Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
61
result(s) for
"Zachary Lesser"
Sort by:
The book in Britain : a historical introduction
\"Presented as a comprehensive, up-to-date narrative, The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction explores the impact of books, manuscripts, and other kinds of material texts on the cultures and societies of the British Isles. The text clearly explains the technicalities of printing and publishing and discusses the formal elements of books and manuscripts, which are necessary to facilitate an understanding of that impact. This collaboratively authored narrative history combines the knowledge and expertise of five scholars who seek to answer questions such as: How does the material form of a text affect its meaning? How do books shape political and religious movements? How have the economics of the book trade and copyright shaped the literary canon? Who has been included in and excluded from the world of books, and why? The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction will appeal to all scholars, students, and historians interested in the written word and its continued production and presentation\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Xeroxing the Renaissance
For nearly two decades now, much of the historicist research that scholars of early modern English literature have undertaken has not involved consulting the actual books that are products of the historical culture they are investigating, but rather clicking through the digital facsimiles in the database of Early English Books Online (EEBO). This disjuncture--that the dominance of historicism as a scholarly methodology has been underwritten by a twenty irst- century digital repository--has not gone unnoticed. In fact, it is a local instance of a broader historicist paradox that obtains even when we work in rare books collections. Since the books in these collections have themselves been manipulated in various ways over the centuries, they embody multiple temporalities rather than being securely rooted in one. The objects that have been habitually treat to recover the early modern period in fact come down as the end result of a long historical process that has left its traces on the objects and on scholarly discourse.
Journal Article
\Hamlet\ After Q1
In 1823, Sir Henry Bunbury discovered a badly bound volume of twelve Shakespeare plays in a closet of his manor house. Nearly all of the plays were first editions, but one stood out as extraordinary: a previously unknown text ofHamletthat predated all other versions. Suddenly, the world had to grapple with a radically new-or rather, old-Hamletin which the characters, plot, and poetry of Shakespeare's most famous play were profoundly and strangely transformed.
Q1, as the text is known, has been declared a rough draft, a shorthand piracy, a memorial reconstruction, and a pre-Shakespearean \"ur-Hamlet,\" among other things. Flickering between two historical moments-its publication in Shakespeare's early seventeenth century and its rediscovery in Bunbury's early nineteenth-Q1 is both the first and lastHamlet. Because this text became widely known only after the familiar version of the play had reached the pinnacle of English literature, its reception has entirely depended on this uncanny temporal oscillation; so too has its ongoing influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas of the play.
Zachary Lesser examines how the improbable discovery of Q1 has forced readers to reconsider accepted truths about Shakespeare as an author and about the nature of Shakespeare's texts. In telling the story of this mysterious quarto and tracing the debates in newspapers, London theaters, and scholarly journals that followed its discovery, Lesser offers brilliant new insights on what we think we mean byHamlet.
eBook
The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays
With the hindsight provided both by Q2 and by nearly two centuries of bibliographic and literary analysis since Henry Bunbury discovered the first of the two now-extant copies of Q1 \"in a closet at Barton\" in 1823, the first quarto of Hamlet seems distinctly unliterary. 5 For much of the twentieth century, this edition has been the archetypal \"bad\" quarto, a botched rendition of an acting version of the play- an illegitimate and practically illiterate offspring of the \"good\" Hamlet embodied by the texts of Q2 and the First Folio (F).
Journal Article
Tragical-Comical-Pastoral-Colonial: Economic Sovereignty, Globalization, and the Form of Tragicomedy
I examine the politics of tragicomedy by focusing on its 1620s shift from pastoral to proto-colonial settings. This formal transformation reveals the genre's connection to economic debates over England's coin shortage and to Thomas Mun's abstract, global model of trade, removed from monarchical authority and naturalized in self-regulating \"laws of commerce.\" Like Mun's model, tragicomedy requires us to imagine the ability of past actions and distant causes to ramify across time and space. Set on a barren, inaccessible island, Fletcher and Massinger's Sea Voyage isolates the nature of money and demonstrates the dangers of transgressing the natural law of commerce.
Journal Article