Synopses & Reviews
Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing offer a new type of study aid that combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the writing skills you need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's complex dramatic language, and expanding your own critical vocabulary, as you respond to his plays.
Key features include:
- an introduction considering when and how the play was written, addressing the language with which Shakespeare created his work, as well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his disposal
- detailed examination and analysis of the individual text, focusing on its literary, technical and historical intricacies
- discussion of performance history and the critical reception of the work
- a 'Writing matters' section in every chapter, clearly linking the analysis of Shakespeare's language to your own writing strategies in coursework and examinations
Written by world-class academics with both scholarly insight and outstanding teaching skills, each guide will empower you to read and write about Shakespeare with increased confidence and enthusiasm.
Synopsis
This guide argues that King Lear's elemental power springs from its language, which is at once simple, relentless, and riddling, and from its full-blown double plot that multiplies unbearably both the follies and the pain of its protagonists. It also explores recent critical approaches to the play and its theatre history.
The Language and Writing series offers a new type of study aid which combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the critical and writing skills students need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's rich and complex dramatic language, and the student's own critical language and how she or he can improve and develop this to become a critical writer.
About the Author
Jean E. Howard is the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, USA. Author of Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, Engendering a Nation (with Phyllis Rackin, 1994) and Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy (2001), she has edited six collections of essays, including the four-volume Blackwell's Companion to Shakespeare's Works (2003). General Editor of the Bedford contextual editions of Shakespeare, Howard is Past President of the Shakespeare Association of America. She has received numerous fellowships and awards including Guggenheim, ACLS, NEH, Folger, Huntington, and Newberry Library Fellowships. At Syracuse University she received the Wasserstrom Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and at Columbia University the University Graduate Mentoring Award.
Table of Contents
Undergraduate students in the UK, US and Australia; Shakespeare studies and criticism; A-level teachers; students of Literary Criticism and introductory literature courses, as well as Shakespeare courses.