Dancing With Ophelia

Uses real-life episodes of psychosis and recovery to show how poetic paradigms for thinking about psychiatric symptoms can enlarge contemporary understandings of mental illness and improve long-term treatment outcome. “Twenty-two years ago, I lost my mind.” So begins Jeanne Ellen Petrolle’s fascinating personal narrative about her mental illness and recovery. Drawing on literature, art, and philosophy, Petrolle explores a unique understanding of madness that allowed her to achieve lasting mental health without using long-term psychiatric drugs. Traditionally, Western literature, art, and philosophy have portrayed madness through six concepts created from myth—Escape into the Wild, Flight from a Scene of Terror, Visit to the Underworld, Dark Night of the Soul, Spiritual Passion, and Fire in the Mind. Rather than conceptualizing madness as “illness,” a mythopoetic concept assumes that madness contains symbolic meaning and offers valuable insight into human concerns like love, desire, sex, adventure, work, fate, spirituality, and God. Madness becomes an experience that unleashes extraordinary creativity by generating the spiritual insight that fuels artistic productivity and personal transformation. By weaving her personal experiences with the life stories and work of surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and modernist novelist Djuna Barnes, Petrolle shows how poetic thinking about severe mental distress can complement strategies for managing mental illness. This approach allowed her, and hopefully others, to produce better long-term treatment outcomes. Jeanne Ellen Petrolle is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Columbia College Chicago and the author of Religion without Belief: Contemporary Allegory and the Search for Postmodern Faith, also published by SUNY Press.

In the mid-eighteenth century, Sarah Fielding (1710-68) was the second most popular English woman novelist, rivaled only by Eliza Haywood. The History of Ophelia, the last of her seven novels, is an often comic epistolary fiction, narrated by the heroine to an unnamed female correspondent in the form of a single protracted letter. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and valuable appendices that contain contemporary reviews of the novel, Richard Corbould's illustrations to the Novelist’s Magazine edition, and excerpts from Sarah Fielding’s Remarks on Clarissa.

With its roots in Middle Eastern and North African dance, belly dance is a popular leisure activity in the West with women (and some men) of all ages and body types pursing the activity for diverse reasons. Drawing on empirical research, fieldwork, and interviews with participants, this book investigates the social world and small group cultures of American belly dance, examining the various ways in which people use leisure to construct the self and social relationships. With attention to gender expectations, body image, sexuality, community, spiritual experiences, and the process of identifying with a leisure activity, this book shows how people engage in the same pursuit in a variety of ways. It sheds light on the manner in which dancers strive to deal with the challenges presented by internal power struggles and legitimacy bids, public beliefs, narrow cultural ideals of beauty and often sexualized assumptions about their art. A fascinating study of identity work and the reproduction and challenging of gender norms through a gendered leisure activity, Gendered Bodies and Leisure: The Practice and Performance of American Belly Dance will be of interest to students and scholars researching gender and sexuality, the sociology of leisure, the sociology of the body and interactionist thought.

In the city of love, a stranger will change everything. Paris, 1926. A young dancer Ray Cohen arrives from London to compete at the Exhibition Paris. He is led astray by Hugo, a charismatic dancer born of the streets, who introduces him to the city's nightlife and a beautiful stranger called Hannah Lindt. His life is forever changed. London, 1941. With the heroic Raymond de Guise away fighting in North Africa, his beloved wife Nancy must balance her new position - as Head of Housekeeping at the Buckingham Hotel - with her duties as a new mother to their child. As the war rages on, someone from Raymond's past arrives at Nancy's doorstep, asking for help. As dark secrets rise to the surface, everything Raymond loves comes under threat. Will tragedy strike?

Shakespeare's texts have a long and close relationship with many different types of dance, from dance forms referenced in the plays to adaptations across many genres today. With contributions from experienced and emerging scholars, this handbook provides a concise reference on dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement - a process that raises questions of authorship and authority, cross-cultural communication, semantics, embodiment, and the relationship between word and image. Motivated by growing interest in movement, materiality, and the body, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is the first collection to examine the relationship between William Shakespeare - his life, works, and afterlife - and dance. In the handbook's first section - Shakespeare and Dance - authors consider dance within the context of early modern life and culture and investigate Shakespeare's use of dance forms within his writing. The latter half of the handbook - Shakespeare as Dance - explores the ways that choreographers have adapted Shakespeare's work. Chapters address everything from narrative ballet adaptations to dance in musicals, physical theater adaptations, and interpretations using non-Western dance forms such as Cambodian traditional dance or igal, an indigenous dance form from the southern Philippines. With a truly interdisciplinary approach, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance provides an indispensable resource for considerations of dance and corporeality on Shakespeare's stage and the early modern era.

Rumour’s got a lot to say for itself, and the message is clear: the regulator’s ready. You know. The magickal regulator. The bright and shiny thing with which we, Team Improbable, propose to restore magick to a fading Britain. Somebody’s got to test it, and that somebody is us. Which means wading into the depths of a long-dead realm that nobody’s entered in centuries. And I may have had some practice at that, but this time it’s different. This time, somebody’s still home. And they really aren’t happy about trespassers. Looks like disaster’s on the agenda. Again. Not to worry, though. Where there’s life, there’s hope. And… dancing. Ves and Jay return in a fresh bout of magickal madness! Grab your dancing shoes and hang onto your hat. It’s going to be wild.

Starclucks save the day! But can Ophelia live up to the family name? Ophelia Starcluck’s family is jam-packed with famous captains who served on United Bird Featheration starships for the bird planet, Aves. On her first day at a new school, Ophelia hears that Birds of Prey, or BOPs, have returned. When Ophelia meets one, she isn’t sure if the falcon is friend or foe. If they’re up to no good, isn’t it her job to save the day? Chester P. Chickadee was born to royalty. Or he would be royal if his villainous great-grandfather had not lost the throne. But Chester has a plan and the perfect scapegoat. An epic war will begin, Ophelia will be blamed, and Chester’s family will rule again. Once Ophelia realizes Chester’s been lying about the BOPs, she’ll fight like a Starcluck to stop Chester’s evil plans. But when everything falls apart, how will this Starcluck save the day? Ophelia Starcluck and the Rebel Prince is the second adventure in The Starcluck Adventures, a series for ages 8-12. If you like stories with friends, quirky humor, animals, and freezing ice cream toppings, you’ll love Kristen Gwen’s plucky tale. Grab it today before the price goes up!

"This compendium reflects the latest international research into the many and various uses of music in relation to Shakespeare's plays and poems, the contributors' lines of enquiry extending from the Bard's own time to the present day. The coverage is global in its scope, and includes studies of Shakespeare-related music in countries as diverse as China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, as well as the more familiar Anglophone musical and theatrical traditions of the UK and USA. The range of genres surveyed by the book's team of distinguished authors embraces music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare's ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music. The authors take a range of diverse approaches: some investigate the evidence for performative practices in the Early Modern and later eras, while others offer detailed analyses of representative case studies, situating these firmly in their cultural contexts, or reflecting on the political and sociological ramifications of the music. As a whole, the volume provides a wide-ranging compendium of cutting-edge scholarship engaging with an extraordinarily rich body of music without parallel in the history of the global arts"--