Feminine Endings

A groundbreaking collection of essays in feminist music criticism, this book addresses problems of gender and sexuality in repertoires ranging from the early seventeenth century to rock and performance art. ". . . this is a major book . . . [McClary's] achievement borders on the miraculous." The Village Voice"No one will read these essays without thinking about and hearing music in new and interesting ways. Exciting reading for adventurous students and staid professionals." Choice"Feminine Endings, a provocative 'sexual politics' of Western classical or art music, rocks conservative musicology at its core. No review can do justice to the wealth of ideas and possibilities [McClary's] book presents. All music-lovers should read it, and cheer." The Women's Review of Books"McClary writes with a racy, vigorous, and consistently entertaining style. . . . What she has to say specifically about the music and the text is sharp, accurate, and telling; she hears what takes place musically with unusual sensitivity."-The New York Review of Books

Philippa Berry draws on feminist theory, postmodern thought and queer theory, to challenge existing critical notions of what is fundamental to Shakespearean tragedy. She shows how, through a network of images clustered around feminine or feminized characters, these plays 'disfigure' conventional ideas of death as a bodily end, as their figures of women are interwoven with provocative meditations upon matter, time, the soul, and the body. The scope of these tragic speculations was radical in Shakespeare's day; yet they also have a surprising relevance to contemporary debates about time and matter in science and philosophy.

When it was originally published in 1991, Feminine Endings was immediately controversial for its unprecedented intermingling of cultural criticism and musical studies, an approach that came to be called "the New Musicology." Through case studies of works ranging from the canonical -- operas by Monteverdi and Bizet -- to the contemporary -- the performance art of Diamanda Galas and popular songs by Madonna -- Susan McClary focuses on the ways music produces images of gender, desire, pleasure, and the body, and explores the gender-based metaphors that circulate in discourse about music. The now classic work features a new introduction that discusses the critical reception it received and the debates it has inspired.

No detailed description available for "English Verse".

Surveying the development and varieties of blank verse in the English playhouses, this book is a natural history of iambic pentameter in English. Marina Tarlinskaja’s statistical analysis of versification focuses on Shakespeare, but places his work in the literary context of the times. Her results offer new ways to think about the dating of plays, the attribution of anonymous texts, and how collaborators divided their task in co-authored dramas.

Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture is a comprehensive companion to The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, providing detailed introductions to and full editorial apparatus for the works themselves as well as a wealth of information about Middleton's historical and literary context.