First published in 2004, David George's majestic compendium of criticism relating to Shakespeare's Coriolanus was recognised as a major contribution to teaching and scholarship on the play. This new edition has been updated with a new supplementary introduction by the author tracing criticism on the play since that first publication, including materialist, psychoanalytic and feminist readings, as well as further readings of the play's politics. As with all titles in the series, this edition 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 substantial 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.

Gender, Mediation, and Popular Education in Venice, 1760–1830 examines how women with enough cultural capital could turn their identity as representatives of "the public" – those on the receiving end of education – to their advantage, producing knowledge under the guise of relaying it. Author Susan Dalton looks at the question of how elite women turned their reputation for ignorance into an opportunity to establish themselves as authors at the dawn of the nineteenth century in Venice. Many literary figures saw women as a group in need of education. By deploying essentialist understandings of femininity, whereby women possessed superior moral virtue but deficient rationality, these women entered the world of print as cultural mediators, identified by contemporaries as key players in the social projects of public education and moral edification central to the European Enlightenment. Focussing on Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi and Giustina Renier Michiel, both renowned Venetian authors, Dalton introduces two well-known Italian women of letters to English-speaking scholars, re-evaluates the impact of their writing in Italy and raises questions about female authorship across Europe, broadens our conceptions of gender norms, and enriches our knowledge of a little-known period of women’s writing in Italy. This volume is an essential resource for students and scholars alike interested in women’s and gender history, early modern history and social and cultural history.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Representing Belief provides a detailed discussion and analysis of the forms and meanings in religious art of nineteenth-century France. This genre, usually assigned minimal importance by writers on the period, turns out to occupy a central place in the cultural history of the era, touching the core of the century's conflict between tradition and modernity, science and faith, ultramontanism and naturalism. Although it was generally assumed that this kind of art was of little importance in the evolution of modern painting, Driskel demonstrates that in reality it played a crucial role. Many of the artists discussed are firmly installed in the present canon (Delacroix, Ingres, Manet, Gauguin), while others (Flandrin, Orsel, Gleyre, Cazin) were major figures in their own time, though largely forgotten today. Writing from an interdisciplinary perspective and employing concepts derived from structuralist and poststructuralist theory, Driskel moves beyond simple formalism to restore a category of once-important works to a meaningful context, thereby offering others a model by which to discuss and interpret these paintings. Carefully charting the genealogies of hieraticism and naturalism, he demonstrates that a dramatic shift occurred in the 1860s and 1870s as naturalism gained acceptance among ultramontanes and the hieratic mode began to attract the interest of adherents to the belief system of modernism. Representing Belief is the first book to situate this art in its social and historical contexts and to approach it from this point of view.