Rebecca Bushnell - Böcker

Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal.Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.

Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal.Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.

This book explores how classical and Shakespearean tragedy has shaped the temporality of crisis on the stage and in time-travel films and videogames. By offering replays or alternative endings, experimental theatre, adaptation, time travel films and videogames reinvent the tragic experience of irreversible present time.

How have ideas of the tragic influenced Western culture? How has tragedy been shaped by its social and cultural conditions?In a work that spans 2,500 years, these ambitious questions are addressed by 55 experts, each contributing their overview of a theme applied to a period in history. Extending far beyond the established aesthetic tradition, the volumes describe the forms tragedy takes to represent human conflict and suffering, and how it engages with matters of philosophy, society, politics, religion and gender.Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six.The six volumes cover: 1. – Antiquity (500 BCE - 1000 AD); 2. – Middle Ages (1000 - 1400); 3. – Early Modern Age (1400 - 1650); 4. – Age of Enlightenment (1650 - 1800); 5. – Age of Empire (1800 - 1920); 6. – Modern Age (1920 - present).Themes (and chapter titles) are: Forms and Media; Sites of Performance and Circulation; Communities of Production and Consumption; Philosophy and Social Theory; Religion, Ritual and Myth; Politics of City and Nation; Society and Family; and Gender and Sexuality.The page extent is approximately 1,824pp with c. 200 illustrations. Each volume opens with Notes on Contributors, a series preface and an introduction, and concludes with Notes, Bibliography and an Index.The Cultural Histories SeriesA Cultural History of Tragedy is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available as hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com.Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.

This volume offers new critical and performance approaches to Shakespeare’s most well-known comedy of desire, a play that speaks powerfully to contemporary concerns.A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most resilient plays. Although often dismissed as light comedy suitable for young readers, the play is now taken seriously, transformed through readings from queer, feminist, post-colonialist, race and ecocritical perspectives, as well as in its global performances and adaptations.Suitable for a wide range of readers, this collection includes approaches to the play covering textual studies, literary analysis, performance studies, adaptation studies and pedagogy. While differing in methodology, the chapters all point to the inherent instability or openness of this play and its themes of shifting identity and boundary crossings, bridging nature and culture, the material and ‘airy nothing’, mortal and fairy. They make it amply clear that this play speaks to people around the world today, emphasising its wide global reception and adaptability in both theatre and film.The variety of topics covered includes: the play’s textual instability; the treatment of cognition and perception; anxiety about the power of the maternal imagination; the intersection of race, slavery and ecology; the intertwining of plant and human bodies; the use of transformative spaces in stage and screen adaptations; Korean adaptations that imagined the possibility of political reparations; student adaptations in India that engaged with what can be and not be staged in performance; and teaching the play in Kuwait and China, where students’ responses reflected differing cultural contexts.

A Companion to Tragedy is an essential resource for anyone interested in exploring the role of tragedy in Western history and culture. Tells the story of the historical development of tragedy from classical Greece to modernity Features 28 essays by renowned scholars from multiple disciplines, including classics, English, drama, anthropology and philosophy Broad in its scope and ambition, it considers interpretations of tragedy through religion, philosophy and history Offers a fresh assessment of Ancient Greek tragedy and demonstrates how the practice of reading tragedy has changed radically in the past two decades

Tragedy: A Short Introduction reinvigorates the genre for readers who are eager to embrace it, but who often find the traditional masterpieces too distant from their own language and world. Argues that today's most popular television shows and films thrive on the type of violence, passion, madness, and catastrophe first introduced to the stage in fifth century AthensOffers selected case studies that exemplify the compelling qualities of tragedyReviews the history of tragic performance and the qualities of the classic tragic hero, and clarifies the role of plot in defining tragedAnalyzes the difference between a tragedy, a catastrophe, and a mere unhappy endingExplores the past and future of the tragic form