Constellation Caliban

We are now in the Age of Caliban rather than in the Time of Ariel or the Era of Prospero, Harold Bloom claimed in 1992. Bloom was specifically referring to Caliban's rising popularity as the prototype of the colonised or repressed subject, especially since the 1980s. However, already earlier the figure of Caliban had inspired artists from the most divergent backgrounds: Robert Browning, Ernest Renan, Aimé Césaire, and Peter Greenaway, to name only some of the better known. Much has already been published on Caliban, and there exist a number of excellent surveys of this character's appearance in literature and the other arts. The present collection does not aim to trace Caliban over the ages. Rather, Constellation Caliban intends to look at a number of specific refigurations of Caliban. What is the Caliban-figure's role and function within a specific work of art? What is its relation to the other signifiers in that work of art? What interests are invested in the Caliban-figure, what values does it represent or advocate? Whose interests and values are these? These and similar questions guided the contributors to the present volume. In other words, what one finds here is not a study of origins, not a genealogy, not a reception-study, but rather a fascinating series of case studies informed by current theoretical debate in areas such as women's studies, sociology of literature and of the intellectuals, nation-formation, new historicism, etc. Its interdisciplinary approach and its attention to matters of multi-culturalism make Constellation Caliban into an unusually wide ranging and highly original contribution to Shakespeare-studies. The book should appeal to students of English Literature, Modern European Literature, Comparative Literature, Drama or Theatre Studies, and Cultural Studies, as well as to anyone interested in looking at literature within a broad social and historical context while still appreciating detailed textual analyses.

Contributes to Shakespeare studies by examining a number of specific refigurations of Caliban. Authors explore the Caliban figure's role and function within a specific work of art, its relations to the other signifiers in the same work, the interests that are invested in the Caliban figure, and what (and whose) values it represents or advocates. These fascinating case studies are informed by current theoretical debate in areas such as women's studies, sociology of literature, nation-formation, and new historicism. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Tempest and its Travels offers a new map of the play by means of an innovative collection of historical, critical, and creative texts and images.

The Fantastic Other is a carefully assembled collection of essays on the increasingly significant question of alterity in modern fantasy, the ways in which the understanding and construction of the Other shapes both our art and our imagination. The collection takes a unique perspective, seeing alterity not merely as a social issue but as a biological one. Our fifteen essays cover the problems posed by the Other, which, after all, go well beyond the bounds of any single critical perspective. With this in mind, we have selected studies to show how insights from deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and Freudian, Jungian and evolutionary psychology help us understand an issue so central to the act of reading.

Shakespeare in Cuba: Caliban’s Books explores how Shakespeare is consumed and appropriated in Cuba. It contributes to the underrepresented field of Latin American Shakespeares by applying the lens of cultural anthropophagy, a theory with Latin American roots, to explore how Cuban artists ingest and transform Shakespeare’s plays. By consuming these works and incorporating them into Cuban culture and literature, Cuban writers make the plays their own while also nourishing the source texts and giving Shakespeare a new afterlife.

The present volume assembles essays from a broad cultural and professional spectrum around the question of European cultural identity. The heterogeneity of the contributors -- their differing points of departure and methods -- attests to a tension in intellectual communities which today is more intense than ever. Europe's identity crisis is not merely an empirical matter. It reflects a far deeper, and far older, discursive crisis. The mandate of Europe's traditional intellectual institutions to preserve and police their own cultural heritage has proved incapable of evolving in a manner sufficient to account for the mutation in its object: European culture. It is not merely that Europe's identity, like any identity in the flux of history, has changed. Rather, the notion of identity, the very basis of any questions of who we are, where we are going, and the appropriate political forms and social institutions for further existence, all rely on a logic of identity which has, at best, become extremely problematic. It is this problematization which provides the common thread unifying the following essays. Each contributor, in his/her own way and with respect to his/her own research object, confronts the adequacy of the concept of cultural identity. The hidden presuppositions of this concept are indeed remarkable, and the logic of cultural identity prescribes that they remain undisclosed.