Karen Newman Libri

Focusing on the contributions of a leading scholar, this book offers a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare studies and early modern literature. It examines key themes, critical approaches, and the evolution of scholarship in this area, highlighting significant works and ideas that have shaped the understanding of Shakespeare's impact on literature and culture. The text serves as both a resource for scholars and an introduction for those new to the field, emphasizing the ongoing relevance of Shakespeare's work in contemporary discussions.

Shakespeare's Tempest has long been claimed by colonials and postcolonial thinkers alike as the dramatic work that most enables them to confront their entangled history. Tempest in the Caribbean reads some of the "classic" anticolonial texts -- by Aime Cesaire and Roberto Fernandez Retamar, for instance -- through the lens of feminist and queer analysis. Extending the Tempest plot, Jonathan Goldberg considers recent works by Caribbean authors and social theorists, among them Sylvia Wynter, Michelle Cliff, Patricia Powell, and Jamaica Kincaid. These rewritings, he suggests, present alternatives to the masculinist and heterosexual bias of the legacy that has been derived from The Tempest, and his work points to new possibilities that might be articulated through the nexus of race and sexuality. Book jacket.

In readings ranging from early-16th- through late-17th-century texts, this book aims to resituate women's writing in the English Renaissance by studying the possibilities available to these writers by virtue of their positions in society and by their articulation of the desire to write.

Offering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics of impossibility and how melodrama as a whole provides queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of the identity categories that regulate and constrain social life.

Focusing on early modern London and Paris, Karen Newman challenges the notion that urban cultural dynamics emerged solely in the nineteenth century. She explores how elements such as speculation, capital, commodities, and urban crowds were already shaping these cities long before the industrial revolution. By examining these foundational aspects, the book reveals a deeper historical continuity in urban culture, suggesting that the complexities of metropolitan life have deeper roots than previously acknowledged.

Set against a backdrop of social change, this book explores the complexities of human relationships and personal identity. Through its richly developed characters, it delves into themes of love, loss, and the search for belonging. The narrative captures the struggles of individuals navigating their paths amidst shifting cultural landscapes, offering profound insights into the human experience. The author’s poignant prose invites readers to reflect on their own lives while engaging with the characters' journeys.

These essays investigate the materiality of the world in Spenser, Cary and Marlowe; its sociability, sexuality and sovereignty in Shakespeare; and the universality of spirit, gender and empire in Vaughan, Donne and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rastanjani princess.