Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women's Re-Visions in Literature and Performance

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Overview

This innovative book outlines the great complexity, variety and difference of male identities in Islamic societies. From the Taliban orphanages of Afghanistan to the cafés of Morocco, from the experience of couples at infertility clinics in Egypt to that of Iraqi conscripts, it shows how the masculine gender is constructed and negotiated in the Islamic Ummah. It goes far beyond the traditional notion that Islamic masculinities are inseparable from the control of women, and shows how the relationship between spirituality and masculinity is experienced quite differently from the prevailing Western norms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312235093
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	01/01/1999
Edition description:	1st ed. 2090
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

Marianne Novy is Professor of English and former Director of Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author ofLove’s Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare and the editor of Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare.

Table of Contents

Introduction--Marianne Novy
• Rita Dove’s Two Shakespeare Poems--Peter Erickson
• Recent Australian Shrews : The ‘Larrikin Element’--Penny Gay
• Katie Mitchell’s Henry VI --Barbara Hodgdon
• Subverting the Male Gaze: Christine Edzard’s Film of As You Like It -- Patricia Lennox
• Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Good Night Desdemona and Paula Vogel’s Desdemona --Marianne Novy
• Jazz Cleopatras: Shakespearean Appropriations by Two Hollywood Divas: Josephine Baker and Tamora Dobson--Francesca Royster
• The Polluted Quarry: Nature and Body in A Thousand Acres --Barbara Mathieson
• King Lear and A Thousand Acres : Gender, Genre, and the Revisionary Impulse--Iska Alter
• Shakespeare in Iceland--Jane Smiley
• ‘Out of Shakespeare’?: Cordelia in Cat’s Eye --Suzanne Raitt
• Tempest Plainsong: Silencing Caliban’s Curse--Diana Brydon
• Sycorax Speaks: Marina Warner’sIndigo and The Tempest --Caroline Cakebread
• Claribel at Palace Dot Tunis--Linda Bamber

Editorial Reviews

“Full of fresh insights and ranging widely across the field of contemporary culture, Transforming Shakespeare is an exciting book. It strikingly demonstrates the many provocative ways in which Shakespeare can be ‘our contemporary.'” —Jean E. Howard, Columbia University

“Novy gathers a varied and all-star cast to explore women's 're-visions' of Shakespeare...well-documented and well-written essays offers new visions of Shakespeare for the diverse, postmodern world...” —Choice

“These well-written and accessible essays show how contemporary women subvert or expand upon [Shakespeare's] original texts, covering subjects as diverse as ecofeminism, colonialism, incest and production styles.” —Library Journal

From the Publisher

Through film, stage, the novel, and poetry, women are revisiting and reinterpreting Shakespeare from a distinctively feminist viewpoint. These well-written and accessible essays show how contemporary women subvert or expand upon his original texts, covering subjects as diverse as ecofeminism, colonialism, incest, and production styles. Novy (English, Univ. of Pittsburgh) makes a wonderful and unusual editorial decision in the extended and multifaceted interest given to the reinterpretation of King Lear in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (including two critical essays and a personal account from Smiley). Linda Bamber's chapter, "Claribel at Palace Dot Tunis," also works well within this collection as an example of a way in which a woman approaches the Shakespeare text as a writer of fiction and literary criticism, blending the concerns of this collection in theory and in practice. Recommended for academic libraries.--Karen E. Sadowski, Simmons Coll., Boston

Library Journal

A surprisingly large number of women writers, directors, and performers have created works that respond to Shakespeare and to more traditional interpretations of his plays. In this collection, feminist critics explore such rewritings, as well as recent Shakespeare performances directed by women. They examine how these works use rewritings of Shakespeare to address issues of gender, race, sexuality, colonialism, and class, as well as the general question of our relation to cultural tradition at the start of the new millennium. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

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