Citing the massive horrors of the Nazi death camps and the domestic violence behind a woman's suicide, Adrienne Rich challenges a fellow poet: 'would it relieve you to decide/Poetry doesn't make this happen?' In this provocative reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin chronicles the return of three major American poets (Wallace Stevens in the late forties and fifties, Robert Lowell in the Seventies, and Adrienne Rich in the nineties) to the mid-century catastrophes that gave rise to such thorny questions. Through close readings of individual poems (and drawing upon the gender and genre theories of Jean François Lyotard, Judith Butler, Melanie Klien, and Jacques Lacan), Estrin counters the usual presuppositions that the lyric remains sequestered in a-political isolation, and offers a new, revisionist critique of American poetry.

This book advances five original readings of Shakespeare's King Lear, influenced by Giorgio Agamben, but tempered by primary research into Jacobean literature, law, religion, and philosophy. To grasp Lear’s encounter between politics and identity, the play demands a wider understanding of the religious influence on political thought. As Lear himself realises, sovereignty is an extreme, glamorous example of a deeper category: sacred office. Lear also shows duty intersecting with a hierarchy of bastards, outlaws, women, waifs, and monks. This book introduces concepts like petit treason, civil death, and waivery into political theological studies, complicating Agamben’s models. Goneril’s treason shows the sovereign’s consort and children are consecrated lives too. Lear’s crisis of "self-knowing" stages a landmark critique of office. The promise of his poignant speech before the prison is foreclosed by Shakespeare's invention: an officer dutifully murdering Cordelia. This book’s conclusion, through Hannah Arendt, reconsiders Lear’s persistent association with the Holocaust.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of criticism and performance. For the first time, numbers 1-50 are being reissued in paperback.

Provides the first dedicated study on appropriations of King Lear in British playwriting of the post-war, developing valuable new perspectives on the legacy of Shakespeare in post-war drama and culture.

Shakespeare Studies is an annual peer-reviewed volume featuring the work of performance scholars, literary critics and cultural historians. The journal focuses primarily on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but embraces theoretical and historical studies of socio-political, intellectual and artistic contexts that extend well beyond the early modern English theatrical milieu. In addition to articles, Shakespeare Studies offers opportunities for extended intellectual exchange through its thematically-focused forums, and includes substantial reviews. An international Editorial Board maintains the quality of each volume so that Shakespeare Studies may serve as a reliable resource for all students of Shakespeare and the early modern period – for research scholars and also for teachers, actors and directors. Volume 51 includes a Forum on the work of Michael D Bristol, with contributions from J. F. Bernard, Gail Kern Paster, James Siemon, Jill Ingram, Unhae Park Langis and Julia Reinhard Lupton, Anna Lewton-Brain and Brooke Harvey, Nicholas Utzig, and Paul Yachnin. Volume 51 includes articles from the Next Generation Plenary of the Shakespeare Association of America and essays by Laurence Senelick ("A Gift to Anti-Semites: Shylock on the Pre-Revolutionary Russian Stage"), Christopher D'Addario ("Metatheater and the Urban Everyday in Ben Jonson's Epicoene and The Alchemist"), and Denise A. Walen ("Elbowing Katherine of Valois"). Book reviews consider eleven important publications on liberty of speech and female voice; theaters of catastrophe; adaptations of Macbeth; staging touch in Shakespeare's England; the criticism of Hugh Grady; Shakespeare and World War II film; Shakespeare and digital pedagogy; Shakespeare and forgetting; Shakespeare and disability studies, and Shakespeare's private life.

Explains the Holocaust by invoking the classical theology of the "suffering servant" preached by Isaiah. By way of the Holocaust, the Jewish people had to become a vicarious atonement for the nations in the image of the "suffering servant". This modern crucifixion of the Jewish people was required in order for Judaism to communicate with and effect a change in the character of Christian civilization. The Holocaust marked the end of the medieval epoch, the termination of the era of religious authoritarianism, religious persecution, and theocratic oppression; Nazism was the final manifestation of the medieval worldview. Afterwards, the world moved with finality from medievalism to modernism.

Dennis Kelly explores Kelly’s unusual career path and sheds light on his eclectic approach to the arts, characterised by a refusal to write texts that people can fit within neat categories. This is the first monograph on Kelly’s work for stage and screen and brings to light his essential contribution to contemporary British drama and his huge range of work including his rise to international fame with Matilda the Musical. Drawing on Kelly’s published and unpublished texts, his work in production, reviews, original interviews with directors, actors and with Kelly himself as well as critical theory, Dennis Kelly examines and reappraises key motifs in his work such as his preoccupation with violence, the complex relationship between the individual and the community or his emphasis on storytelling. It also offers new insights into overlooked aspects of Kelly’s work by setting out to explore his traumatic narratives and his post-romanticism. In keeping with Kelly’s wish never to repeat himself, this study offers multiple critical entries into his plays, television series and films, drawing on moral and political philosophy, trauma studies, studies in humour, feminist theory and film studies. Part of the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatist series, Dennis Kelly is addressed to students and scholars in Drama, Theatre and Performance as well as theatre practitioners and offers in-depth analysis of one of the most unique and challenging voices in contemporary British playwriting and screenwriting.