From the Fool to the Wildman, from the irate Reformer to the festive Masqueraders, this collection of articles offers a variety of topics, approaches, and agendas in the study of early modern European theatre. With samplings from Scandinavia, Germany, England, France, the Iberian peninsula, and even the New World, this collection also spans time, from the late fifteenth century to the present. In the process, Carnival and the carnivalesque are examined from archival, Bakhtinian, cultural, and even political points of view. The articles in this collection reveal the variety and inherent vitality of scholarship in early modern theatre. The thirteen essays have been selected from presentations made at the Eighth Triennial Congress of the Société Internationale pour l'Etude du Théâtre Médiéval held in Toronto (1995), under the auspices of the Records of Early English Drama project and Victoria University in the University of Toronto.

Magical storyteller Neil Jordan steps into the realm of fantasy--for fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. It looked like any other carnival, but of course it wasn't. The boy saw it from the car window, the tops of the large trailer rides over the parked trains by the railway tracks. His parents were driving towards the new mall and he was looking forward to that too, but the tracery of lights above the gloomy trains caught his imagination . . . Andy walks into Burleigh's Amazing Hall of Mirrors, and then he walks right into the mirror, becomes a reflection. Another boy, a boy who is not Andy, goes home with Andy's parents. And the boy who was once Andy is pulled--literally pulled, by the hands, by a girl named Mona--into another world, a carnival world where anything might happen. Master storyteller Neil Jordan creates his most commercial novel in years in this crackling, cinematic fantasy--which is also a parable of adolescence, how children become changelings, and how they find their own way.

This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.

Medieval fools hatched from eggs, pigs roasting butchers on spits, battles between pots and pans, a transvestite performance artist and a tattooed lady: these are a few examples of the startling and provocative images in this exploration of 'the carnival sense of the world' in Western art from the Middle Ages to the present day. The inspiration for this account is drawn from the early twentieth-century Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin who in Rabelais and his World invoked the transforming power of 'festive laughter ... that peculiar folk humour that has always existed and has hever merged with the official culture of the ruling classes'.

The diverse essays collected here constitute an exploration of the emerging interdisciplinary field of visual culture, and examine why modern and postmodern culture place such a premium on rendering experience in visual form.

"The Third Edition of An Invitation to Environmental Sociology introduces the sociology of environmental possibility, inviting students to delve into this rapidly changing field. Author Michael Mayerfeld Bell covers the broad range of topics in environmental sociology. With updated material on our environmental situation, this edition challenges readers with the complexity of environmental puzzles." "This book is designed as a core text for courses in Environmental Sociology. It can also be used in courses such as Social Problems, Introduction to Environmental Issues, Human Dimensions of the Environment, and Environmental Ethics."--Jacket.

Public Performances offers a deep and wide-ranging exploration of relationships among genres of public performance and of the underlying political motivations they share. Illustrating the connections among three themes—the political, the carnivalesque, and the ritualesque—this volume provides rich and comprehensive insight into public performance as an assertion of political power. Contributors consider how public genres of performance express not only celebration but also dissent, grief, and remembrance; examine the permeability of the boundaries between genres; and analyze the approval or regulation of such events by municipalities and other institutions. Where the particular use of public space is not sanctioned or where that use meets with hostility from institutions or represents a critique of them, performers are effectively reclaiming public space to make public statements on their own terms—an act of popular sovereignty. Through these concepts, Public Performances distinguishes the sometimes overlapping dimensions of public symbolic display. Carnival, and thus the carnivalesque, is understood to possess tacit social permission for unconventional or even deviant performance, on the grounds that normal social order will resume when the performance concludes. Ritual, and the ritualesque, leverages a deeper symbolic sensibility, one believed—or at least intended—by the participants to effect transformative, longer-term change. Contributors: Roger D. Abrahams, John Borgonovo, Laurent Sébastien Fournier, Lisa Gilman, Barbara Graham, David Harnish, Samuel Kinser, Scott Magelssen, Elena Martinez, Pamela Moro, Beverly J. Stoeltje, Daniel Wojcik, Dorothy L. Zinn