Selling Shakespeare tells a story of Shakespeare's life and career in print, a story centered on the people who created, bought, and sold books in the early modern period. The interests and investments of publishers and booksellers have defined our ideas of what is 'Shakespearean', and attending to their interests demonstrates how one version of Shakespearean authorship surpassed the rest. In this book, Adam G. Hooks identifies and examines four pivotal episodes in Shakespeare's life in print: the debut of his narrative poems, the appearance of a series of best-selling plays, the publication of collected editions of his works, and the cataloguing of those works. Hooks also offers a new kind of biographical investigation and historicist criticism, one based not on external life documents, nor on the texts of Shakespeare's works, but on the books that were printed, published, sold, circulated, collected, and catalogued under his name.

This provocative work analyzes Mae West's long life and productive career in three major phases: the early theater years, her meteoric film career in the thirties, and her subsequent life as a popular culture legend. It examines her theatrical approach to life and her unique talent for translating a low comic variety style into a subtle satire of melodramatic conventions. West's attempts to control her comic creation led her into many public battles over her claims to authorship of her plays and filmscripts. The book's bibliography explores her talents as a writer, summarizing the plays and books she wrote and investigating the validity of those claims. A thorough study of West's background and attitudes, this volume combines the approaches of both biographical and critical/artistic analysis and broadens our understanding of how Mae West fits into American popular culture. The book examines West's philosophy of success and how it was reflected in her personal and professional life, and places her in a historical and cultural perspective without forcing her personality into predetermined categories. This bio-bibliography provides a fresh view of the legendary Mae West, and a new insight into the complexity of her artistry and social vision. It will be a valuable addition to all public libraries, and a useful resource in the study of American popular culture and film history.

Though history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D. Popkin in History, Historians, and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography? Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others, he reveals the contributions historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust. An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, this work will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.

"Abu Raihan Mohammad Ibn Ahmad (973-1053 C.E.) was an Iranian scholar, also known as Biruni, whose extraordinary achievements include predicting the existence of landmasses on the opposite side of the Earth (North and South America) and calculating the radius of the Earth five centuries before the European Renaissance. Biruni was more than just a great scholar - he was a humanitarian and a man of honor. For the first time, a complete list of Biruni's numerous books on cartography, mathematics, astronomy, history, and geology is presented in a single volume." "Divided into five parts, A Bio-Bibliography for Biruni gives general background information on Biruni's time, his world, and his life, providing the complete names of his 183 books as well as documentation of Internet sites providing biographical information. The titles of these books are given in Arabic, Persian, and English, and they are all annotated and, where possible, the number of folios is given. A list of articles, bibliographies, books, and Internet sites in English completes this volume. This selected research bibliography is for those individuals who are interested in the history of science, scientific research, and scholarship."--BOOK JACKET.

Provides access to citations of journal articles, books, and dissertations published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Coverage is international and subjects include literature, language and linguistics, literary theory, dramatic arts, folklore, and film since 1963. Special features include the full text of the original article for some citations and a collection of images consisting of photographs, maps, and flags.