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By the time they encounter Romeo and Juliet in the classroom, many students have already been exposed to various, and sometimes incongruous, manifestations of Shakespeare's work. This volume makes a virtue of students' familiarity with the preconceptions, anachronisms, and appropriations that shape experiences of the work, finding innovative pedagogical possibilities in the play's adaptations and in new technologies that spark students' creative responses.
The essays cover a wide area of concerns, such as marriage, gender, queer perspectives, and girlhood, and contributors embrace different ways of understanding the play, such as through dance, editing, and acting. The final essays focus on decolonizing the text by foregrounding both the role of race and economic inequality in the play and the remarkable confluence of Romeo and Juliet and Hispanic culture.
The author of Comentarios reales and La Florida del Inca, now recognized as key foundational works of Latin American literature and historiography, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was born in 1539 in Cuzco, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan princess, and later moved to Spain. Recalling the family stories and myths he had heard from his Quechua-speaking relatives during his youth and gathering information from friends who had remained in Peru, he created works that have come to indelibly shape our understanding of Incan history and administration. He also articulated a new American identity, which he called mestizo.
This volume provides guidance on the translations of Garcilaso's writings and on the scholarly reception of his ideas. Instructors will discover ideas for teaching Garcilaso's works in relation to indigenous thought, European historiography, natural history, indigenous religion and Christianity, and Incan material culture. In essays informed by postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, scholars draw connections between Garcilaso's writings and contemporary issues like migration, multiculturalism, and indigenous rights.
The Italian romance epic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with its multitude of characters, complex plots, and roots in medieval Carolingian epic and Arthurian chivalric romance, was a form popular with courtly and urban audiences. In the hands of writers such as Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, works of remarkable sophistication that combined high seriousness and low comedy were created. Their works went on to influence Cervantes, Milton, Ronsard, Shakespeare, and Spenser.
In this volume instructors will find ideas for teaching the Italian Renaissance romance epic along with its adaptations in film, theater, visual art, and music. An extensive resources section locates primary texts online and lists critical studies, anthologies, and reference works.
The Comedy of Errors not only contains the complete text of the play but also presents the expanse of scholarly opinion and interpretation from the earliest commentary to the present. It covers dating, sources, and emendations to stage history and influential interpretations of particular words.
This Variorum volume includes a CD that contains the contents as fully text-searchable PDFs with internal links for easy navigation.
Inaugurated in the 1860s and the standard reference edition of Shakespeare’s work, the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare continues the tradition of the original Variorum editions of the early nineteenth century. The New Variorum editions are valuable resources for an international audience of scholars, students, directors, actors, and general readers. Overseen by two general editors and an MLA committee, the production of each edition is conducted by a team of scholars and researchers working over a number of years.
The works of François Rabelais—Gargantua, Pantagruel, the Tiers livre, and the Quart livre—embody the Renaissance spirit of discovery and are crucial to the development of early modern prose and to the birth of the novel. Rabelais’s exuberant satire deals not only with the major cultural and intellectual issues of his time but also with issues of interest to students today.
This volume, in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature, suggests the materials that can be used in teaching Rabelais: editions, translations, criticism, Web sites, music, artwork, and films. Thirty-four essays present strategies for the classroom, discussing the classical and biblical allusions; the context of humanism and evangelical reform; various themes (giants, monsters, war); both feminism and masculinity as vexing subjects; Rabelais’s erudition; and the challenges of teaching his inventive language, his ambiguity, and his scatology.
Teaching French Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation considers the issues critical to teaching recently rediscovered writers, such as Hélisenne de Crenne, Pernette Du Guillet, and Louise Labé, who have enriched the literary canon by offering alternative perspectives on the social, political, and religious issues of early modern France. Addressing topics from law and medicine to motherhood and aesthetics, these women wrote in nearly every genre, and their works include several literary firsts: the first book of Christian emblems ever published by a woman (Georgette de Montenay), the first published collection of private letters between women in French (the Dames Des Roches), and the first full-length memoir by a woman in French (Margaret of Valois).
The volume considers techniques for reading women’s writing alongside the texts of their male contemporaries and offers guidance on incorporating a range of resources into the classroom. Essays in part 1 explore the background and contexts so crucial for helping students understand how these writers negotiated their entry into the public world of writing. In part 2, contributors discuss specific genres. Part 3 describes critical methodologies that are useful in the classroom and demonstrates the benefits of teaching certain pairings of texts and authors. The fourth and final part recommends a range of electronic and print resources.
In 1554, Lazarillo de Tormes, a slim, unassuming little volume, unsigned by the author, made its first published appearance in the bookstalls of several important mercantile centers in Spain and the Netherlands. Since then, as narratives of pícaros—and pícaras—continued to follow in the footsteps of Lázaro’s fictional life, picaresque literature developed into a major genre in literary studies that remains popular to this day.
Yet the genre’s definition is anything but simple, as the diversity of this volume demonstrates. Part 1, “Materials,” reviews editions and translations of Lazarillo and other picaresque works, as well as the critical and historical resources related to them. The essays in part 2, “Approaches,” explore the picaresque’s place in language and literature classrooms of all levels. Some contributors contextualize Lazarillo in the early modern Spanish culture it satirizes, investigating the role of the church and the marginalization of Muslims and Jews. Others pair Lazarillo with Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache or Quevedo’s Buscón to concentrate on the genre’s literary aspects. A cluster of essays focuses on teaching the picaresque (including the female picaresque) to nonspecialist students in interdisciplinary courses. The volume concludes with a section devoted to the picaresque novel’s influence on other literary traditions, from early modern autobiographies, such as Teresa of Ávila’s Libro de la vida, to post–Spanish Civil War texts to twentieth-century Latin American novels and 1950s American beat narratives.
Marguerite de Navarre—writer, reformer, patron—was a key figure of the French Renaissance. Her works, however, were critically reassessed by scholars only in the twentieth century. Today her Heptameron is widely anthologized and frequently taught in undergraduate and graduate classrooms. But teaching this collection of novellas presents challenges: the work is in Middle French, complex in its construction, and far-reaching in its use of historical context. This ninety-fifth volume in the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series aims to show teachers how to unravel the intricacies of the Heptameron for students. The first part, “Materials,” reviews editions and translations, surveys sources that are useful in the classroom, and considers audiovisual and technological resources available to instructors. The second part, “Approaches,” features twenty-seven essays that explore the Heptameron and its cultural and historical contexts; the religious and political ideas and the literary genres that influenced it; its publishing history; and its relation to other works by Marguerite. Experienced instructors share insights about how to teach this work in foreign language and survey courses; how to incorporate film and visual art in the classroom; and how to approach the subject of gender in discussing Marguerite’s writing.
Taught widely in high school and college, Romeo and Juliet may be Shakespeare’s most accessible work. Teenagers and young adults identify with the play’s interfamilial conflict, the love story, and the defiance of parental authority. Nevertheless, readers of all ages are often perplexed by the Bard’s poetic language, the “unrealism” of the characters’ eloquence, and the embedded sonnets. Essays in this book address these challenges and others and offer instructors imaginative strategies for dealing with them.
The first part, “Materials,” reviews the most widely used anthologies of Shakespeare’s plays and the many available editions of Romeo and Juliet, as well as background materials for the instructor and recommendations for student reading. The second part, “Approaches,” presents practical ideas for the classroom. A final section describes scenarios for teaching the play through dramatic technique and for using Romeo and Juliet’s many adaptations, including the popular Zeffirelli and Luhrmann films.
This bibliography supplements the New Variorum Edition of 1955.
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