Ben Jonson The Sad Shepherd The Fall Of Mortimer Masques And Entertainments

Unique in combining a comprehensive and comparative study of genre with a study of romance, this book constitutes a significant contribution to ongoing critical debates over the definition of romance and the genre and artistry of Malory's Morte Darthur. K.S. Whetter offers an original approach to these issues by prefacing a comprehensive study of romance with a wide-ranging and historically diverse study of genre and genre theory. In doing so Whetter addresses the questions of why and how romance might usefully be defined and how such an awareness of genre-and the expectations that come with such awareness-impact upon both our understanding of the texts themselves and of how they may have been received by their contemporary medieval audiences. As an integral part the study Whetter offers a detailed examination of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, a text usually considered a straightforward romance but which Whetter argues should be re-classified and reconsidered as a generic mixture best termed tragic-romance. This new classification is important in helping to explain a number of so-called inconsistencies or puzzles in Malory's text and further elucidates Malory's artistry. Whetter offers a powerful meditation upon genre, romance and the Morte which will be of interest to faculty, graduate students and undergraduates alike.

Strange as it may seem, Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, Marc Forster’s film Stranger than Fiction, Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pere Borrell del Caso’s painting “Escaping Criticism” reproduced on the cover of the present volume and Mozart’s sextet “A Musical Joke” all share one common feature: they include a meta-dimension. Metaization – the movement from a first cognitive, referential or communicative level to a higher one on which first-level phenomena self-reflexively become objects of reflection, reference and communication in their own right – is in fact a common feature not only of human thought and language but also of the arts and media in general. However, research into this issue has so far predominantly focussed on literature, where a highly differentiated, albeit strictly monomedial critical toolbox exists. Metareference across Media remedies this onesidedness and closes the gap between literature and other media by providing a transmedial framework for analysing metaphenomena. The essays transcend the current notion of metafiction, pinpoint examples of metareference in hitherto neglected areas, discuss the capacity for metaization of individual media or genres from a media-comparative perspective, and explore major (historical) forms and functions as well aspects of the development of metaization in cultural history. Stemming from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, the contributors propose new and refined concepts and models and cover a broad range of media including fiction, drama, poetry, comics, photography, film, computer games, classical as well as popular music, painting, and architecture. This collection of essays, which also contains a detailed theoretical introduction, will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: intermediality studies, semiotics, literary theory and criticism, musicology, art history, and film studies.

The emblem, a Renaissance literary genre which combined text and image, conveyed erudition, admonishment, propaganda, and piety with unparalleled concision and economy. It arose out of humanist circles in the early sixteenth century and quickly became established as a staple tool in religious, political, and social discourses across the major European languages. In recent years the emblem has come to be regarded by scholars working in all areas of the humanities and cultural studies as an interdisciplinary matrix of extraordinary utility in gaining insights into the mentalities and preoccupations of the early modern era. Within its apparently slender frame, the emblem embraces questions of foremost philological, semiotic, and iconographical importance, and encompasses ideas and assumptions of exceedingly far range and reach. This collection of essays attests to the pervasiveness of the emblem, both within Renaissance and Baroque Europe, and in those parts of the wider world where European influence came to bear. It seeks to follow the development of the emblem from its beginnings in various forms of bimedial artefact, from early illustrated books and hieroglyphs, to medals and ancient coins; we then witness its deployment as a propagandistic tool in the temporal and confessional disputes of Europe. Thereafter, the emblem appears in non-European contexts, emerging as a place of cultural exchange as it became assimilated within indigenous visual traditions. The latter parts of the book concentrate on the often subliminal role emblems played in diverse literary texts, as well as their ongoing vitality in praxis or in the burgeoning area of emblem scholarship within early modern studies.