Precarious Figurations

Precarious Figurations focuses on the reception of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germany. Looking at theatrical practices and critical or scholarly discourses from the Weimar Republic to the new millennium, the book explores why the play has served simultaneously as a vehicle for the actualization of anti-Semitic tropes and as a staging ground for the critical exposure of the very logic of anti-Semitism. In particular, the study investigates how the figure of Shylock has come to be both a device in and a stumbling block for attempts to bridge the fundamental rupture in civilization brought about by the Holocaust. The careful analysis of the German reception of Merchant, and in particular of the ways of doing and reading Shylock in the context of painful German, and German-Jewish, discourses of identity and remembrance, is designed to raise fundamental questions – questions concerning not only the staging of Jewishness, the tenacity of anti-Semitism and the difficulties of Holocaust remembrance, but also the general potentials and limitations of theatrical interventions into cultural conflicts.

The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities provides a series of exemplary studies conjoining perspectives from Asian, African, and Latin American Studies on subjectivity in the Global South as a central category of social and cultural analysis. The contestation of the Northern myth of the autonomous subject—the dispositive that contests subject formation in the South by describing it as fragmented, incomplete, delayed or simply deviant, has been a cornerstone of theory production from the South over the years. This volume’s contributions offer an interdisciplinary and transarea dialogue, reframing issues of selfhood and alterity, of personhood, of the human, of the commons and contesting the North’s presumption in determining what kind of subjectivities abide by its norms, whose voices are heard, who is recognised as a subject, and, by extension, whose lives matter. In the context of the shifting dynamics of today’s manifold crises, they raise questions regarding how subjectivities act on or resist such forms of contestation, contingency, and indeterminacy. A major contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the Global South, this handbook will be an essential resource for students, scholars, researchers and instructors in literature, media and culture studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, law, politics, visual arts and art history.

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: - Essays on the play's critical and performance history - A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play - A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice has often been labelled a 'problem play', and throughout the ages it has been an object of both fascination and repulsion. Without neglecting the socio-political and religious issues that are at the heart of the play, this collection of critical essays invites readers to rediscover the variety of approaches that this multifaceted work calls for, exploring its gender aspects, its rich mythological background, its legal matters and the ways in which it has been adapted to the screen. Essays consider the play in relation to its sources, genre and religion, historical and socio-political context and its critical reception and performance history.

The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation explores the dynamics of adapted Shakespeare across a range of literary genres and new media forms. This comprehensive reference and research resource maps the field of Shakespeare adaptation studies, identifying theories of adaptation, their application in practice and the methodologies that underpin them. It investigates current research and points towards future lines of enquiry for students, researchers and creative practitioners of Shakespeare adaptation. The opening section on research methods and problems considers definitions and theories of Shakespeare adaptation and emphasises how Shakespeare is both adaptor and adapted.A central section develops these theoretical concerns through a series of case studies that move across a range of genres, media forms and cultures to ask not only how Shakespeare is variously transfigured, hybridised and valorised through adaptational play, but also how adaptations produce interpretive communities, and within these potentially new literacies, modes of engagement and sensory pleasures. The volume's third section provides the reader with uniquely detailed insights into creative adaptation, with writers and practice-based researchers reflecting on their close collaborations with Shakespeare's works as an aesthetic, ethical and political encounter. The Handbook further establishes the conceptual parameters of the field through detailed, practical resources that will aid the specialist and non-specialist reader alike, including a guide to research resources and an annotated bibliography.

Selected contributions to the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, which took place in July 2011 in Prague, represent the contemporary state of Shakespeare studies in thirty-eight countries worldwide. Apart from readings of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, more than forty chapters map Renaissance contexts of his art in politics, theater, law, or material culture and discuss numerous cases of the impact of his works in global culture from the Americas to the Far East, including stage productions, book culture, translations, film and television adaptations, festivals, and national heritage. The last section of the book focuses on the afterlife of Shakespeare in the work of the leading British dramatist Tom Stoppard. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

TERRAINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS emerges from an Indian-German-Swiss research collaboration. The book makes a case for a phenomenology of globalization that pays attention to locally situated socioeconomic terrains, everyday practices, and cultures of knowledge. This is exemplified in relation to three topics: - the tension between 'terrain' and 'territory' in Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe' as a pioneering work of the globalist mentality (chapter 1) - the relationship between established conceptions of feminism and the concrete struggles of women in India since the 19th century (chapter 2) - the exploration of urban space and urban life in writings on India's capital - from Ahmed Ali to Arundhati Roy (chapter 3).

Criminology is at a crossroads. In the last two decades it has largely failed to produce the kind of new intellectual frameworks and empirical data that might help us to explain the high levels of crime and interpersonal violence that beset inner city areas and corrode community life. Similarly, it has failed to adequately explain forms of antisocial behaviour that are just as much a part of life in corporate boardrooms as they are in the ghettos of north America and the sink estates of Britain. Criminology needs to rethink the problem of crime and re-engage its audience with strident theoretical analysis and powerful empirical data. In New Directions in Crime and Deviancy some of the world’s most talented and polemical critical criminologists come together to offer new ideas and new avenues for analysis. The book contains chapters that address a broad range of issues central to 21st century critical criminology: ecological issues and the new green criminology; the broad impact of neoliberalism upon our cultural and economic life; recent signs of political resistance and opposition; systemic and interpersonal forms of violence; growing fear and enmity in cities; the backlash against the women’s movement; the subjective pathology of the serial killer; computer hacking and so on. Based on key papers presented at the historic York Deviancy Conferences, this cutting-edge volume also contains important critical essays that address criminological research methods and the production of criminological knowledge. It is key reading material for those with an academic interest in critical, cultural and theoretical criminology, and crime and deviance more generally.

Publishing its nineteenth volume, The Shakespearean International Yearbook surveys the present state of Shakespeare studies, addressing issues that are fundamental to our interpretive encounter with Shakespeare’s work and his time, across the whole spectrum of his literary output. Contributions are solicited from scholars across the field, from both hemispheres of the globe. New trends are evaluated from the point of view of established scholarship, and emerging work in the field is encouraged. Each issue includes a special section under the guidance of a specialist Guest Editor, along with coverage of the current state of the field in other aspects. An essential reference tool for scholars of early modern literature and culture, this annual publication captures, from year to year, current and developing thought in Shakespeare scholarship and theater practice worldwide. There is a particular emphasis on Shakespeare studies in global contexts.