In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died and King James I inherited the English throne. During James's reign, England continued to hark back to Elizabeth, comparing him with his predecessor – not always in a way that was either flattering or pleasing to James. Critics have traditionally assumed that Shakespeare avoided involving himself in this discourse. In this study of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays, however, Yuichi Tsukada demonstrates that, far from not involving himself in the phenomenon of nostalgia for Elizabeth, Shakespeare interacted closely with retrospective writings on Elizabeth and illuminated the complex politics behind the nostalgia. Based upon close readings of Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline and Henry VIII, together with a range of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, including Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, George Chapman, John Marston, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, the book traces the ongoing cultural negotiation of the memory of Elizabeth. Yuichi Tsukada offers fresh insights into enigmatic aspects of Shakespeare's Jacobean drama. For instance, what was the original significance of the two contentious prophecies – 'none of woman born' and the march of Birnam Wood – in Macbeth? Or that of the seemingly out-of-place triumphal procession of Volumnia near the tragic end of Coriolanus? Although her memory recurred in all forms of discourse throughout the first decade of James's reign, the impact of this cultural undercurrent on Shakespeare's Jacobean drama has been ignored or underestimated. Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia reveals the unnoticed richness of Shakespeare's Jacobean drama by focusing on the growing cultural and political nostalgia for England's dead queen.

In this trenchant work, Susan Bennett examines the authority of the past in modern cultural experience and the parameters for the reproduction of the plays. She addresses these issues from both the viewpoints of literary theory and theatre studies, shifting Shakespeare out of straightforward performance studies in order to address questions about his plays and to consider them in the context of current theoretical debates on historiography, post-colonialism and canonicity.

Explores the work of novelists including Naguib Mahfouz, 'Abd al-Khaliq al-Rikabi, Jamal al-Ghitani, Ben Salem Himmich, Ali Mubarak, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish and Nizar Qabbani to show how the development of the Arabic novel has created a politics of nostal

One of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land. “In this sprightly and enthralling book . . . Shapiro amply demonstrates [that] for Americans the politics of Shakespeare are not confined to the public realm, but have enormous relevance in the sphere of private life.” —The Guardian (London) The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned. From Abraham Lincoln’s and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth’s, competing Shakespeare obsessions to the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated, Shakespeare in a Divided America reveals how no writer has been more embraced, more weaponized, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history.

In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.

An ethnographic analysis of the ways that, during the 1990s, Turkish citizens began to express nostalgia for the secularist and nationalist foundations of the Turkish Republic.

Branded by critics from Aristophanes to Nietzsche as sophistic, iconoclastic, and sensationalistic, Euripides has long been held responsible for the demise of Greek tragedy. Despite this reputation, his drama has a fundamentally conservative character. It conveys nostalgia for an idealized age that still respected the gods and traditional codes of conduct. Using deconstructionist and feminist theory, this book investigates the theme of the lost voice of truth and justice in four Euripidean tragedies. The plays' unstable mix of longing for a transcendent voice of truth and skeptical analysis not only epitomizes the discursive practice of Euripides' era but also speaks to our postmodern condition. The book sheds light on the source of the playwright's tragic power and enduring appeal, revealing the surprising relevance of his works for our own day.