All for Love


Book Description

Although John Dryden the poet is best known for his alexandrine epics, John Dryden the playwright is most honored for this blank verse tragedy. The summit of Dryden's dramatic art, All for Love (1677) is a spectacle of passion as felt, feared, and disputed in the suspicious years following the English Civil War. Due to its dramatic compression and elegance, All for Love is one of the most enduring plays of the Restoration repertory. It was so successful that in the eighteenth century Dryden's tragedy drove Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra from the stage. The play depicts the catastrophic passion of Cleopatra and Marc Antony, who could not be conquered but by love. Fidelity to family and friends, adherence to codes of honor, national loyalties, and the rule of law compete with each other, tearing the world with violence.




Twentieth Century Interpretations of All for Love


Book Description

A 1677 heroic drama by John Dryden which is now his best-known and most performed play. It is a tragedy written in blank verse and is an attempt on Dryden's part to reinvigorate serious drama. It is an acknowledged imitation of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and focuses on the last hours of the lives of its hero and heroine.







Otherworldly John Dryden


Book Description

Reminding readers of John Dryden’s persistent use of occult rhetoric, Jack M. Armistead argues that Dryden’s otherworldliness involves more than Christian apologetics, biblical typology, or intermittent borrowings from the supernatural materials in classical literature. Rather, it manifests throughout his career in occult materials drawn from many traditions, including but going well beyond the standard classical and Christian ones. As Armistead shows, Dryden’s practice of juxtaposing pre- and post-scientific treatments of such occult topics as alchemy, astrology, and demonology pervades many of his poems and plays. In its engagement with works such as The Indian Queen, Annus Mirabilis, All for Love, and Absalom and Achitophel, among many others, Otherworldly John Dryden not only enhances our understanding of Dryden’s works, but also tracks the writer’s attitudes about Providence and the ability of the poet to perceive a hidden design in earthly events.




The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre


Book Description

Fourteen specially commissioned essays provide essential information about staging, playwrights, themes and genres in the drama of the Restoration.




John Dryden


Book Description

John Dryden was first published in 1976. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This annotated bibliography represents a comprehensive updating of Samuel Holt Monk's earlier work, also published by the University of Minnesota Press, John Dryden: A List of Critical Studies Published from 1895 to 1948 (out of print). Since the publication of that earlier bibliography, the number of studies devoted to Dryden has more than tripled, and thus this new bibliography is essential for scholars of Dryden or related aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature. This volume contains four times as many entries as the earlier volume, and there is an extensive introduction by Professor Latt which surveys the historical shifts in critical opinion of Dryden. The new volume incorporates all of the listings contained in the first one. The entries include works that focus directly on Dryden, those that discuss Dryden's works in the context of other writers, and those that investigate material of general importance to Dryden studies. Dissertations from American, German, English, and French universities are included. Complete bibliographic information is provided for virtually every entry. The listings are grouped in nine categories, and there is an additional section which covers festschriften and other collections of essays. Works of exceptional value and those which develop new points of view are so designated. The publishing history of each item is included along with the standard bibliographic information. The index includes topical as well as author entries.




The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer


Book Description

Nobel Prizewinner Nadine Gordimer's novels and short stories from The Conservationist to Jump have been her best and most controversial work. This new book examine such topics as the autobiographical basis of her fiction, her relationship to feminism, the place of the white woman in black Africa, the ambiguity of revolutionary politics, her ambivalent relationship to Judaism, her use of irony, the symbolism of landscape, and the ways in which she has revised recurring topics throughout her career as a writer.




Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World


Book Description

This book addresses emancipatory narratives from two main sites in the colonial world, the Indian and southern African subcontinents. Exploring how love and revolution interrelate, this volume is unique in drawing on theories of affect to interrogate histories of the political, thus linking love and revolution together. The chapters engage with the affinities of those who live with their colonial pasts: crises of expectations, colonial national convulsions, memories of anti-colonial solidarity, even shared radical libraries. It calls attention to the specific and singular way in which notions of ‘love of the world’ were born in a precise moment of anti-colonial struggle: a love of the world for which one would offer one’s life, and for which there had been little precedent in the history of earlier revolutions. It thus offers new ways of understanding the shifts in global traditions of emancipation over two centuries.







V.S. Naipaul


Book Description

V. S. Naipaul is a reader-friendly introduction to the writing of one of the most influential contemporary authors and the 2001 Nobel laureate in Literature. Bruce King provides a novel by novel analysis of the fiction with attention to structure, significance, and Naipaul's development as a writer, while setting the texts in their autobiographical. philosophical, social, political, colonial and postcolonial contexts. King shows how Naipaul modified Western and Indian literary traditions for the West Indies and then the wider world to become an international writer whose subject matter includes the Caribbean, England, India, Africa, the United States, Argentina, and contemporary Islam. Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of V. S. Naipaul now includes an expanded Introduction, and discussion of his most recent novels A Way in the World and Half a Life, his Nobel Lecture, Naipaul's writings on Islam, and a survey of the main criticism by other writers and postcolonial theorists.