A richly illustrated study of the interplay of word and image in representations of the English countryside, built environment, and domestic space during the interwar period. During the 1920s and 30s, words and pictures in print were the main way in which people received ideas and entertainment, the two working together in a great variety of forms. Many books of the twenties argued against the loss of the countryside because of suburban building. But the demand for post-wa...

Shakespeare's knowledge of the practices of visual art, its fundamental concepts and the surrounding debates is clear from his earliest works. This book explores this relationship, showing how key works develop visual compositions as elements of dramatic movement, construction of ideas, and reflections on the artifice of theatre and language. The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, Richard II and A Midsummer Night's Dream are explored in detail, offering new insights into their form...

This wide-ranging study traces the forces that drove the production and interpretation of visual images of Shakespeare's plays. Covering a rich chronological terrain, from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the midpoint of the nineteenth, Stuart Sillars offers a multidisciplinary, nuanced approach to reading Shakespeare in relation to image, history, text, book history, print culture and performance. The volume begins by relating the production imagery of Shakespeare's plays to oth...

Illustrations have been an important element of many of the most extensively read editions of Shakespeare's plays, from the frontispieces to Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition to the multiple images placed within the text of Victorian editions. Through symbols the illustrations have explored language and character; by allusion to earlier paintings they have offered critical readings; and by gesture, setting and costume they have redesigned the plays within the visual vocabulary of their own time...

Visualisation in Popular Fiction 1860-1960 explores the important but neglected tradition of illustrated fiction in English. It suggests new analytical approaches for its study by offering detailed discussions of a range of representative texts, including Mary Webb's Gone to Earth and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.Among the issues and genres Sillars explores are:* Victorian `narrative' paintings* Edwardian fictional magazines* comic stri...

Shakespeare Closely Read is a collection of essays by Shakespearean scholars, all of which were originally papers presented at the 2008 International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford-upon-Avon. Each contains a close reading of Shakespearean or other Elizabethan dramatic texts in an effort to open up new meanings and interpretations. The volume contains an introduction by the editor on the history of close reading and its place in contemporary critical theory and practice.

While over the past four hundred years numerous opinions have been voiced as to Shakespeare's identity, these eleven essays widen the scope of the investigation by regarding Shakespeare, his world, and his works in their interaction with one another. Instead of restricting the search for bits and pieces of evidence from his works that seem to match what he may have experienced, these essays focus on the contemporary milieu—political developments, social and theater history, and cultural an...

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread o...