This book examines dramatic dialogue in English-language theatre, tracing verbal invention across four centuries from Shakespeare and Restoration comedy right up to contemporary English and American theatre.Published posthumously, this renowned theatre scholar's book considers English dramatic dialogue as exemplified in the verbal invention of particular plays. That invention is traced through puns, repetitions, adroit clichés, occasional neologisms, malapropisms, ...

"The ultimate literary bucket list. . . . 948 pages later, you still want more!" —The Washington PostCelebrate the thrill of discovering new titles in an extraordinary book that's as compulsively readable, entertaining, surprising, and enlightening as the one,zero-plus titles it recommends.Covering fiction, poetry, science and science fiction, memoir, travel writing, biography, children's books, history, and more, one,zero Books to Read Bef...

"As warm and stimulating as a library to which one returns again and again," the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic discusses the rewards of reading books ( Chicago Tribune, Editor's Choice).Once out of school, most of us read for pleasure. Yet there is another equally important, though often overlooked, reason that we read: to learn how to live. Though books have always been understood as life-teachers, the exact way in which...

W. H. Auden takes you to Auden’s home in Austria to ask him questions; the conversation on the lawn that one dreams of. A fine tribute.” —Bestseller

What is it about Hamlet that has made it such a compelling and vital work? Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages is an account of Shakespeare's great play from its sources in Scandinavian epic lore to the way it was performed and understood in his own day, and then how the play has fared down to the present: performances on stage, television, and in film, critical evaluations, publishing history, spinoffs, spoofs, musical adaptations, the play's growing reputation, its influen...

In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people's very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being.In what is sure to become a critical classic, An Archaeology of Sympathy challenges Sergei Eisenstein's influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the u...

Good prose - fiction and non-fiction alike--is part mystery and part technique. Mystery cannot be taught, but technique can, and if it is well taught it can open a window onto the mystery. In &IA Matter of Style Matthew Clark draws on examples from real writers, past and present, to examine the stylistic techniques that lift written language from bare communication to art. Clark assumes that his readers know the basics of grammar and style. But everyone, even the best writers, can make...

This comprehensive and authoritative casebook includes cornerstone essays on Pinter's creative process, his politics, film adaptations, and acting career. It also includes a collection of photos found nowhere else that document Pinter's "golden time"--his early acting days in Ireland--, a substantial introduction, a chronology, and bibliography.

The Well Read Play, deepens our appreciation and enjoyment of drama. Clear and practical guidance helps the reader to understand the workings of a play, spot clues that the playwright has planted, imagine how it can be staged, and decide whether it will stand the test of time. Absorbing and informative, whether for purposes of study, staging or simply leisure, it is the ideal guide for students, directors, teachers and anyone who loves the theatre.

In 1893 Friedrich Engels branded history “the cruelest goddess of all.” This sorrowful vision of the past is deeply rooted in the Western imagination, and history is thus presented as a joyless playground of inevitability rather than a droll world of possibilities. There are few places this is more evident than in historical cinema which tends to portray the past in a somber manner.Historical Comedy on Screen examines this tendency paying particular attention to the themes...

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The first holistic reappraisal of the significance of the decadent movement, from the 1900s through the 1930s.Decadence in the Age of Modernism begins where the history of the decadent movement all too often ends: in 1895. It argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to write...