Participants in the current debate about the literary canon generally separate the established literary order—of which Shakespeare is the most visible icon—from the emergent minority literatures. In this challenging study, Peter Erickson insists on bringing the two realms together. He asks: what impact does a revision of the literary canon have on Shakespeare's status? Part One of his book is about Shakespeare on women. In analyses of several Shakespearean works, Erickson discusses Shakespeare's ambivalence about women as a reflection of male anxiety about the cultural authority of Queen Elizabeth. Part Two is about (contemporary) women on Shakespeare. Erickson discusses Adrienne Rich's revision of the very concept of canon and discusses how several African-American women writers (in particular Maya Angelou and Gloria Naylor) have reflected on the ambivalent status of Shakespeare in their worlds. Erickson here offers a model for multicultural literary criticism and a new conceptual framework with which to discuss issues of identity politics. Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves makes an important contribution to the national debate about educational policy in the humanities.

This study finds a significant number of contemporary writers and artists who quote our most quotable author for the purpose of reconsidering and reformulating the twin themes of Shakespeare and race. The book examines Shakespeare quotation as a means of revision in the work of Nadine Gordimer, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Leon Forrest, Ishmael Reed, Caryl Phillips, Djanet Sears, Fred Wilson, and J. M. Coetzee. In addition, a pivotal chapter discusses Paul Robeson as an earlier figure whose performance of Othello poses the problem of race in Shakespeare and suggests the need for reinterpretation.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The beloved author of The Handmaid’s Tale reimagines Shakespeare’s final, great play, The Tempest, in a gripping and emotionally rich novel of passion and revenge. “A marvel of gorgeous yet economical prose, in the service of a story that’s utterly heartbreaking yet pierced by humor, with a plot that retains considerable subtlety even as the original’s back story falls neatly into place.”—The New York Times Book Review Felix is at the top of his game as artistic director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. Now he’s staging aTempest like no other: not only will it boost his reputation, but it will also heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. And also brewing revenge, which, after twelve years, arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Margaret Atwood’s novel take on Shakespeare’s play of enchantment, retribution, and second chances leads us on an interactive, illusion-ridden journey filled with new surprises and wonders of its own. Praise for Hag-Seed “What makes the book thrilling, and hugely pleasurable, is how closely Atwood hews to Shakespeare even as she casts her own potent charms, rap-composition included. . . . Part Shakespeare, part Atwood, Hag-Seed is a most delicate monster—and that’s ‘delicate’ in the 17th-century sense. It’s delightful.”—Boston Globe “Atwood has designed an ingenious doubling of the plot of The Tempest: Felix, the usurped director, finds himself cast by circumstances as a real-life version of Prospero, the usurped Duke. If you know the play well, these echoes grow stronger when Felix decides to exact his revenge by conjuring up a new version of The Tempest designed to overwhelm his enemies.”—Washington Post “A funny and heartwarming tale of revenge and redemption . . . Hag-Seed is a remarkable contribution to the canon.”—Bustle

Why have contemporary playwrights been obsessed by Shakespeare’s plays to such an extent that most of the canon has been rewritten by one rising dramatist or another over the last half century? Among other key figures, Edward Bond, Heiner Müller, Carmelo Bene, Arnold Wesker, Tom Stoppard, Howard Barker, Botho Strauss, Tim Crouch, Bernard Marie Koltès, and Normand Chaurette have all put their radical originality into the service of adapting four-century-old classics. The resulting works provide food for thought on issues such as Shakespearean role-playing, narrative and structural re-shuffling. Across the world, new writers have questioned the political implications and cultural stakes of repeating Shakespeare with and without a difference, finding inspiration in their own national experiences and in the different ordeals they have undergone. How have our contemporaries carried out their rewritings, and with what aims? Can we still play Hamlet, for instance, as Dieter Lesage asks in his book bearing this title, or do we have to “kill Shakespeare” as Normand Chaurette implies in a work where his own creative process is detailed? What do these rewritings really share with their sources? Are they meaningful only because of Shakespeare’s shadow haunting them? Where do we draw the lines between “interpretation,” “adaptation” and “rewriting”? The contributors to this collection of essays examine modern rewritings of Shakespeare from both theoretical and pragmatic standpoints. Key questions include: can a rewriting be meaningful without the reader’s or spectator’s already knowing Shakespeare? Do modern rewritings supplant Shakespeare’s texts or curate them? Does the survival of Shakespeare in the theatrical repertory actually depend on the continued dramatization of our difficult encounters with these potentially obsolete scripts represented by rewriting?

"These are the rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story."—Elmore Leonard For aspiring writers and lovers of the written word, this concise guide breaks down the writing process with simplicity and clarity. From adjectives and exclamation points to dialect and hoopetedoodle, Elmore Leonard explains what to avoid, what to aspire to, and what to do when it sounds like "writing" (rewrite). Beautifully designed, filled with free-flowing, elegant illustrations and specially priced, Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing is the perfect writer's—and reader's—gift.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Questioning whether the impulse to adapt Shakespeare has changed over time, Lynne Bradley argues for restoring a sense of historicity to the study of adaptation. Bradley compares Nahum Tate's History of King Lear (1681), adaptations by David Garrick in the mid-eighteenth century, and nineteenth-century Shakespeare burlesques to twentieth-century theatrical rewritings of King Lear, and suggests latter-day adaptations should be viewed as a unique genre that allows playwrights to express modern subject positions with regard to their literary heritage while also participating in broader debates about art and society. In identifying and relocating different adaptive gestures within this historical framework, Bradley explores the link between the critical and the creative in the history of Shakespearean adaptation. Focusing on works such as Gordon Bottomley's King Lear's Wife (1913), Edward Bond's Lear (1971), Howard Barker's Seven Lears (1989), and the Women's Theatre Group's Lear's Daughters (1987), Bradley theorizes that modern rewritings of Shakespeare constitute a new type of textual interaction based on a simultaneous double-gesture of collaboration and rejection. She suggests that this new interaction provides constituent groups, such as the feminist collective who wrote Lear's Daughters, a strategy to acknowledge their debt to Shakespeare while writing against the traditional and negative representations of femininity they see reflected in his plays.

Recreating Jane Austen is a book for readers who know and love Austen s work. Stimulated by the recent crop of film and television versions of Austen s novels, John Wiltshire examines how they have been transposed and recreated in another age and medium. Wiltshire illuminates the process of recreation through the work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and offers Jane Austen s own relation to Shakespeare as a suggestive parallel. Exploring the romantic impulse in Austenian biography, Jane Austen as a commodity, and offering a re-interpretation of Pride and Prejudice, this book approaches the central question of the role Jane Austen plays in the contemporary cultural imagination.

The essays in this book examine the ideology of motherhood in British and American literature from the 16th to the 21st centuries. This book looks at the institution of motherhood, that is, at various cultural interpretations and manipulations of maternity. Presenting mothers whose roles are often empowering yet confining, these essays scrutinize three distinct aspects of motherhood: its social and cultural construction; the significance of maternal absence; and, finally, its representation as an agent of social change. Literary works examined include William Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis; Daniel Defoe's Roxana; John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath; Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury; Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son; Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Dorothy Leigh's The Mother's Blessing; and W.S. Penn's Killing Time with Strangers, among others.