Laurie Maguire – författare

This wide-ranging and entertaining book explores blank space from incunabula to Google books. Blanks are a paradox--simultaneously nothing and something, gesturing to what was once there or might be there. They are also a creative opportunity for readers as well as writers: readers respond to what is not there and writers come to anticipate that response. Thus, blank space develops literary and ludic applications. Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page: physical gaps (Chapter One), marks of incompletion such as &c (Chapter Two), and the asterisk as a stand-in for things that cannot be said (Chapter Three). By looking at the early-modern page as a visual unit as well as a verbal unit, this volume shows how the relationship between textual layout and textual content is as productive for writers as it is for readers. Mise-en-page influences readers in the same way that rhetoric influences readers. It is thus possible to speak of 'the rhetoric of the page'.

How do names attach themselves to particular objects and people and does this connection mean anything? This is a question which goes as far back as Plato and can still be seen in contemporary society with books of Names to Give Your Baby or Reader's Digest columns of apt names and professions. For the Renaissance the vexed question of naming was a subset of the larger but equally vexed subject of language: is language arbitrary and conventional (it is simply an agreed label for a pre-existing entity) or is it motivated (it creates the entity which it names)? Shakespeare's Names is a book for language-lovers. Laurie Maguire's witty and learned study examines names, their origins, cultural attitudes to them, and naming practices across centuries and continents, exploring what it means for Shakespeare's characters to bear the names they do. She approaches her subject through close analysis of the associations and use of names in a range of Shakespeare plays, and in a range of performances. The focus is Shakespeare, and in particular six key plays: Romeo and Juliet, Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, All's Well that Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida. But the book also shows what Shakespeare inherited and where the topic developed after him. Thus the discussion includes myth, the Bible, Greek literature, psychological analysis, literary theory, social anthropology, etymology, baptismal trends, puns, different cultures' and periods' social practice as regards the bestowing and interpreting of names, and English literature in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; the reader will also find material from contemporary journalism, film, and cartoons.

Think you know Shakespeare? Think again . . . Was a real skull used in the first performance of Hamlet? Were Shakespeare's plays Elizabethan blockbusters? How much do we really know about the playwright's life? And what of his notorious relationship with his wife? Exploring and exploding 30 popular myths about the great playwright, this illuminating new book evaluates all the evidence to show how historical material—or its absence—can be interpreted and misinterpreted, and what this reveals about our own personal investment in the stories we tell.

Think you know Shakespeare? Think again . . . Was a real skull used in the first performance of Hamlet? Were Shakespeare's plays Elizabethan blockbusters? How much do we really know about the playwright's life? And what of his notorious relationship with his wife? Exploring and exploding 30 popular myths about the great playwright, this illuminating new book evaluates all the evidence to show how historical material—or its absence—can be interpreted and misinterpreted, and what this reveals about our own personal investment in the stories we tell.

This engaging book draws on all of Shakespeare's plays to show they can still be used as a guide to life. Introduces beginning students and general readers to Shakespeare's plays by highlighting the connections between the issues addressed by the plays and those of our own time. Focuses on the characters, situations and stories in Shakespeare which are still familiar today. Shows how Shakespeare's plays illustrate some of life's most familiar stories - love and obsession, parents and children, sex and politics, suffering and revenge Makes Shakespeare’s plays accessible to the widest possible audience.

Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood is a comprehensive literary biography of Helen of Troy, which explores the ways in which her story has been told and retold in almost every century from the ancient world to the modern day. Takes readers on an epic voyage into the literary representations of a woman who has wielded a great influence on Western cultural consciousness for more than three millenniaFeatures a wide and diverse variety of literary sources, including epic, drama, novels, poems, film, comedy, and opera, and works by Homer, Euripides, Chaucer, ShakespeareIncludes an analysis of a radio play by the prize-winning author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and a Faust play by a contemporary Scottish playwrightExplores themes such as narrative difficulties in portraying Helen, how legal history relates to her story, and how writers apportion blame or exculpate herConsiders the aesthetic and narrative difficulties that ensue when literature translates myth

Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood is a comprehensive literary biography of Helen of Troy, which explores the ways in which her story has been told and retold in almost every century from the ancient world to the modern day. Takes readers on an epic voyage into the literary representations of a woman who has wielded a great influence on Western cultural consciousness for more than three millenniaFeatures a wide and diverse variety of literary sources, including epic, drama, novels, poems, film, comedy, and opera, and works by Homer, Euripides, Chaucer, ShakespeareIncludes an analysis of a radio play by the prize-winning author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and a Faust play by a contemporary Scottish playwrightExplores themes such as narrative difficulties in portraying Helen, how legal history relates to her story, and how writers apportion blame or exculpate herConsiders the aesthetic and narrative difficulties that ensue when literature translates myth

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH SHAKESPEARE HOW TO DO THINGS WITH SHAKESPEARE “This is a companion to Shakespeare with a difference. Vive la différance!”DAVID BEVINGTON, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO “Doing things with literature: scholarly articles are not the only way to go. Aristotle uses a lecture, Horace a letter, Sidney a mock oration. Laurie Maguire and the contributors to this book engage in a genial conversation that invites students in. Like all good conversations, this one admits first-person candor, keeps things lively by changing the subject five times, welcomes disagreements, and waits for what the reader-listener is going to do in response.”BRUCE SMITH, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH SHAKESPEARE HOW TO DO THINGS WITH SHAKESPEARE “This is a companion to Shakespeare with a difference. Vive la différance!”DAVID BEVINGTON, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO “Doing things with literature: scholarly articles are not the only way to go. Aristotle uses a lecture, Horace a letter, Sidney a mock oration. Laurie Maguire and the contributors to this book engage in a genial conversation that invites students in. Like all good conversations, this one admits first-person candor, keeps things lively by changing the subject five times, welcomes disagreements, and waits for what the reader-listener is going to do in response.”BRUCE SMITH, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

In this volume on Othello, Laurie Maguire examines the use and misuse of language, the play’s textual and performance histories and how critics and directors have responded to the language of sexual jealousy.