An indispensable introduction to one of the great critics of the twentieth century, whose work on ideology, aesthetics and social criticism has ensured his place at the centre of cultural studies and contemporary theoretical debates.
Empires and Colonies provides a thoroughgoing and lively exploration of the expansion of the seaborne empires of western Europe from the fifteenth century and how that process of expansion affected the world, including its successor, the United States. Whilst providing special attention to Europe, the book is careful to highlight the ambivalence and contradiction of that expansion. The book also illuminates connections between empires and colonies as a theme in history, concentrating on culture while also discussing the rich social, economic and political dimensions of the story. Furthermore, Empires and Colonies recognizes that whilst a study of the expansion of Europe is an important part of world history, it is not a history of the world per se. The focus on culture is used to assert that areas and peoples that lack great economic power at any given time also deserve attention. These alternative voices of slaves, indigenous peoples and critics of empire and colonization are an important and compelling element of the book. Empires and Colonies will be essential reading not only for students of imperial history, but also for anyone interested in the makings of our modern world.
Based on extensive archival research, this book looks at the earlier contest of empires in the New World, especially among Spain, France and England, and then examines the opposition to empire, the promotion of empire and the question of slavery. Hart's discussion on slavery has even larger scope ranging from early Arab, African and Portuguese practices in Africa and beyond to the legal abolition of slavery in the British empire, the United States and elsewhere in the Nineteenth-century.
Textual Imitation offers a new critique of the space between fiction and truth, poetry and philosophy. In a nimble, yet startlingly wide-ranging argument, esteemed scholar Jonathan Hart argues that recognition and misrecognition are the keys to understanding texts and contexts from the Old World to the New World.
Private Charles Smith had been dead for close to a century when Jonathan Hart discovered the soldier’s small diary in the Baldwin Collection at the Toronto Public Library. The diary’s first entry was marked 5 June 1915. After some research, Hart discovered that Charles Smith was an Anglo-Canadian, born in Kent, and that this diary was almost all that remained of this forgotten man, who like so many soldiers from ordinary families had lost his life in the First World War. In reading the diary, Hart discovered a voice full of life, and the presence of a rhythm, a cadence that urged him to bring forth the poetry in Smith’s words. Unforgetting Private Charles Smith is the poetic setting of the words in Smith’s diary, work undertaken by Hart with the intention of remembering Smith’s life rather than commemorating his death.
Part of a series of books of poetry on dream and its relation to actuality, Dreamwork is an exploration of the then and there, here and now, of landscapes and inscapes over time. The poems explore past, present, and future in places from Canada through New Jersey, New York, and New England to-- England and Europe as part of the speaker's journey. A typology of home and displacement, of natural beauty and industrial scars unfold in the movement of the book.
Making and Seeing Modern Texts explores the poetics of texts through a close reading and analysis across the genres of poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction travel literature and theory. This volume demonstrates that prose, as much as poetry, share the making and seeing of language, literary practice, and theory. Genre, then, is presented as a guide that crosses multiple boundaries. This volume selects different ways to examine texts, discussing Michael Ondaatje’s early poetry and examining narrative in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. The book examines images in poetry, narrative in fiction, prefaces in non-fiction, metatheatre in drama, and attempts to see the modern and postmodern in theory, all of which show us the complexities of modernity or later modernity. One of the innovations is that the author, a literary critic/theorist, poet and historian, takes his training in practice and theory and shows, through examples of each, how language operates across genres.
Musing is a book of sonnets, combining one of poetry's most classic forms with history and landscape. Ranging from the traditional to the innovative, Jonathan Locke Hart captures a piece of European poetic flavour and mingles the experience with North American artistic flair.
Examines possible and fictional worlds, author and authority, otherness and recognition, translation, alternative critique, empire, education, imagination, comedy, history, poetry, and culture. The analyzed works include classical and modern texts and theorists of the past sixty years ranging from Jerome Bruner to Stephen Greenblatt.
Shakespeare, the Renaissance and Empire: Poetry, Philosophy and Politics is the second volume of this study and builds on the first, which concentrated on related matters, including geography and language. In both volumes, a key focus is close analysis of the text and an attention to Shakespeare’s use of signs, verbal and visual, to represent the world in poetry and prose, in dramatic and non-dramatic work as well as some of the contexts before, during and after the Renaissance. Shakespeare’s representation of character and action in poetry and theatre, his interpretation and subsequent interpretations of him are central to the book as seen through these topics: German Shakespeare, a life and no life, aesthetics and ethics, liberty and tyranny, philosophy and poetry, theory and practice, image and text. The book also explores the typology of then and now, local and global.
Jonathan Hart has three main goals in this innovative study of the texts of exploration and European colonization: to show the complexity of travel as well as the importance of its depictions for Spain, France and England; to present the ambivalent and contradictory responses of France and England to Spain over the period; and to demonstrate the importance of translations in both disseminating and shaping knowledge surrounding the colonizing of the New World. By combining three major cultural traditions – France, England, Spain – the author reveals fascinating interactions about the way the New World was represented in writing, and he makes substantial contributions to our understanding of the political and social context of these writings. This allows significant reassessments of the early modern Atlantic world’s perception of the Americas in both a collective sense and according to the different dynamics of each country.
Shakespeare, the Renaissance and Empire presents Shakespeare as both a local and global writer, investigating Shakespeare’s trans-cultural writing through the interrelations and interactions of binaries including theory and practice, past and present, aesthetics and ethics, freedom and tyranny, republic and empire, empires and colonies, poetry and history, rhetoric and poetics, England and America, and England and Asia. The book breaks away from traditional western-centric analysis to present a universal Shakespeare, exposing readers to the relevance and significance of Shakespeare within their local contexts and cultures. This text aims to present a global Shakespeare, utilizing a dual perspective or dialectical presentation, mainly centred on questions of (1) how Shakespeare can be viewed as both an English writer and a world writer; (2) how language operates across genres and kinds of discourse; and (3) how Shakespeare helps to articulate a poetics of both texts (literature) and contexts (cultures). The book’s originality lies in its articulation of the importance and value of Shakespeare in the emerging landscape of global culture.
This is the first book to discuss the full sweep of the work of J. Hillis Miller, from his earliest writing in the 1950s to those near the time of his death in February 2021 across the genres of his criticism and theory—poetry, fiction, drama, fiction, non-fiction. The book examines Miller’s preference for close and careful reading of individual literary and critical works over abstract theory. The study will discuss the member of the so-called Yale School of deconstruction to die but will see him as a reader and lover of literature, someone interested in Georges Poulet and phenomenology and in Jacques Derrida and deconstruction. Miller was concerned about many aspects of literature and life, including the pleasure of reading and writing as in climate change, which he saw as the crisis of our time. Miller was well known in humanities and literature worldwide, one of the greatest of modern critics and theorists.
This book focuses on a close analysis of selected speeches of Winston Churchill in the House of Commons and some of the responses from fellow MPs from the middle of 1940 to the death of Churchill in 1965, speeches in war and peace, and concentrates on foreign affairs. The book will appeal to those interested in Churchill, freedom, tyranny, diplomacy, war and conflict, democracy, politics, the Second World War, the Cold War, Britain, Canada, the United States, the British Empire and Commonwealth, Europe, France, Asia, Germany, Japan, totalitarianism, Parliament, legislative assemblies, rhetoric, language, style, speech-writing, oral and written communication, literature, history and other areas. The debate between autocracy (tyranny, totalitarianism) and democracy is in those times and ours, with many parallels, chilling. Churchill was key to our world history and is a key to understanding what is at stake in the world now.
First published in 1992, Theater and World is a detailed exploration of Shakespeare’s representation of history and how it affects the relation between theatre and world. The book focuses primarily on the Second Tetralogy (Richard II, Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, and Henry V) and includes a wealth of analysis and interpretation of the plays. In doing so, it explores a wide range of topics, including the relation between literary and theatrical representations and the world; the nature of illusion and reality; genre; the connection between history and fiction (especially plays); historiography and literary criticism or theory; poetry and philosophy; and irony, both rhetorical and philosophical. Theater and World continues to have lasting relevance for anyone with an interest in Shakespeare’s words and his representation of history in particular.
This book presents a unique new method to improve business focus, capacity, capability, performance, profitability and information, reduce stress and attract the right sort of customers, suppliers, personnel and publicity. In other words, how to get your ducks in a row. You'll discover how Purpose and Intention act as the Magnetic North of a business, and how aligning everything to P&I will transform the capability of the business. One thing's for sure, if you follow this method, you'll never look at your business in the same light again
The Words of Winston Churchill, a study that ranges over the course of a rich, controversial and remarkable career, is about the power and art of his language as a writer and speaker. Churchill used words as the greatest of poets and orators do, and did so in Parliament and for the people, Britain and the empire, in war and peace, facing the changes in the world, and resisting Hitler and the Nazis. Drawing on the traditions of poetics, rhetoric and textual commentary, the study concentrates on Churchill’s writing and is sensitive to texts and contexts and to the archive. A central matter is Churchill speaking in Parliament and the reception of his speeches there for over six decades, although his work as a writer and a speaker outside the House of Commons is also important. Churchill speaks to the House, the people, Britain, the Empire, the Commonwealth and the world and, in crisis, defends freedom and democracy.
Reading the Renaissance, first published in 1996, is a collection of essays discussing the literature, drama, poetics and culture of the Renaissance period. The Renaissance, which extends from about 1300 to 1700 depending on the country, was originally a rebirth of the arts but has also come to apply to the wider cultural change in the face of modernization. The essays represent a plural Renaissance and explore the boundaries between genre and gender, languages and literatures, reading and criticism, the Renaissance and the medieval, the early modern and the postmodern, world and theatre. There is also a plurality of methods that is fitting for the variety of topics and the richness of the Renaissance. This book is ideal for students of literature and theatre studies.
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This book focuses on how we perceive, know and interpret culture across disciplinary boundaries. The study ranges from the Bible and classical works to those by and about men and women in Europe, the Americas and beyond of Native, African, European and different backgrounds.
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