Kirjahaku

This scholarly monograph, Shakespeare s Dramatic Maxims, explores Shakespeare's use of maxims (defined as short, pithy statements of wisdom) in the plays, with special attention to their period social and political implications and how they affect reading and staging of his plays today.While some works (scholarly and popular) have explored proverbial aspects of Shakespeare's language (an entire subgenre of Bardolatry discusses how one can use his sayings to live a better life) but no major study has yet done an analysis of who speaks the maxims and to what effect they have particular political import that few have as yet considered within the universe of a complete collection of maxims from all the plays. And Shakespeare's moral import has evolved throughout the ages as the meaning and purpose of his work has taken new interpretations.Part 1 comprises an introduction that discusses the historical importance of maxims plus relevant scholarship on Shakespeare's language and politics; Part 2 includes a complete list of the dramatic maxims, proceeding through the plays chronologically; Part 3 pursues how the maxims help the reader and researcher develop readings of the plays, again moving through them chronologically; a robust index and bibliography (Works Cited) concludes the manuscript.

Seeking the Beautiful: A Study in Literary Aesthetics comprises essays both theoretical and applied, with a focus on English medieval and Renaissance texts. While the term aesthetics may imply simply sensory perception or expression, this volume considers what makes literary texts beautiful. While of course any such study must involve subjective judgment, one can still describe subjective experience and share it with others, with the goal of expanding others’ and one’s own potential for enjoying works of literary art.Academic discussion most often deals with meaning or the social or psychological implications of writing and reading, and we tend to neglect what often draws us to read in the first place: a text’s verbal or imaginative beauty. Our favourite texts make us re-readers as well as readers.Using a variety of examples—including Shakespeare plays, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Worth’s Urania, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Beowulf, `The Dream of the Rood’ and others, this study highlights the idea of texture, pleasure through depth, variety, and passionate liveliness, as a means to consider textual beauty. Explicitly an essay, an attempt, it aims to connect theoretical strands from Classical through Postmodern thought to formulate a joy of reading that may encourage dialogue on why we love the literature we love.