Introduction

in Critical Survey (2022), 34(2), 1-9

Introduction

in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (2022), 70(2), 123-130

Bücherschau

in Shakespeare Jahrbuch (2022)

Tiffany Stern, ed. Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020.

in Shakespeare Jahrbuch (2021), 157

Telling Tales of Empire in Contemporary British Popular Culture

in Habermann, Ina; Krug, Christian (Eds.) And Hereby Hangs a Tale: A Critical Anatomy of (Popular) Tales (2020)

The Politics of Happiness in Richard Brome’s The Queen and Concubine

in Critical Survey (2020), 32(3), 70-81

Drama written for the commercial stage during the 1630s has long been seen as falling neatly into two categories: the majority of plays is seen as reflecting a courtly taste for cultural escapism believed ... [more ▼]

Drama written for the commercial stage during the 1630s has long been seen as falling neatly into two categories: the majority of plays is seen as reflecting a courtly taste for cultural escapism believed to have been cultivated during a time in which the court increasingly found itself in opposition to the rest of the country. In contrast, a smaller group of plays is read as 'opposition drama' voicing thinly veiled discontent with Charles I’s personal rule. In this article, I challenge this critical dichotomy by arguing that Richard Brome’s The Queen and Concubine, written for the King’s Revels company in 1635-36, affirms notions of good government which are central to Caroline ideals of kingship. As I show, Brome’s play uses its female protagonist Eulalia, banished Queen of Sicily, in order to promote a politics of happiness that draws on the iconography of Charles I as well as on ideals of statecraft endorsed by the English king in the 1630s. [less ▲]

Dickens as an Agent of Change

Book published by Cornell University Press - 2nd ed. (2019)

Sixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change to show how Dickens was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy ... [more ▼]

Sixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change to show how Dickens was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy in the Inimitable's protean style, registered and commented on the ongoing changes in the Victorian world while the Victorians' fictional and factional worlds kept (and keep) changing. The essays from notable Dickens scholars—Malcolm Andrews, Matthias Bauer, Joel J. Brattin, Doris Feldmann, Herbert Foltinek, Robert Heaman, Michael Hollington, Bert Hornback, Norbert Lennartz, Chris Louttit, Jerome Meckier, Nancy Aycock Metz, David Paroissien, Christopher Pittard, and Robert Tracy—suggest the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated in Dickens' works through four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. An afterword by the late Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens changed the life of one eminent Dickensian. [less ▲]

Englands dramatische Geschichte: Shakespeares Histories

in Singh, Sikander; Leber, Manfred (Eds.) Literatur und Geschichte (2018)

Introduction

in Journal for the Study of British Cultures (2018), 25(2), 121-128

A. S. Byatt, Possession (1990)

in Reinfandt, Christoph (Ed.) Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2017)

A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession (1990) revolves around questions of writing the past, more particularly the Victorian past, from the perspective of the late twentieth century. As outlined in the essay ... [more ▼]

A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession (1990) revolves around questions of writing the past, more particularly the Victorian past, from the perspective of the late twentieth century. As outlined in the essay, Byatt’s novel stages various forms of possession, both material and immaterial, linking them to issues of identity and female autonomy as well as to epistemological and ethical notions of poetry and imagination. Possession is an ambivalent text in that it problematizes the ontological, epistemological and methodological problems of writing the past; at the same time, the novel asserts the desire to acquire knowledge of the past, exploring literary genres, poetry and imagination as various means of opening the past to the present. As a Neo-Victorian text, Possession re-evaluates perceived cliches about the Victorian age, rewriting it as an era of a benign humanism that counteracts late-twentieth-century doubts and insecurities. [less ▲]