an unforgettable woman. Set against an absorbing portrait of Victorian London, hers is a timeless rags-to-riches story a la Becky Sharpe._________Praise for BECOMING BELLE'Nuala O'Connor has the thrilling ability to step back nimbly and enter the deep dance of time. This is a hidden history laid luminously before us of an exultant Anglo-Irish woman navigating the dark shoals and the bright fields of a life' SEBASTIAN BARRY, award-winning author of The Secret Scripture and Days Without End'Becoming Belle is so mesmerizing you will be distraught when it ends.O'Connor has resurrected a fiery, inexorable woman who rewrites the script on a stage supposedly ruled by men. Sensual, witty, daring, and unapologetically forward.' Lisa Carey, author of The Stolen Child'Belle's determination to live her life on her own terms and in defiance of her times makes her a fascinating subject' Irish Central'Masterful storytelling! I was putty in Nuala O'Connor's hands. She made the unsinkable Belle Bilton and her down-to-earth sister Flo real to me, and brought 1880's London to my living room. Encore! Encore!' Lynn Cullen, bestselling author of Mrs. Poe'A glorious novel in which Belle Bilton and 19th century London are brought roaring to life with exquisite period detail' Hazel Gaynor, New York Times bestselling author of A Memory of Violets'Thoroughly engrossing and entertaining read' Liz Nugent'Thrillingly dramatic and achingly moving and profoundly resonant into this present era' Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain'O'Connor gently unfolds Belle's tale in a manner that is compelling and disarming. The ambience may be Victorian elegance but the sheer honesty of O'Connor's writing is sensual, authentic and earthy. A delight!' Rose Servitova, author of The Longbourn Letters
Becky Shaw (Modern Plays)
by Gina GionfriddoI'm also going to give you some advice. Your husband is not the Red Cross. The last time he started consoling a cute, suicidal chick, he married her. Becky Shaw is an amusing and cleverly constructed comedy about ambition, the cost of being truthful, and the perils of a blind date. The fast and funny dialogue navigates between five distinctively perverse and disingenuously dysfunctional characters.The plot is as follows: from the moment that Becky arrives overdressed for her blind date with straight-talking Max, it's clear the evening won't go to plan. In the immediate fallout, Becky becomes an object of devotion for her boss Andrew, who appears to have a fetish for vulnerable women. In turn Andrew's wife Suzanna turns to her step-brother Max for comfort, and their mutual desire begins to resurface.Gina Gionfriddo's masterful play is a biting American comedy with sharp, witty dialogue and a carefully crafted yet unforced story arc. Character-driven, Becky Shaw is a comic tale of tangled love lives and a subtle but acerbic comedy of manners.
Becky Shaw (Modern Classics)
by Gina Gionfriddo“A tangled tale of love, sex and ethics among a quartet of men and women in their 30s … as engrossing as it is ferociously funny, like a big box of fireworks fizzing and crackling across the stage from its first moments to its last.” New York Times From the moment that Becky arrives overdressed for her blind date with straight-talking Max, it's clear the evening won't go to plan. In the immediate fallout, Becky becomes an object of devotion for her boss Andrew, who appears to have a fetish for vulnerable women. In turn, Andrew's wife Suzanna turns to her step-brother Max for comfort, and their mutual desire begins to resurface.A biting American comedy with sharp, witty dialogue about ambition, the cost of being truthful, and the perils of a blind date. This modern classic edition features an introduction to the play by Julia Listengarten.
Becky Shaw (Modern Classics)
by Gina Gionfriddo“A tangled tale of love, sex and ethics among a quartet of men and women in their 30s … as engrossing as it is ferociously funny, like a big box of fireworks fizzing and crackling across the stage from its first moments to its last.” New York Times From the moment that Becky arrives overdressed for her blind date with straight-talking Max, it's clear the evening won't go to plan. In the immediate fallout, Becky becomes an object of devotion for her boss Andrew, who appears to have a fetish for vulnerable women. In turn, Andrew's wife Suzanna turns to her step-brother Max for comfort, and their mutual desire begins to resurface.A biting American comedy with sharp, witty dialogue about ambition, the cost of being truthful, and the perils of a blind date. This modern classic edition features an introduction to the play by Julia Listengarten.
Beckett's Words: The Promise of Happiness in a Time of Mourning
by David Kleinberg-LevinAt stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when our old faith in the redeeming of the word-and the word's power to redeem-has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin's political theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play, and Adorno's critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, and Derrida's writings on language, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, because of its communicative and revelatory powers, language bears the utopian "promise of happiness," the idea of a secular redemption of humanity, at the very heart of which must be the achievement of universal justice. In an original reading of Beckett's plays, novels and short stories, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, despite inheriting a language damaged, corrupted and commodified, Beckett redeems dead or dying words and wrests from this language new possibilities for the expression of meaning. Without denying Beckett's nihilism, his picture of a radically disenchanted world, Kleinberg-Levin calls attention to moments when his words suddenly ignite and break free of their despair and pain, taking shape in the beauty of an austere yet joyous lyricism, suggesting that, after all, meaning is still possible.
Beckett's Words: The Promise of Happiness in a Time of Mourning
by David Kleinberg-LevinAt stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when our old faith in the redeeming of the word-and the word's power to redeem-has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin's political theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play, and Adorno's critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, and Derrida's writings on language, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, because of its communicative and revelatory powers, language bears the utopian "promise of happiness," the idea of a secular redemption of humanity, at the very heart of which must be the achievement of universal justice. In an original reading of Beckett's plays, novels and short stories, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, despite inheriting a language damaged, corrupted and commodified, Beckett redeems dead or dying words and wrests from this language new possibilities for the expression of meaning. Without denying Beckett's nihilism, his picture of a radically disenchanted world, Kleinberg-Levin calls attention to moments when his words suddenly ignite and break free of their despair and pain, taking shape in the beauty of an austere yet joyous lyricism, suggesting that, after all, meaning is still possible.
Beckett's Laboratory: Experiments in the Theatre Enclosure
by Corey WakelingOffering fresh studies of Samuel Beckett in pre-production, in rehearsal, as an innovator of the script form, and as a speculative director and designer, Beckett's Laboratory reconsiders Beckett's stringent approach to stage direction through the lens of the laboratory and reveals his experimentalism with stage representation and composition. Wakeling argues that acknowledging Beckett's experimental processes, from their composition to their reception, is crucial to understanding the innovative representations of humanity that emerged at different stages in Beckett's practice.Repositioning Beckett's performance oeuvre in relation to philosophy, Wakeling draws upon post-dramatic, symbolist, materialist and post-structural understandings of theatre performance to reappraise Beckett's plays as a composition for performance. The philosophical underpinnings of Beckett's practices are explored through an eclectic mix of familiar and unexplored contemporary theatre productions and films of Beckett's works, including Not I, Nacht und Träume, Happy Days, Footfalls and Catastrophe. Beckett's Laboratory is a provocative examination of Beckett's experimentalism with the human spectacle and his playful reliance upon the interpretative powers of the actors and audience.
Beckett's Laboratory: Experiments in the Theatre Enclosure
by Corey WakelingOffering fresh studies of Samuel Beckett in pre-production, in rehearsal, as an innovator of the script form, and as a speculative director and designer, Beckett's Laboratory reconsiders Beckett's stringent approach to stage direction through the lens of the laboratory and reveals his experimentalism with stage representation and composition. Wakeling argues that acknowledging Beckett's experimental processes, from their composition to their reception, is crucial to understanding the innovative representations of humanity that emerged at different stages in Beckett's practice.Repositioning Beckett's performance oeuvre in relation to philosophy, Wakeling draws upon post-dramatic, symbolist, materialist and post-structural understandings of theatre performance to reappraise Beckett's plays as a composition for performance. The philosophical underpinnings of Beckett's practices are explored through an eclectic mix of familiar and unexplored contemporary theatre productions and films of Beckett's works, including Not I, Nacht und Träume, Happy Days, Footfalls and Catastrophe. Beckett's Laboratory is a provocative examination of Beckett's experimentalism with the human spectacle and his playful reliance upon the interpretative powers of the actors and audience.
Beckett's Intuitive Spectator: Me to Play (New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)
by Michelle ChiangBeckett’s Intuitive Spectator: Me to Play investigates how audience discomfort, instead of a side effect of a Beckett pedagogy, is a key spectatorial experience which arises from an everyman intuition of loss. With reference to selected works by Henri Bergson, Immanuel Kant and Gilles Deleuze, this book charts the processes of how an audience member’s habitual way of understanding could be frustrated by Beckett’s film, radio, stage and television plays. Michelle Chiang explores the ways in which Beckett exploited these mediums to reconstitute an audience response derived from intuition.
Beckett's Intuitive Spectator: Me to Play (New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)
by Michelle ChiangBeckett’s Intuitive Spectator: Me to Play investigates how audience discomfort, instead of a side effect of a Beckett pedagogy, is a key spectatorial experience which arises from an everyman intuition of loss. With reference to selected works by Henri Bergson, Immanuel Kant and Gilles Deleuze, this book charts the processes of how an audience member’s habitual way of understanding could be frustrated by Beckett’s film, radio, stage and television plays. Michelle Chiang explores the ways in which Beckett exploited these mediums to reconstitute an audience response derived from intuition.
Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism (New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)
by Nick WoltermanSamuel Beckett’s work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett’s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides. Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett’s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett’s techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism’s experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett’s uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars. For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Beckett’s artistic ambitions—his arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical play—as well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments.
Beckett's Creatures: Art of Failure after the Holocaust
by Joseph AndertonIn the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme – testimony, power, humour and survival – to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Beckett's treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz.
Beckett's Creatures: Art of Failure after the Holocaust
by Joseph AndertonIn the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme – testimony, power, humour and survival – to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Beckett's treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz.
Beckett's afterlives: Adaptation, remediation, appropriation
by Jonathan Bignell Anna McMullan Pim VerhulstDespite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s work across the world following the author’s death in 1989, Beckett’s afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts of adaptation, remediation and appropriation to reflect on Beckett’s own evolving approach to crossing genre boundaries and to analyse the ways in which contemporary artists across different media and diverse cultural contexts – including the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America – continue to engage with Beckett. The book offers fresh insights into how his work has kept inspiring both practitioners and audiences in the twenty-first century, operating through methodologies and approaches that aim to facilitate and establish the study of modern-day adaptations, not just of Beckett but other (multimedia) authors as well.
Beckett's afterlives: Adaptation, remediation, appropriation
by Jonathan Bignell Pim Verhulst Anna McMullanDespite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s work across the world following the author’s death in 1989, Beckett’s afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts of adaptation, remediation and appropriation to reflect on Beckett’s own evolving approach to crossing genre boundaries and to analyse the ways in which contemporary artists across different media and diverse cultural contexts – including the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America – continue to engage with Beckett. The book offers fresh insights into how his work has kept inspiring both practitioners and audiences in the twenty-first century, operating through methodologies and approaches that aim to facilitate and establish the study of modern-day adaptations, not just of Beckett but other (multimedia) authors as well.
Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity
by S. WellerIn Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity Weller argues through an analysis of the interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender that to read Beckett in this way is to miss the strangely 'anethical' nature of his work, as opposed to the notion that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity.
Beckett and Politics: Politics, Propaganda And A 'universe Become Provisional' (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)
by William Davies Helen BaileyThis collection of essays reveals the extent to which politics is fundamental to our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s life and writing. Bringing together internationally established and emerging scholars, Beckett and Politics considers Beckett’s work as it relates to three broad areas of political discourse: language politics, biopolitics and geopolitics. Through a range of critical approaches, including performance studies, political theory, gender theory, historicizing approaches and language theory, the book demonstrates how politics is more than just another thematic lens: it is fundamentally and structurally intrinsic to Beckett’s life, his texts and subsequent interpretations of them. This important collection of essays demonstrates that Beckett’s work is not only ripe for political engagement, but also contains significant opportunities for understanding and illuminating the broader relationships between literature, culture and politics.
Beckett and Musicality
by Sara Jane Bailes Nicholas TillDiscussion concerning the ’musicality’ of Samuel Beckett’s writing now constitutes a familiar critical trope in Beckett Studies, one that continues to be informed by the still-emerging evidence of Beckett’s engagement with music throughout his personal and literary life, and by the ongoing interest of musicians in Beckett’s work. In Beckett’s drama and prose writings, the relationship with music plays out in implicit and explicit ways. Several of his works incorporate canonical music by composers such as Schubert and Beethoven. Other works integrate music as a compositional element, in dialogue or tension with text and image, while others adopt rhythm, repetition and pause to the extent that the texts themselves appear to be ’scored’. But what, precisely, does it mean to say that a piece of prose or writing for theatre, radio or screen, is ’musical’? The essays included in this book explore a number of ways in which Beckett’s writings engage with and are engaged by musicality, discussing familiar and less familiar works by Beckett in detail. Ranging from the scholarly to the personal in their respective modes of response, and informed by approaches from performance and musicology, literary studies, philosophy, musical composition and creative practice, these essays provide a critical examination of the ways we might comprehend musicality as a definitive and often overlooked attribute throughout Beckett’s work.
Beckett and Musicality
by Sara Jane Bailes Nicholas TillDiscussion concerning the ’musicality’ of Samuel Beckett’s writing now constitutes a familiar critical trope in Beckett Studies, one that continues to be informed by the still-emerging evidence of Beckett’s engagement with music throughout his personal and literary life, and by the ongoing interest of musicians in Beckett’s work. In Beckett’s drama and prose writings, the relationship with music plays out in implicit and explicit ways. Several of his works incorporate canonical music by composers such as Schubert and Beethoven. Other works integrate music as a compositional element, in dialogue or tension with text and image, while others adopt rhythm, repetition and pause to the extent that the texts themselves appear to be ’scored’. But what, precisely, does it mean to say that a piece of prose or writing for theatre, radio or screen, is ’musical’? The essays included in this book explore a number of ways in which Beckett’s writings engage with and are engaged by musicality, discussing familiar and less familiar works by Beckett in detail. Ranging from the scholarly to the personal in their respective modes of response, and informed by approaches from performance and musicology, literary studies, philosophy, musical composition and creative practice, these essays provide a critical examination of the ways we might comprehend musicality as a definitive and often overlooked attribute throughout Beckett’s work.
Beckett and media
by Balazs Rapcsak Mark Nixon Philipp SchweighauserBeckett and media provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The book analyses the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Beckett and media draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett’s intermedial oeuvre. As such, the book engages with Beckett as a media artist and examines the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation.
Beckett and media
by Balazs Rapcsak Mark Nixon Philipp SchweighauserBeckett and media provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The book analyses the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Beckett and media draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett’s intermedial oeuvre. As such, the book engages with Beckett as a media artist and examines the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation.
Beckett: A Study of his Plays (Routledge Revivals #2)
by John Fletcher John SpurlingFirst published in 1978, Beckett examines the plays of Beckett in the order in which they were written. The book affords a lively and fresh introduction to Beckett’s theatre. Both authors stress that ‘Beckett was waiting for the theatre as the theatre was waiting for Beckett.’ The differing backgrounds of the two authors of this study have enabled them to approach Beckett’s drama in a particularly fruitful way. This book will be of interest to students of literature and drama.
Beckett: A Study of his Plays (Routledge Revivals)
by John Fletcher John SpurlingFirst published in 1978, Beckett examines the plays of Beckett in the order in which they were written. The book affords a lively and fresh introduction to Beckett’s theatre. Both authors stress that ‘Beckett was waiting for the theatre as the theatre was waiting for Beckett.’ The differing backgrounds of the two authors of this study have enabled them to approach Beckett’s drama in a particularly fruitful way. This book will be of interest to students of literature and drama.
The Beaux' Stratagem (New Mermaids)
by George Farquhar Ann BlakeIt attests to Farquhar's stature as a man that he composed thiswarm-hearted and vibrant play while he was dying. Like The RecruitingOfficer, the play is set in a provincial town and its plot is slight:Aimwell and Archer, two impecunious London gentlemen, arrive inLichfield looking for an heiress to marry. Aimwell, posing as his elderbrother, falls in love with his 'prey' Dorinda and confesses hisimposture to her; his 'man-servant' Archer arouses the wistful interestof the unhappily married Mrs Sullen. The introduction to this editiondiscusses the play for its theatrical merits and argues that itdramatises the ills of marriage in early modern England, shown byFarquhar to be more injurious to the wife than to the husband, andcalls for a reform of the divorce laws.