King Lear (Annotated with Biography and Critical Essay) PDF Download

Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: BookCaps Study Guides
ISBN: 1610426177
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
The dates of the writing and first performance of King Lear are unknown, although it is known that King James I viewed the play on December 26, 1606. Shakespeare may have been inspired to write King Lear by the uncertainly that accompanied the last years of Queen Elizabeth I’s life, as she left no children or nieces and nephews to inherit the throne. King Lear is the King of Britain. He decides to “retire” as king and divide his land holdings among his three daughters – Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. What they will inherit is dependent on how skillfully the daughters can publically proclaim love for their father. Goneril and Regan, who are married to the Duke of Albany and the Duke of Cornwall respectively, have no problem with this, and speak enthusiastically about their love for their father. Cordelia, the youngest girl, refuses to flatter her father. She is his favorite daughter, and in his disappointment, Lear cuts her off without a penny and banishes her. She marries the King of France who is willing to accept her without an inheritance. Lear’s friend and ally, the Earl of Kent, defends Cordelia and he is sent off in disgrace; he returns to the court in disguise. Lear’s kingdom is now split between his two older daughters. This annotated edition includes a biography and critical essay.

Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Author: Norman MacLean
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226500314
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Selected works and incidental writings by the celebrated author of A River Runs Through It, plus excerpts from a 1986 interview. In his eighty-seven years, Norman Maclean played many parts: fisherman, logger, firefighter, scholar, teacher. But it was a role he took up late in life, that of writer, that won him enduring fame and critical acclaim—as well as the devotion of readers worldwide. Though the 1976 collection A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was the only book Maclean published in his lifetime, it was an unexpected success, and the moving family tragedy of the title novella—based largely on Maclean’s memories of his childhood home in Montana—has proved to be one of the most enduring American stories ever written. The Norman Maclean Reader is a wonderful addition to Maclean’s celebrated oeuvre. Bringing together previously unpublished materials with incidental writings and selections from his more famous works, the Reader will serve as the perfect introduction for readers new to Maclean, while offering longtime fans new insight into his life and career. In this evocative collection, Maclean as both a writer and a man becomes evident. Perceptive, intimate essays deal with his career as a teacher and a literary scholar, as well as the wealth of family stories for which Maclean is famous. Complete with a generous selection of letters, as well as excerpts from a 1986 interview, The Norman Maclean Reader provides a fully fleshed-out portrait of this much admired author, showing us a writer fully aware of the nuances of his craft, and a man as at home in the academic environment of the University of Chicago as in the quiet mountains of his beloved Montana. Various and moving, the works collected in The Norman Maclean Reader serve as both a summation and a celebration, giving readers a chance once again to hear one of American literature’s most distinctive voices. Praise for The Norman MacLean Reader “A solid, satisfying, well-made body of work by a patient craftsman.” —Chicago Tribune “The Norman Maclean Reader fills out and makes more human the impressions of the restless, inquiring storyteller we saw in previously published works. In his writings, at their best, we too feel the thrusts and strains. He is a writer of great beauty, in his own terms.” —Financial Times “Weltzien has not only done great service for Norman Maclean’s readers, he has rightly expanded Maclean’s place in American literature . . . . For me, The Norman Maclean reader is discovered treasure.” —Bloomsbury Review

Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Golgotha Press
ISBN: 1610426398
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1397

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Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is the story of a woman, Anna, wife of Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin. She is an apparently happily married matron of the Russian upper class. The novel begins with her attempt to smooth the troubled waters of her brother’s adulterous affair. Due to circumstances surrounding this situation she ends up in an adulterous affair of her own with a wealthy army officer, Count Vronsky. The novel is about the choices people make and the consequences of their actions in a society of strict social rules, hypocrisies and prejudices. Tolstoy weaves a story of great intricacy with a myriad of characters that move the action forward. Anna’s actions as a married woman involved in an extramarital affair eventually lead her to be outcast from her own society. She goes into an emotional decline and in time, commits suicide. The novel has a subplot about a young woman named Kitty who is courted by both Count Vronsky and a landowner, Konstantin Dmitrich Levin. She prefers Vronsky, but when she finds out about his affair with Anna, she is devastated and turns to Levin for comfort, and marries him. Their situation is a positive note in the novel - they enjoy a contented marriage. This annotated edition includes a biography and critical essay.

Author: Brian Vickers
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674970330
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
King Lear exists in two different texts: the Quarto (1608) and the Folio (1623). Because each supplies passages missing in the other, for over 200 years editors combined the two to form a single text, the basis for all modern productions. Then in the 1980s a group of influential scholars argued that the two texts represent different versions of King Lear, that Shakespeare revised his play in light of theatrical performance. The two-text theory has since hardened into orthodoxy. Now for the first time in a book-length argument, one of the world’s most eminent Shakespeare scholars challenges the two-text theory. At stake is the way Shakespeare’s greatest play is read and performed. Sir Brian Vickers demonstrates that the cuts in the Quarto were in fact carried out by the printer because he had underestimated the amount of paper he would need. Paper was an expensive commodity in the early modern period, and printers counted the number of lines or words in a manuscript before ordering their supply. As for the Folio, whereas the revisionists claim that Shakespeare cut the text in order to alter the balance between characters, Vickers sees no evidence of his agency. These cuts were likely made by the theater company to speed up the action. Vickers includes responses to the revisionist theory made by leading literary scholars, who show that the Folio cuts damage the play’s moral and emotional structure and are impracticable on the stage.

Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393079848
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

Author: Joseph Rosenblum
Publisher: Salem Press
ISBN: 9781619258648
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Examines all 39 of the most influential plays by Shakespeare, with an in-depth examination of each play's historical significance, literary technique, and contemporary alignment. The plays of William Shakespeare, from tragedies such as Hamlet to comedies such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, have endured since their first productions in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. A vital part of high school and college literature curricula today, these plays continue to educate and entertain, showing students - as well as the general populace - themes of humanity that have persevered throughout the ages, such as romantic love, greed, power, revenge, forgiveness, and many more. Written by leading experts in the field of Shakespearean studies, Critical Survey of Shakespeare's Plays closely examines all 39 of Shakespeare's plays, as well as Shakespeare's life, style, technique, and influences. This title begins with a biography of Shakespeare and an introduction to his plays as a whole, followed by close readings of individual plays. Each essay is devoted to a single work and provides an in-depth critical analysis of the play's historical significance, literary/dramatic techniques, and meaning to a contemporary audience. An abstract, explanation of context, and lists of keywords, works cited, and recommended books for further study also enhance each essay. The second half of the book focuses on various critical readings, analyzing Shakespeare's form, technique, and syntax, as well as main themes, motifs, and related topics. Also included are other resources useful to studying Shakespeare's plays, including a guide to free online sources and more literary criticism, a bibliography, a list of contributors, and a complete index. The essays in this single volume compile the essentials for any person interested in Shakespeare, whether a student approaching his works for the first time or a habitual theatergoer about to witness a new production of one of the plays. This title is a set of essays that record the history of Shakespeare the man, the dramatist, and the poet, and analyze each work attributed to his pen. With so much comprehensive analysis of Shakespeare's life and works, Critical Survey of Shakespeare's Plays is a must-have resource for high school and undergraduate literature departments, as well as public libraries who wish to support their literature collections.

Author: Norman MacLean
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022647223X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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The New York Times–bestselling classic set amid the mountains and streams of early twentieth-century Montana, “as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway” (Chicago Tribune). When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Today, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs Through It has established itself as a classic of the American West filled with beautiful prose and understated emotional insights. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.” “Maclean’s book—acerbic, laconic, deadpan—rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren.” —New York Times Book Review Includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award–winning film adaptation

Author: Stuart Sillars
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107328209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
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 times. In all these ways they offer important exchanges with contemporary social, aesthetic and critical concerns, and, despite being largely ignored by scholars, are central to the plays' reception. Highly illustrated, including many images not previously reproduced, the book allows the reader to share the experience of early readers of the plays. Building on the author's earlier work in Painting Shakespeare it offers a fresh address to the tradition of visual criticism and assimilation of Shakespeare's plays.

Author: Greg Maillet
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443812935
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This book follows the recent ‘turn to religion’ that has been so important to English Studies in the 21st century, and builds on many of the recent biographies of Shakespeare that have explored the playwright’s religious views. While noticing biography, the focus of this book is upon the onstage action of King Lear, arguing that its ‘theodicy’ can be understood as the expansion of theological vision. The book makes this argument by drawing on an approach to literature known as ‘theological aesthetics,’ an approach pioneered by Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Engaging with not only W.R. Elton, but also other Shakespeare scholars such as Jan Kott and Kenneth Muir, it combines theological argument, performance criticism, and dramatic analysis to argue for a theological reading of King Lear.