Gary Waller - Böcker

Described as one of Shakespeare’s most intriguing plays, All’s Well That Ends Well has only recently begun to receive the critical attention it deserves. Noted as a crucial point of development in Shakespeare’s career, this collection of new essays reflects the growing interest in the play and presents a broad range of approaches to it, including historical, feminist, performative and psychoanalytical criticisms.In addition to fourteen essays written by leading scholars, the editor’s introduction provides a substantial overview of the play’s critical history, with a strong focus on performance analysis and the impact that this has had on its reception and reputation. Demonstrating a variety of approaches to the play and furthering recent debates, this book makes a valuable contribution to Shakespeare criticism.

Described as one of Shakespeare’s most intriguing plays, All’s Well That Ends Well has only recently begun to receive the critical attention it deserves. Noted as a crucial point of development in Shakespeare’s career, this collection of new essays reflects the growing interest in the play and presents a broad range of approaches to it, including historical, feminist, performative and psychoanalytical criticisms.In addition to fourteen essays written by leading scholars, the editor’s introduction provides a substantial overview of the play’s critical history, with a strong focus on performance analysis and the impact that this has had on its reception and reputation. Demonstrating a variety of approaches to the play and furthering recent debates, this book makes a valuable contribution to Shakespeare criticism.

This book was first published in 2011. The Virgin Mary was one of the most powerful images of the Middle Ages, central to people's experience of Christianity. During the Reformation, however, many images of the Virgin were destroyed, as Protestantism rejected the way the medieval Church over-valued and sexualized Mary. Although increasingly marginalized in Protestant thought and practice, her traces and surprising transformations continued to haunt early modern England. Combining historical analysis and contemporary theory, including issues raised by psychoanalysis and feminist theology, Gary Waller examines the literature, theology and popular culture associated with Mary in the transition between late medieval and early modern England. He contrasts a variety of pre-Reformation texts and events, including popular mariology, poetry, tales, drama, pilgrimage and the emerging 'New Learning', with later sixteenth-century ruins, songs, ballads, Petrarchan poetry, the works of Shakespeare and other texts where the Virgin's presence or influence, sometimes surprisingly, can be found.

Walsingham was medieval England's most important shrine to the Virgin Mary and a popular pilgrimage site. Following its modern revival it is also well known today. For nearly a thousand years, it has been the subject of, or referred to in, music, poetry and novels (by for instance Langland, Erasmus, Sidney, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Eliot and Lowell). But only in the last twenty years or so has it received serious scholarly attention. This volume represents the first collection of multi-disciplinary essays on Walsingham's broader cultural significance. Contributors to this book focus on the hitherto neglected issue of Walsingham's cultural impact: the literary, historical, art historical and sociological significance that Walsingham has had for over six hundred years. The collection's essays consider connections between landscape and the sacred, the body and sexuality and Walsingham's place in literature, music and, more broadly, especially since the Reformation, in the construction of cultural memory. The historical range of the essays includes Walsingham's rise to prominence in the later Middle Ages, its destruction during the English Reformation, and the presence of uncanny echoes and traces in early modern English culture, including poems, ballads, music and some of the plays of Shakespeare. Contributions also examine the cultural dynamics of the remarkable revival of Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage and as a cultural icon in the Victorian and modern periods. Hitherto, scholarship on Walsingham has been almost entirely confined to the history of religion. In contrast, contributors to this volume include internationally known scholars from literature, cultural studies, history, sociology, anthropology and musicology as well as theology.

Drawing on history, art history, literary criticism and theory, gender studies, theology and psychoanalysis, this interdisciplinary study analyzes the cultural significance of the Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, medieval England's most significant pilgrimage site devoted to the Virgin Mary, which was revived in the twentieth century, and in 2006 voted Britain's favorite religious site. Covering Walsingham's origins, destruction, and transformations from the Middle Ages to the present, Gary Waller pursues his investigation not through a standard history but by analyzing the "invented traditions" and varied re-creations of Walsingham by the "English imagination"- poems, fiction, songs, ballads, musical compositions and folk legends, solemn devotional writings and hostile satire which Walsingham has inspired, by Protestants, Catholics, and religious skeptics alike. They include, in early modern England, Erasmus, Ralegh, Sidney, and Shakespeare; then, during Walsingham's long "protestantization" from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, ballad revivals, archeological investigations, and writings by Agnes Strickland, Edmund Waterton, and Hopkins; and in the modern period, writers like Eliot, Charles Williams, Robert Lowell, and A.N. Wilson. The concluding chapter uses contemporary feminist theology to view Walsingham not just as a symbol of nostalgia but a place inviting spiritual change through its potential sexual and gender transformation.

This book traces the history of the Annunciation, exploring the deep and lasting impact of the event on the Western imagination. Waller explores the Annunciation from its appearance in Luke’s Gospel, to its rise to prominence in religious doctrine and popular culture, and its gradual decline in importance during the Enlightenment.

Late Shakespeare and the English Baroque focuses mainly on Shakespeare’s late (or later) works, those written from around 1607. It sets both poetry and plays within the emerging culture of the baroque, the term defined not merely by stylistic features but by the underlying ideological ‘structure of feeling’ of baroque culture in early modern England. The book extends the mode of analysis of The Female Baroque (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and draws on theoretical work by José Antonio Maravall, Raymond Williams, and Julia Kristeva. It analyzes recurring Baroque characteristics – hyperbole and melancholy, theatricality, gender, and ‘plateauing’. Attention is given to the sonnets and other poems, as well as the tragedies from Hamlet on, and argues that increasingly, tragi-comedy emerges as a distinctively baroque Shakespearean characteristic. In the final chapter, primarily on The Tempest, the late Shakespeare is shown to have philosophical insights parallel to Montaigne or Bruno, and to provide anticipatory connections with later baroque artists like Vermeer.

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture is a contribution to the revival of early modern women's writings and cultural production in English that began in the 1980s. Its originality is twofold: it links women's writing in English with the wider context of Baroque culture, and it introduces the issue of gender into discussion of the Baroque. The title comes from Julia Kristeva's study of Teresa of Avila, that 'the secrets of Baroque civilization are female'. The book is built on a schema of recurring Baroque characteristics — narrativity, hyperbole, melancholia, kitsch, and plateauing, pointing less to surface manifestations and more to underlying ideological tensions. The crucial concept of the book is developed in detail. Particular attention is given to Gertrude More, Mary Ward, Aemilia Lanyer, The Ferrar/Collet women, Mary Wroth, the Cavendish sisters, Hester Pulter, Anne Hutchinson, and finally Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn, whose lives and writings point to the developing cultural transition to the Enlightenment.

This book was first published in 2011. The Virgin Mary was one of the most powerful images of the Middle Ages, central to people's experience of Christianity. During the Reformation, however, many images of the Virgin were destroyed, as Protestantism rejected the way the medieval Church over-valued and sexualized Mary. Although increasingly marginalized in Protestant thought and practice, her traces and surprising transformations continued to haunt early modern England. Combining historical analysis and contemporary theory, including issues raised by psychoanalysis and feminist theology, Gary Waller examines the literature, theology and popular culture associated with Mary in the transition between late medieval and early modern England. He contrasts a variety of pre-Reformation texts and events, including popular mariology, poetry, tales, drama, pilgrimage and the emerging 'New Learning', with later sixteenth-century ruins, songs, ballads, Petrarchan poetry, the works of Shakespeare and other texts where the Virgin's presence or influence, sometimes surprisingly, can be found.

Walsingham was medieval England's most important shrine to the Virgin Mary and a popular pilgrimage site. Following its modern revival it is also well known today. For nearly a thousand years, it has been the subject of, or referred to in, music, poetry and novels (by for instance Langland, Erasmus, Sidney, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Eliot and Lowell). But only in the last twenty years or so has it received serious scholarly attention. This volume represents the first collection of multi-disciplinary essays on Walsingham's broader cultural significance. Contributors to this book focus on the hitherto neglected issue of Walsingham's cultural impact: the literary, historical, art historical and sociological significance that Walsingham has had for over six hundred years. The collection's essays consider connections between landscape and the sacred, the body and sexuality and Walsingham's place in literature, music and, more broadly, especially since the Reformation, in the construction of cultural memory. The historical range of the essays includes Walsingham's rise to prominence in the later Middle Ages, its destruction during the English Reformation, and the presence of uncanny echoes and traces in early modern English culture, including poems, ballads, music and some of the plays of Shakespeare. Contributions also examine the cultural dynamics of the remarkable revival of Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage and as a cultural icon in the Victorian and modern periods. Hitherto, scholarship on Walsingham has been almost entirely confined to the history of religion. In contrast, contributors to this volume include internationally known scholars from literature, cultural studies, history, sociology, anthropology and musicology as well as theology.

Drawing on history, art history, literary criticism and theory, gender studies, theology and psychoanalysis, this interdisciplinary study analyzes the cultural significance of the Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, medieval England's most significant pilgrimage site devoted to the Virgin Mary, which was revived in the twentieth century, and in 2006 voted Britain's favorite religious site. Covering Walsingham's origins, destruction, and transformations from the Middle Ages to the present, Gary Waller pursues his investigation not through a standard history but by analyzing the "invented traditions" and varied re-creations of Walsingham by the "English imagination"- poems, fiction, songs, ballads, musical compositions and folk legends, solemn devotional writings and hostile satire which Walsingham has inspired, by Protestants, Catholics, and religious skeptics alike. They include, in early modern England, Erasmus, Ralegh, Sidney, and Shakespeare; then, during Walsingham's long "protestantization" from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, ballad revivals, archeological investigations, and writings by Agnes Strickland, Edmund Waterton, and Hopkins; and in the modern period, writers like Eliot, Charles Williams, Robert Lowell, and A.N. Wilson. The concluding chapter uses contemporary feminist theology to view Walsingham not just as a symbol of nostalgia but a place inviting spiritual change through its potential sexual and gender transformation.

This book traces the history of the Annunciation, exploring the deep and lasting impact of the event on the Western imagination. Waller explores the Annunciation from its appearance in Luke’s Gospel, to its rise to prominence in religious doctrine and popular culture, and its gradual decline in importance during the Enlightenment.

Late Shakespeare and the English Baroque focuses mainly on Shakespeare’s late (or later) works, those written from around 1607. It sets both poetry and plays within the emerging culture of the baroque, the term defined not merely by stylistic features but by the underlying ideological ‘structure of feeling’ of baroque culture in early modern England. The book extends the mode of analysis of The Female Baroque (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and draws on theoretical work by José Antonio Maravall, Raymond Williams, and Julia Kristeva. It analyzes recurring Baroque characteristics – hyperbole and melancholy, theatricality, gender, and ‘plateauing’. Attention is given to the sonnets and other poems, as well as the tragedies from Hamlet on, and argues that increasingly, tragi-comedy emerges as a distinctively baroque Shakespearean characteristic. In the final chapter, primarily on The Tempest, the late Shakespeare is shown to have philosophical insights parallel to Montaigne or Bruno, and to provide anticipatory connections with later baroque artists like Vermeer.