Stephen Greenblatt's Books

Hamlet in Purgatory

Expanded Edition

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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In Hamlet in Purgatory, renowned literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt delves into his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution--as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet. In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false "poem," they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly "prison house of souls" had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition. With the doctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew up around it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiating with the dead. The Protestant attack on Purgatory destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not eradicate the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had for centuries focused and exploited. In his strikingly original interpretation, Greenblatt argues that the human desires to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead were transformed by Shakespeare--consummate conjurer that he was--into the substance of several of his plays, above all the weirdly powerful Hamlet. Thus, the space of Purgatory became the stage haunted by literature's most famous ghost. This book constitutes an extraordinary feat that could have been accomplished by only Stephen Greenblatt. It is at once a deeply satisfying reading of medieval religion, an innovative interpretation of the apparitions that trouble Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and an exploration of how a culture can be inhabited by its own spectral leftovers. This expanded Princeton Classics edition includes a new preface by the author.

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347

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400848091

ISBN 13

9781400848096

Shakespeare's Freedom

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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Shakespeare's Freedom

By: Stephen Greenblatt

Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes—of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling Will in the World, shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers. Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare’s preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked. He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare’s works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks. He then turns to Shakespeare’s interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine in Measure for Measure. Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority—that is, Shakespeare’s deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained. A book that could only have been written by Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom is a wholly original and eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.

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163

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226306682

ISBN 13

9780226306681

Learning to Curse

Essays in Early Modern Culture

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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Learning to Curse

Essays in Early Modern Culture

By: Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt argued in these celebrated essays that the art of the Renaissance could only be understood in the context of the society from which it sprang. His approach - 'New Historicism' - drew from history, anthropology, Marxist theory, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis and in the process, blew apart the academic boundaries insulating literature from the world around it. Learning to Curse charts the evolution of that approach and provides a vivid and compelling exploration of a complex and contradictory epoch.

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280

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1136774203

ISBN 13

9781136774201

The Swerve

How the Renaissance Began

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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The Swerve

How the Renaissance Began

By: Stephen Greenblatt

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

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370

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

0099572443

ISBN 13

9780099572442

Cultural Mobility

A Manifesto

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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Cultural Mobility

A Manifesto

By: Stephen Greenblatt

Cultural Mobility offers a model for understanding the patterns of meaning that human societies create. It has emerged under the very distinguished editorial guidance of Stephen Greenblatt and represents a new way of thinking about culture and cultures with which scholars in many disciplines will need to engage.

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283

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Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521863562

ISBN 13

9780521863568

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)

By: Stephen Greenblatt

Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

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441

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W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393079848

ISBN 13

9780393079845

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

By: Stephen Greenblatt

Brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable." —Philip Roth World-renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores the playwright’s insight into bad (and often mad) rulers. Examining the psyche—and psychoses—of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, and Coriolanus, Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the disasters visited upon the societies over which these characters rule. Tyrant shows that Shakespeare’s work remains vitally relevant today, not least in its probing of the unquenchable, narcissistic appetites of demagogues and the self-destructive willingness of collaborators who indulge their appetites.

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200

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W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393635767

ISBN 13

9780393635768

Marvelous Possessions

The Wonder of the New World

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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Marvelous Possessions

The Wonder of the New World

By: Stephen Greenblatt

A masterwork of history and cultural studies, Marvelous Possessions is a brilliant meditation on the interconnected ways in which Europeans of the Age of Discovery represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, particularly in the New World. In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Stephen Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was manipulated by Columbus and others in the service of colonial appropriation. Much more than simply a collection of the odd and exotic, Marvelous Possessions is both a highly original extension of Greenblatt’s thinking on a subject that has permeated his career and a thrilling tale of wandering, kidnapping, and go-betweens—of daring improvisation, betrayal, and violence. Reaching back to the ancient Greeks, forward to the present, and, in his new preface, even to fantastical meetings between humans and aliens in movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Greenblatt would have us ask: How is it possible, in a time of disorientation, hatred of the other, and possessiveness, to keep the capacity for wonder—for tolerant recognition of cultural difference—from being poisoned?

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225

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022652518X

ISBN 13

9780226525181

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story That Created Us

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story That Created Us

By: Stephen Greenblatt

“Endlessly illuminating and a sheer pleasure to read.” —Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography Daring to take the great biblical account of human origins seriously, but without credulity. The most influential story in Western cultural history, the biblical account of Adam and Eve is now treated either as the sacred possession of the faithful or as the butt of secular jokes. Here, acclaimed scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores it with profound appreciation for its cultural and psychological power as literature. From the birth of the Hebrew Bible to the awe-inspiring contributions of Augustine, Dürer, and Milton in bringing Adam and Eve to vivid life, Greenblatt unpacks the story’s many interpretations and consequences over time. Rich allegory, vicious misogyny, deep moral insight, narrow literalism, and some of the greatest triumphs of art and literature: all can be counted as children of our “first” parents.

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535

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393634582

ISBN 13

9780393634587

The Touch of the Real

Essays in Early Modern Culture in Honour of Stephen Greenblatt

By: Philippa Kelly

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The Touch of the Real

Essays in Early Modern Culture in Honour of Stephen Greenblatt

By: Philippa Kelly

Taking the reader back to the early modern period, this book addresses the works of Shakespeare, and asks how historical texts might be seen to interplay with identity. Beginning with Stephen Greenblatt's illuminating essay, questions are raised about how we come up with "important" historical texts, how we use educational and cultural institutions to maintain their primacy, and what the costs of this can be. Several of the essays look at ways of defining "the self" in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the working-through of these notions in various writings. Others tell us about how people traveled and the effects of travel on selfhood - how they dressed, how they celebrated special occasions, and how they thought of work and pleasure. The authors reflect on recent methodological concerns and adapt them to new issues in historically-oriented literary and cultural studies. They offer important contributions to new directions in scholarship. The book emerges from a symposium held at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, to celebrate the work of Stephen Greenblatt. Drawing on Greenblatt's methodologies, contributors examine strategies by which we "know" ourselves through our relationships with the past.

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268

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ISBS

Published Date

ISBN 10

1876268727

ISBN 13

9781876268725

Renaissance Self-Fashioning

From More to Shakespeare

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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Renaissance Self-Fashioning

From More to Shakespeare

By: Stephen Greenblatt

Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence. "No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."—Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz

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340

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022602704X

ISBN 13

9780226027043

Second Chances

Shakespeare and Freud

By: Stephen Greenblatt,Adam Phillips

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Second Chances

Shakespeare and Freud

By: Stephen Greenblatt,Adam Phillips

A powerful exploration of the human capacity for renewal, as seen through Shakespeare and Freud In this fresh investigation, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips explore how the second chance has been an essential feature of the literary imagination and a promise so central to our existence that we try to reproduce it again and again. Innumerable stories, from the Homeric epics to the New Testament, and from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet, explore the realization or failure of second chances—outcomes that depend on accident, acts of will, or fate. Such stories let us repeatedly rehearse the experience of loss and recovery: to know the joy that comes with a renewal of love and pleasure and to face the pain that comes with realizing that some damage can never be undone. Through a series of illuminating readings, the authors show how Shakespeare was the supreme virtuoso of the second chance and Freud was its supreme interpreter. Both Shakespeare and Freud believed that we can narrate our life stories as tales of transformation, of momentous shifts, constrained by time and place but often still possible. Ranging from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter’s Tale, and from D. W. Winnicott to Marcel Proust, the authors challenge readers to imagine how, as Phillips writes, “it is the mending that matters.&rdquo

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231

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300277296

ISBN 13

9780300277296

The Norton Shakespeare

Tragedies

By: William Shakespeare,Stephen Greenblatt,Walter Cohen,Jean Elizabeth Howard

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The Norton Shakespeare

Tragedies

By: William Shakespeare,Stephen Greenblatt,Walter Cohen,Jean Elizabeth Howard

A vibrant Shakespeare that brings readers closer than ever before possible to Shakespeare's plays as they were first acted. The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition invites readers to rediscover Shakespearethe working man of the theater, not the universal bard-and to rediscover his plays as scripts to be performed, not works to be immortalized. Combining the freshly edited texts of the Oxford Edition with lively introductions by Stephen Greenblatt and his co-editors, glossaries and annotations, and an elegant single-column page (that of the Norton Anthologies), this edition of Shakespeare invites contemporary readers to see and read Shakespeare afresh. Greenblatt's full introduction creates a window into Shakespeare world-the culture, demographics, commerce, politics, and religion of early-modern EnglandShakespeare's family background and professional life, the Elizabethan industries of theater and printing, and the subsequent centuries of Shakespeare textual editing.

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1144

Publisher

W W Norton & Company Incorporated

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393976726

ISBN 13

9780393976724

Shakespearean Negotiations

The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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Shakespearean Negotiations

The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England

By: Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt has been at the center of a major shift in literary interpretation toward a critical method that situates cultural creation in history. Shakespearean Negotiations is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare's achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.

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226

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Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520061608

ISBN 13

9780520061606

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)

By: Stephen Greenblatt

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441

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W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393079848

ISBN 13

9780393079845

The Norton Anthology of English Literature

Ninth Edition

By: Greenblatt, Stephen,Christ, Carol T

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The Norton Anthology of English Literature

Ninth Edition

By: Greenblatt, Stephen,Christ, Carol T

The Ninth Edition offers more complete works and more teachable groupings than ever before, the apparatus you trust, and a new, free Supplemental Ebook with more than 1,000 additional texts. Read by more than 8 million students, The Norton Anthology of English Literature sets the standard and remains an unmatched value.

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W. W. Norton & Company

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ISBN 10

0393913007

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9780393913002

In Search of Authority - Third Edition

An Introductory Guide to Literary Theory

By: Stephen Bonnycastle

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In Search of Authority - Third Edition

An Introductory Guide to Literary Theory

By: Stephen Bonnycastle

In Search of Authority is the most engaging introduction to literary theory available today. This is the third edition of a book that has been widely used to introduce undergraduates to the field of literary theory. Its distinctive quality is the way in which it makes complex literary theories, such as structuralism, deconstruction, and post-modernism, accessible to students by relating these theories to students’ own enjoyment in reading literature. Each theory is illustrated by several applications of the theory to well-known literary works. Based on a reader-response approach to literature, In Search of Authority begins with an up-to-date account of the status of literary theory in the 21st century, including a response to recent debates about the “post-theory” question. It concludes with a discussion of how an understanding of literary theory can lead to the empowerment of the individual reader, and of how the authority of the professor can be gradually transferred to the student. This third edition has been revised and updated throughout. Each chapter ends with several questions to help students check their understanding of the key ideas in the chapter.

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279

Publisher

Broadview Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1551117673

ISBN 13

9781551117676

Principles and Practice of Psychopharmacotherapy

By: Philip G. Janicak,Stephen R. Marder,Mani N. Pavuluri

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Principles and Practice of Psychopharmacotherapy

By: Philip G. Janicak,Stephen R. Marder,Mani N. Pavuluri

Fully updated for its Fifth Edition, Principles and Practice of Psychopharmacotherapy summarizes the latest data on hundreds of drug and device-based therapies and offers practical, evidence-based guidelines and treatment strategies for virtually every psychiatric disorder. Highlights of this edition include expanded coverage of pharmacogenomics, updates on treatments for elderly patients, and discussion of mechanisms of action for drugs used in sleep disorders, especially narcolepsy.

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712

Publisher

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Published Date

ISBN 10

1451178778

ISBN 13

9781451178777

1 Henry IV

A Critical Guide

By: Stephen Longstaffe

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1 Henry IV

A Critical Guide

By: Stephen Longstaffe

An introduction to Shakespeare's I Henry IV - introducing its critical and performance history, current critical landscape and new directions in research on the play.

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241

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Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1441170421

ISBN 13

9781441170422

Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism

Alagiyavanna and the Portuguese in Sri Lanka

By: Stephen C. Berkwitz

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Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism

Alagiyavanna and the Portuguese in Sri Lanka

By: Stephen C. Berkwitz

Many researchers have explored the impact of British and French Orientalism in the reinterpretations of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Less noticed, however, and infrequently discussed is the impact of Portuguese colonialists and missionaries upon Buddhist communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries across Asia. Stephen C. Berkwitz addresses this theme by examining five poetic works by Alagiyavanna Mukaveti (b.1552), a renowned Sinhala poet who participated directly in the convergence of local and trans-local cultures in early modern Sri Lanka. Berkwitz follows the written works of the poet from his position in the court of a Sinhala king, through the cultural upheavals of warfare and the expansion of colonial rule, and finally to his eventual conversion to Catholicism and employment under the Portuguese Crown. In so doing, Berkwitz explores the transformations in religion and literature rendered by what was arguably the earliest sustained encounter between Asian Buddhists and European colonialists in world history. Alagiyavanna's poetic works give expression to both a discourse of nostalgia for the local religious and cultural order in the late sixteenth century, and a discourse of cultural assimilation with the new colonial order during its ascendancy in the early seventeenth century. Employing an interdisciplinary approach that combines Buddhist Studies, History, Literary Criticism, and Postcolonial Studies, this book yields important insights into how the colonial experience contributed to the transformation of Buddhist culture in early modernity.

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327

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199935777

ISBN 13

9780199935772

Economic Foundations of Law

By: Stephen J. Spurr

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Economic Foundations of Law

By: Stephen J. Spurr

The third edition of Economic Foundations of Law introduces readers to the economic analysis of the major areas of the law: property law, torts, contracts, criminal law, civil procedure, corporation law and financial markets, taxation, and labor law. No prior knowledge of law is required, but a prior course in the principles of microeconomics would be quite helpful. The text opens with a review of the basic principles of price theory and an overview of the legal system, to ensure readers are equipped with the tools necessary for economic analysis of the law. The third edition provides expanded or new coverage of key topics including intellectual property law, how the creation of new forms of property rights affects the conservation of species such as elephants and fish, controversies involving liability for medical malpractice and class actions, the transformation of personal injury litigation by the intervention of insurance companies as plaintiffs, how to predict the outcome of litigation with game theory, an economic analysis of the ownership and use of guns, bankruptcy law, and the economics of bank regulation. Comprehensive and well-written, this text is a compelling introduction to law and economics that is accessible to both economics and law students.

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508

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351239767

ISBN 13

9781351239769

Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Conversion

By: Stephen Wittek

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Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Conversion

By: Stephen Wittek

This book takes a close look at Shakespeare’s engagement with the flurry of controversy and activity surrounding the concept of conversion in post-Reformation England. For playhouse audiences during the period, conversional thought encompassed a markedly diverse, fluid amalgamation of ideas, practices, and arguments centered on the means by which an individual could move from one category of identity to another. In an analysis that includes chapter-length readings of The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV Part I, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest, the book argues that Shakespearean drama made a unique and substantive intervention in public discourse surrounding conversion, and continues to speak meaningfully about conversional experience for audiences in the present age. It will be of particular benefit to students and scholars with an interest in theatrical history, performance theory, theology, cultural studies, race studies, and gender studies.

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206

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Springer Nature

Published Date

ISBN 10

3031119614

ISBN 13

9783031119613

Greco-Roman Literature and Culture in the Imagination of Virginia’s Tidewater Region, 1607–1826

The Empire of the Mind

By: Benjamin Stephen Haller

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Greco-Roman Literature and Culture in the Imagination of Virginia’s Tidewater Region, 1607–1826

The Empire of the Mind

By: Benjamin Stephen Haller

This book explores the influence of classical texts upon early European settlers and inhabitants of the Tidewater region of Virginia, addressing how Greek and Roman literature and culture shaped and sometimes challenged prevailing assumptions about personhood, liberty, town planning, and representative government in Virginia during the period of its expansion from the fort at Jamestown to Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia. Ben Haller introduces the reader to the Ovid translation which George Sandys penned during his time in Virginia as Treasurer; William Strachey’s account of the wreck of the Sea Venture, likely one inspiration for William Shakespeare’s The Tempest; William Byrd II’s writings, including his secret diaries which record the intimate details of the life of an Indian Trader and plantation owner in the early eighteenth century; and Jefferson’s expansive Enlightenment Era appetite for knowledge classical and modern. Haller’s analysis of these texts is carefully anchored in a discussion of the cultural historical context of the English settlement of Virginia, the excavations of Pompeii, the eighteenth-century mania for Palladian architecture, the construction of the campus of the University of Virginia, and new Enlightenment ideals of personal liberty and human rights which came to the fore during Jefferson’s lifetime, and which he helped to enshrine in modern American political thought.

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