The Tragedy of Tragedies


Book Description

Best known today for the novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Henry Fielding was just as renowned in his own time as a prolific and highly successful dramatist. Among his most popular plays was The Tragedy of Tragedies: Or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb, one of the most extraordinary parodies in English theater. The print version of the play incorporates, in an elaborate structure of annotations, a remarkable satire of heroic drama and of the pretensions and excesses of “false scholarship.” This edition includes the text of the play itself and the text of the extraordinary notes (by Fielding’s pseudonym “H. Scriblerus Secundus”), appearing in facing page layout; extensive explanatory notes for the modern reader appear at the bottom of the page. Also included are a substantial introduction and a wide range of background materials that set the work in the context of its time. These contextual materials include contemporary reviews, excerpts from the plays that Fielding’s parody most frequently targeted, and selections from works that provided inspiration for The Tragedy of Tragedies—from contemporary versions of the “Tom Thumb” folktale to satirical writing by authors such as Alexander Pope, John Gay, and George Villiers.




British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan


Book Description

Representative selections from Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, comedy, satire, tragedy, and farce are prefaced by descriptions of the theaters, acting styles, methods of play production, and audiences.




Henry Fielding


Book Description

An accurate and comprehensive study of the political aspects of Fielding’s art has been sorely needed. As a result of decades of work by literary scholars and a series of great historians, such a study is finally possible. This volume addresses that need, and, in the light of a recent revival of interest in Fielding’s work, it arrives most opportunely. The author offers here a wide-ranging focus and a firm grip on the shifting complexities of Fielding’s political situations—the loyalties and enmities, factional alignments and fractious rhetoric—that allow a satisfactory understanding of Fielding’s political writing. Political writing in Fielding’s day, as in ours, was topical, concerned with evanescent problems and day-to-day needs that were familiar to contemporaries, but that are now recaptured only with greatest difficulty. This study constitutes a thorough reconstruction of Fielding’s political context and extricates from the context Fielding’s own political endeavours. Cleary’s work will make many of Felding’s previously unstudied work accessible to students and scholars of eighteenth-century English literature. A necessary point of reference to both literary specialists and historians concerned with eighteenth-century England.







Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England


Book Description

Thornton also sheds light on areas where popular culture and politics were uneasily interlinked: the powerful political influence of those outside elite groups; the variations in political culture across the country; and the considerable continuing power of mystical, supernatural, and 'non-rational' ideas in British social and political life into the nineteenth century."--Jacket.




Jacobean Dramatists


Book Description

Comprises of individual volumes on: Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and John Webster. The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase oxes) and as individual volumes.




A Bibliography of Modern Arthuriana (1500-2000)


Book Description

Annotated bibliography of the Arthurian legend in modern English-language fiction, not only in literary texts, but in television, music, and art. The legend of Arthur has been a source of fascination for writers and artists in English since the fifteenth century, when Thomas Malory drew together for the first time in English a variety of Arthurian stories from a number of sources to form the Morte Darthur. It increased in popularity during the Victorian era, when after Tennyson's treatment of the legend, not only authors and dramatists, but painters, musicians, and film-makers found a sourceof inspiration in the Arthurian material. This interdisciplinary, annotated bibliography lists the Arthurian legend in modern English-language fiction, from 1500 to 2000, including literary texts, film, television, music, visual art, and games. It will prove an invaluable source of reference for students of literary and visual arts, general readers, collectors, librarians, and cultural historians--indeed, by anyone interested in the history of the waysin which Camelot has figured in post-medieval English-speaking cultures. ANN F. HOWEY is Assistant Professor at Brock University, Canada; STEPHEN R. REIMER is Associate Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada