San Antonio College Library

The authors here provide a comprehensive account of the cultural history of English drama. They draw upon new empirical research and the latest theoretical models to show how the character of a given theatrical age contains many contradictions.

Shakespeare's Othello has exercised a powerful fascination over audiences for centuries with its intense portrayal of passionate love and destructive jealousy. This study is a major exercise in the historicization of Othello. Initially the author examines the early Jacobean context of the play, and the discourses which formed its writing. Circulating simultaneously in late Renaissance London were accounts of Mediterranean clashes between Turks and...

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbitt, The Lord of the Rings, and Silmarillion have long been recognized as among the most popular fiction of the twentieth century, and most critical analysis of Tolkien has centered on these novels. Granted access by the Tolkien estate and the Bodleian Library in Oxford to Tolkien's unpublished writings, Verlyn Flieger uses them here to shed new light on his better known works, revealing a new dimension of his fictive vision...

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1993 book Lincoln at Gettysburg, Garry Wills showed how the Gettysburg Address revolutionized the conception of modern America. In Witches and Jesuits, Wills again focuses on a single document to open up a window on an entire society. He begins with a simple question: If Macbeth is such a great tragedy, why do performances of it so often fail? The stage history of Macbeth has created a legendary curse on the drama. Superstitious...

"Byron and Place merges two influential areas of literary criticism of recent years (geography and history) under the notion of the 'geo-historical' - places where historically significant events occurred. Stephen Cheeke examines the way in which the notion of being there becomes the central claim and shaping force in Byron's poetry up to 1818, and investigates Byron's self-imposed exile in Italy and the gradual process of translation and acculturation...