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How to Keep an Alien: A Story about Falling in Love and Proving It to the Government (Modern Plays)
by Sonya KellyHow to Keep an Alien is a funny and tender autobiographical tale in which Irish Sonya and Australian Kate meet and fall in love, but Kate's visa is up and she must leave the country. Together they must find a way to prove to the Department of Immigration that they have the right to live together in Ireland. The paper trail of evidence for 'the visa people' takes them on a global odyssey from County Offaly to the Queensland Bush. It's a tricky business coming from opposite ends of the earth. It takes an Olympian will and the heart of a whale, but above all else, paperwork. How to Keep an Alien is written and performed by Sonya Kelly, with Justin Murphy. Sonya Kelly's debut show, The Wheelchair on My Face, won a Scotsman Fringe First Award in 2012 and was the New York Times Critics' Pick. This edition was published to coincide with a revival of the original production, including performances at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.
McQueen: or Lee and Beauty (Modern Plays)
by James PhillipsYou look otherworldly. Like all my girls. This will make you a queen. Like years ago and people wore clothes like weapons, like weapons against poor people, because even is you were hungry how could you raise your fist against what looked like a god? But I can make things that are weapons against day to day stuff.A girl has watched McQueen's Mayfair house for eleven consecutive days. Tonight, she climbs down from her watching tree and breaks into his house, to steal a dress, to become someone special. He catches her, but, instead of calling the police, they embark together on a journey through London and into his heart. The play captures the fairy-story landscape of McQueen's mind - the landscape seen in his immortal shows - where, with a dress, an urchin can become an Amazon and where beauty might just help us survive the night. McQueen is a journey into the visionary imagination and dark dream world of Alexander McQueen, fashion's greatest contemporary artist.James Phillips's play received its world premiere at St James Theatre, London, on 12 May 2015.
Before Monsters Were Made (Modern Plays)
by Ross DunganYou see, people forever say history is written by the victors. It's not. It's written by those who can shape the simplest narrative.David is a man struggling to hold together his marriage when the small town he lives in is rocked by the sudden, untimely death of a local girl. As details are uncovered, rumours and talk take hold of the town, and start to force David to revisit old memories.Set in 1960s Ireland, Before Monsters Were Made tells the story of how a few small words can have a very big impact. When suspicion and old stories start to spread like a virus, how well do we know the people we trust the most? Can we ever know what goes on inside other people's lives? And do we really want to?Before Monsters Were Made is an unnerving and moving thriller about loyalty, lies and love.
Chef (Modern Plays)
by Sabrina MahfouzI cook here, create here,make here be as much of life as I canbecause outside of thisI'm not safe,I don't know the way.Chef tells the gripping story of how one woman went from being a haute-cuisine head chef to a convicted inmate running a prison kitchen. Leading us through her world of mouth-watering dishes and heart-breaking memories, Chef questions our attitudes to food, prisoners, violence, love and hope. Inspired by an interview Mahfouz conducted with celebrity chef Ollie Dabbous, Chef studies food as the ultimate art form taking stimulus from Dabbous's obsession with simplicity and making something the best it can be. Featuring Sabrina Mahfouz's distinct, lyrical style in abundance, Chef received its premiere at the Underbelly, Cowgate, during the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, winning a Fringe First, and was produced at the Soho Theatre, London, in June 2015.
Is Shylock Jewish?: Citing Scripture and the Moral Agency of Shakespeare's Jews (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy)
by Sara CoodinWhat happens when we consider Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as a play with ‘real’ Jewish characters who are not mere ciphers for anti-Semitic Elizabethan stereotypes? Is Shylock Jewish studies Shakespeare’s extensive use of stories from the Hebrew Bible in The Merchant of Venice, and argues that Shylock and his daughter Jessica draw on recognizably Jewish ways of engaging with those narratives throughout the play. By examining the legacy of Jewish exegesis and cultural lore surrounding these biblical episodes, this book traces the complexity and richness of Merchant’s Jewish aspect, spanning encounters with Jews and the Hebrew Bible in the early modern world as well as modern adaptations of Shakespeare’s play on the Yiddish stage.
The Shakespearean Inside: A Study of the Complete Soliloquies and Solo Asides
by Marcus NordlundThe Shakespearean Inside is a study of all soliloquies and solo asides (dubbed “insides” for short) in Shakespeare’s complete plays. The first step in the research process was the creation of the Shakespearean Inside Database (SID) where these speeches were annotated according to variables of genuine literary interest (such as act, dramatic subgenre, probable time of composition, dramatic speech acts, selected figures of speech, and character attributes such as gender and class). Such comprehensive and detailed data makes it possible to generalize dependably about Shakespeare’s authorial habits, and, by extension, to identify situations where the author departs in interesting ways from his habitual practices. The monograph uses these broad patterns and significant exceptions as a backdrop for fresh interpretations of various Shakespeare plays (from early works such as The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona to mature tragedies like Hamlet and late plays like The Tempest and The Two Noble Kinsmen).
Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature (Other Becketts)
by Christopher LangloisSamuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature addresses the relevance of terror to understanding the violence, the suffering, and the pain experienced by the narrative voices of Beckett’s major post-1945 works in prose: The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, How It Is, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. Through a sustained dialogue with the theoretical work of Maurice Blanchot, it accomplishes a systematic interrogation of what happens in the space of literature when writing, and first of all Beckett’s, encounters the language of terror, thereby giving new significance – ethical, ontological, and political – to what speaks in Beckett’s texts.
Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism
by Pam MorrisAusten and Woolf are materialists, this book argues. ‘Things’ in their novels give us entry into some of the most contentious issues of the day. This wholly materialist understanding produces worldly realism, an experimental writing practice which asserts egalitarian continuity between people, things and the physical world. This radical redistribution of the importance of material objects and biological existence, challenges the traditional idealist hierarchy of mind over matter that has justified gender, class and race subordination. Entering their writing careers at the critical moments of the French Revolution and the First World War respectively, and sharing a political inheritance of Scottish Enlightenment scepticism, Austen’s and Woolf’s rigorous critiques of the dangers of mental vision unchecked by facts is more timely than ever in the current world dominated by fundamentalist neo-liberal, religious and nationalist belief systems.
Islamists and the Politics of the Arab Uprisings: Governance, Pluralisation and Contention
by Hendrik Kraetzschmar Paola RivettiTraces Scotland's changing townscapes over a thousand years
Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture)
by Emily RidgeLuggage is an overlooked detail in the stock sketch of the expatriated modernist writer from the valise-fashioned desks of both James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov to the lost manuscript-laden cases of Ernest Hemingway and Walter Benjamin. While the trope of modernist exile has long been spotlighted, little attention has been given to the material meaning of this condition. What things and objects do modernism’s exiles and émigrés carry with them and how does the act of carriage enter into the modernist picture more broadly? What are the implications and historical resonances of a portable outlook, particularly from the angles of gender, wartime conflict and character conception? Above all, how far does such an outlook impact upon artistic vision? Portability represents the simultaneous transportation and repudiation of domesticity and the home, those key frames of reference in the nineteenth-century novel. This book examines the multifarious ways in which the emergence of a modern culture of portability prompts a radical, if often problematic, departure from Victorian architectural conceptions of fiction towards more movable understandings of form and character.
Scottish Criminal Law Essentials
by Claire McDiarmidOutlines a new critical paradigm for reading children’s Gothic literature and film
Modern Arabic Literature: A Theoretical Framework
by Reuven SnirThe study of Arabic literature is blossoming. This book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework to help research this highly prolific and diverse production of contemporary literary texts. Based on the achievements of historical poetics, in particular those of Russian formalism and its theoretical legacy, this framework offers flexible, transparent, and unbiased tools to understand the relevant contexts within the literary system. The aim is to enhance our understanding of Arabic literature, throw light on areas of literary production that traditionally have been neglected, and stimulate others to take up the fascinating challenge of mapping out and exploring them.
Theatrical Milton: Politics and Poetics of the Staged Body (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture)
by Brendan PrawdzikTheatrical Milton brings coherence to the presence of theatre in John Milton through the concept of theatricality. In this book, ‘theatricality’ identifies a discursive field entailing the rhetorical strategies and effects of framing a given human action, including speech and writing, as an act of theatre. Political and theological cultures in seventeenth-century England developed a treasury of representational resources in order to stage—to satirize and, above all, to de-legitimate—rhetors of politics, religion, and print. At the core of Milton’s works is a contradictory relation to theatre that has neither been explained nor properly explored. This book changes the terms of scholarly discussion and discovers how the social structures of theatre afforded Milton resources for poetic and polemical representation and uncovers the precise contours of Milton’s interest in theatre and drama.
Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study
by Emma SimoneBreaking fresh ground in Woolfian scholarship, this study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.
OCR Anthology for Classical Greek GCSE
by Judith Affleck Clive LetchfordThis is the OCR endorsed publication from Bloomsbury for the Greek GCSE set text prescriptions examined from 2018 to 2023. The texts covered are:HomerOdyssey 6:48–159Iliad 3:1–112Odyssey 7:184–297HerodotusHistories 1.30–4, 86–7 and 6.125 (Solon & Croesus; How Alcmaeon Was Enriched by Croesus)Histories 3.17–25, 38 (The Ethiopians; The Power of Custom)Histories 2.2, 69–70, 129–33, 31–2 (Psammetichus; Crocodiles; Mycerinus; Pygmies)EuripidesAlcestis 280–393Electra 215–331Bacchae 434–508, 800–38PlatoPhaedo 59c–60a, 115b–d, 116b–d, 117c–18aPlutarchA Spartan ChildhoodLucianAnacharsis and Athletics The Isle of the BlestThe volume starts with an introduction to ancient Greek history and culture, which will set in context the passages for the exams and give guidance on how to translate ancient Greek. The prescribed texts are set out in clear passages facing commentary notes, with further information on GCSE vocabulary and key terms as well as study questions. The full GCSE vocabulary is provided at the back of the book and a timeline, Who's Who, glossaries and map combine to give students a focused preparation for their exams. The book is supported by a companion website of further resources.
Ovid Heroides: A Selection
by John GodwinThis is the OCR-endorsed publication from Bloomsbury for the Latin A-Level (Group 4) prescription of Ovid's Heroides, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary for Heroides VI, lines 1–100 and 127–64, and X, lines 1–76 and 119–50. A detailed introduction covers the prescribed text to be read in English, placing the poems in their Roman literary context.The heroines of the Heroides are women in love who can do nothing but write sad verse letters to their faithless lovers across the sea. They tell their stories and express their feelings in poetry of great power and psychological subtlety. Hypsipyle (in VI) and Ariadne (in X) are feminists before feminism, royal ladies who are slaves to their passion – these women are given a voice by Ovid in poetry which is at once simple and sophisticated, heartfelt and yet also full of irony and literary resonance.
Tacitus Annals I: A Selection
by Katharine Radice Roland MayerThis is the OCR-endorsed publication from Bloomsbury for the Latin AS and A-Level (Group 1) prescription of Annals Book I sections 16–30 and the A-Level (Group 2) prescription of Annals Book I sections 3–7, 11–14 and 46–49, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary, with a detailed introduction that also covers the prescribed text to be read in English for A Level.Annals I starts with the death of Augustus and the beginning of Tiberius' principate. Tacitus chronicles the uneasy and unprecedented transition from one to the other, in the context of a political elite shaken by years of civil war and unsure as to how best to protect their own interests and the stability Augustus had brought to Rome. With damning references to the servile nature of the new regime, Tacitus vividly paints scenes of confused senatorial debates, and Tiberius' own uncertainty over his own position and the best decisions to make. Opportunistic rebellions in the army are described with dramatic brilliance.
OCR Anthology for Classical Greek AS and A Level
by Malcolm Campbell Rob Colborn Frederica Daniele Benedict Gravell Sarah Harden Steven Kennedy Matthew McCullagh Charlie Paterson John Taylor Claire WebsterThe OCR-endorsed publication from Bloomsbury for the Greek AS and A-Level set text prescriptions giving full Greek text, commentary and vocabulary and a detailed introduction for each text that also covers the prescription to be read in English for A Level. The texts covered are:ASThucydides, Histories, Book IV: 11–14, 21–23, 26–28 Plato, Apology, 18a7 to 24b2Homer, Odyssey X: 144–399Sophocles, Antigone, lines 1–99, 497–525, 531–581, 891–928 A-levelThucydides, Histories, Book IV: 29–40Plato, Apology, 35e–endXenophon, Memorabilia, Book 1.II.12 to 1.II.38Homer, Odyssey IX: 231–460Sophocles, Antigone, lines 162–222, 248–331, 441–496, 998–1032Aristophanes, Acharnians, 1–203, 366–392
Seneca Letters: A Selection
by Eliot MaunderThis is the OCR-endorsed publication from Bloomsbury for the Latin A-Level (Group 2) prescription of Seneca's Letters, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary for Letters 51, 53 and 57, with a detailed introduction that also covers the prescribed text to be read in English.The most enduringly popular of his works, the Letters are an ideal introduction to both the personal philosophy and the vibrant Latin of Seneca. He writes with wit and modesty to his friend Lucilius about his own, daily struggle to live up to the ideals of Stoicism. Over the course of this selection he covers a great variety of topics including the Stoics' perennial conflict with Fortune, the corrupting influence of a bad environment and the irrational nature of most fear. Composed not long before his own suicide, the Letters also provide an important insight into Seneca's views on death and immortality.
Virgil Aeneid X: A Selection
by Christopher TanfieldThis is the OCR-endorsed publication from Bloomsbury for the Latin A-Level (Group 4) prescription of Virgil's Aeneid X, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary for lines 215–250, 260–307, 362–398 and 426–542. A detailed introduction covers the prescribed text to be read in English for A Level.In Book X, the story moves from a council of the gods, via a depiction of Aeneas's return by sea to his beleaguered Trojan camp, to a bloody field of battle. We see Aeneas for the first time as a heroic warrior, but also afflicted by the searing pain of loss as the young son of his new ally, entrusted to him by his father, is killed. Aeneas is for now cheated of his revenge, a revenge which is the preoccupation of the rest of the poem. He does, however, slay the son of a champion of the opposition and then the champion himself, in scenes which re-emphasise that pain.The heart of the book, where Aeneas and his allies join the fray, constitutes the OCR selection. It is an immensely powerful confrontation between violence and compassion, cruelty and nobility.
Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid: A Selection of Love Poetry
by Anita NikkanenThis is the OCR-endorsed publication from Bloomsbury for the Latin AS and A-Level (Group 3) prescription of Ovid's Amores 1.1 and 2.5, Propertius 1.1 and Tibullus 1.1 with the A-Level (Group 4) prescription of Ovid's Amores 2.7 and 2.8, Propertius 1.3 and 2.14 and Tibullus 1.3, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary, with a detailed introduction that also covers the prescribed text to be read in English for A Level.Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid are our three main writers of Latin love elegy. The selected poems depict the bitter-sweet love affairs of the poet-lovers and their mistresses, from the heartbreak of rejection to the elation at love reciprocated. While Propertius's and Ovid's setting is the city and their poems show us such details of urbane Roman life as drinking parties and elaborate hair-dressing, Tibullus introduces the idyll of the countryside to the genre. Their sophisticated poems combine intense emotion with wit and irony, and celebrate the life of love and their mistresses, Propertius's Cynthia, Tibullus's Delia and Nemesis, and Ovid's Corinna.
Cicero Pro Milone: A Selection
by Robert West Lynn FotheringhamThis is the OCR-endorsed publication from Bloomsbury for the Latin AS and A-Level (Group 1) prescription of Cicero's pro Milone sections 24–32, 34–35 and 43–52, and the A-Level (Group 2) prescription of sections 53–64 (to defendere) and 72–80, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary, with a detailed introduction that also covers the prescribed text to be read in English for A Level.The death of Publius Clodius and the prosecution of Milo for his murder came at a critical point in the history of the late Republic, with Civil War and the collapse of the Republic only three years away. In his passionate defence of Milo, Cicero pleads for the rule of law as a vital counterweight to the anarchy that the gangs of Clodius, and Milo, had created. The published speech was regarded as a masterpiece of oratory in its own time, and is still held to be one of his finest compositions and a model for the presentation of such a defence.
The Angry Brigade (Modern Plays)
by James GrahamIts government has declared a vicious class war. A one-sided war . . . We have started to fight back . . . with bombs.Against a backdrop of Tory cuts, high unemployment and the deregulated economy of 1970s Britain, a young urban guerrilla group mobilises: The Angry Brigade. Their targets: MPs, embassies, police, pageant queens. A world of order is shattered by anarchy and the rules have changed. An uprising has begun. No one is exempt.As a special police squad hunt the home-grown terrorists whose identities shocked the nation, James Graham's heart-stopping thriller lures us into a frenzied world that looks much like our own.The Angry Brigade was first produced by Paines Plough in September 2014 and this edition, featuring changes to the script, has been published to coincide with the production's transfer to the Bush Theatre, London, in May 2015.
Monsters, Dinosaurs, Ghosts (Modern Plays)
by Jimmy McAleaveyWe wanted to be someone. Some . . . I dunno . . . thing.Nig and Wee Joe used to be soldiers. They have done monstrous things. Now nobody is listening and nobody gives a fuck either way. Their lives are full of cognitive behavioural therapy, valium and guilt.One last operation offers the chance to bring meaning to their actions. It also brings them face to face with 'L', who represents the new and unpredictable reality of war in Northern Ireland.This tense and darkly funny play from Jimmy McAleavey takes a fearless look at why men go to war. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 4 June 2015.
Mastering the Shakespeare Audition: A Quick Guide to Performance Success (Performance Books)
by Donna Soto-MorettiniMastering the Shakespeare Audition is a handbook for actors of all ages and experience, whether auditioning for a professional role or a place in drama school.Many actors have no idea where to start in preparing a Shakespeare audition speech. Yet many auditions – professional or drama school – require a well-delivered classical monologue.Mastering the Shakespeare Audition shows performers how to focus rehearsal time and spend it well. Starting with how to choose a piece that plays to each actor's particular strength, casting director Donna Soto-Morettini provides a series of timed exercises and rehearsal techniques that will allow any actor to feel confident and truly prepared for performance – in sessions totalling just 35 hours.Offering progressive and clearly marked exercises detailing the time necessary both to read and complete the work, Mastering the Shakespeare Audition also features extended exercises for those with more time to spare, allowing a deeper understanding of the ideas and skills involved.