Katherine Rowe - Böcker

The past fifteen years have witnessed a diverse group of experiments in ‘staging’ Shakespeare on film. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen introduces and applies the new analytic techniques and language that are required to make sense of this new wave. Drawing on developments in Shakespeare studies, performance studies, and media studies, the book integrates text-based and screen-based approaches in ways that will be accessible to teachers and students, as well as scholars. The study maps a critical vocabulary for interpreting Shakespeare film; addresses script-to-screen questions about authority and performativity; outlines varied approaches to adaptation such as revival, recycling, allusion, and sampling; parses sound as well as visual effects; and explores the cross-pollination between film and other media, from ancient to cutting-edge. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen emphasizes how rich the payoffs can be when Shakespeareans turn their attention to film adaptations as texts: aesthetically complex, historically situated, and as demanding in their own right as the playtexts they renovate.Works discussed include pop culture films like Billy Morrisette’s Scotland, PA; televised updatings like the ITV Othello; and art-house films such as Julie Taymor’s Titus, Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, and Kristian Levering’s The King is Alive. These films reframe the playtexts according to a variety of extra-Shakespearean interests, inviting viewers back to them in fresh ways.

The past fifteen years have witnessed a diverse group of experiments in ‘staging’ Shakespeare on film. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen introduces and applies the new analytic techniques and language that are required to make sense of this new wave. Drawing on developments in Shakespeare studies, performance studies, and media studies, the book integrates text-based and screen-based approaches in ways that will be accessible to teachers and students, as well as scholars. The study maps a critical vocabulary for interpreting Shakespeare film; addresses script-to-screen questions about authority and performativity; outlines varied approaches to adaptation such as revival, recycling, allusion, and sampling; parses sound as well as visual effects; and explores the cross-pollination between film and other media, from ancient to cutting-edge. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen emphasizes how rich the payoffs can be when Shakespeareans turn their attention to film adaptations as texts: aesthetically complex, historically situated, and as demanding in their own right as the playtexts they renovate.Works discussed include pop culture films like Billy Morrisette’s Scotland, PA; televised updatings like the ITV Othello; and art-house films such as Julie Taymor’s Titus, Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, and Kristian Levering’s The King is Alive. These films reframe the playtexts according to a variety of extra-Shakespearean interests, inviting viewers back to them in fresh ways.

Dead Hands traces the fascinating career of a curious imaginative device: the wandering, disembodied, or ghostly hand. The author situates this familiar gothic convention in its richer literary and intellectual contexts, from early modern English drama through American fiction. Dexterously threading historical, theoretical, and formalist questions through readings of the plays of Shakespeare and Webster and the haunted tales of Maupassant, Le Fanu, and Twain, the book illuminates the complex social fictions invested in the faculties of the hand and tested by this evocative device.The book brings together a broad and eclectic array of "manual" iconography: from sixteenth-century religious imagery, medical anatomies, emblem books, witchcraft and folklore, to the popular metaphors of nineteenth-century industrialism, contemporary labor movements, and forensic science. Literary "dead hands" draw on and elaborate these varied traditions, to sometimes humorous and sometimes chilling effect.Across such disparate fields, the author argues, the figure of the "dead hand" represents a specific set of ideas about human agency: particularly, concerns about the fraught relationship between intentions (individual and collective) and meaningful action in the world. Severed and wandering, fictional dead hands challenge prevailing assumptions about bodily autonomy and control, directing us instead to the dependent, disabling, and self-alienating experiences of the acting self. In the process, they illuminate the changing assumptions about bodily experience—that "sense" of acting self—that sustain legal and political definitions of person in these different periods.Outlining the dynamic history of this device—first as it migrates from visual art onto the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and later as it prospers in Anglo-American gothic fiction—Dead Hands advances a comparatist reading of early modern and modern concepts of bodily action and its relation to interiority, authority, and identity.