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8 books match the query 'Bard'

cover of Bard of Iceland: Jonas Hallgrimsson, Poet and Scientist

Bard of Iceland

Jonas Hallgrimsson, Poet and Scientist

Richard Ringler

University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

Bard of Iceland makes available for the first time in any language other than Icelandic an extensive selection of works by Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807–1845), the most important poet of modern Iceland. Jónas was also Iceland’s first professionally trained geologist and an active contributor in a number of other scientific fields: geography, botany, zoology, and archaeology. He played a key role as well in Iceland’s struggle to gain independence from Denmark. "Descriptive power and fullness of spirit were the hallmarks of his soul," wrote a contemporary admirer.
    Dick Ringler, one of the premier scholars of Icelandic literature in the world, offers a substantial biography of Jónas, a representative selection of his most important poems, and some of his prose work in science and belles lettres. Ringler also provides extended commentaries and an essay on Icelandic prosody.
    The poems are translated into English equivalents of their original complex meters in Icelandic and Danish. As a poet Jónas was intimately familiar with his nation’s medieval literary inheritance—the sagas and eddas—and also with the groundbreaking work of contemporary German and Danish Romanticism (Chamisso, Heine, Oehlenschläger). A master of poetic form, Jónas not only exploited and enlarged the possibilities of traditional eddic and skaldic meters, but introduced the sonnet, triolet stanza, terza and ottava rima, and blank verse into the Icelandic metrical repertory.

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cover of Beside the Bard: Scottish Lowland Poetry in the Age of Burns

Beside the Bard

Scottish Lowland Poetry in the Age of Burns

George S. Christian

Bucknell University Press, 2020

Beside the Bard argues that Scottish poetry in the age of Burns reclaims not a single past, dominated and overwritten by the unitary national language of an elite ruling class, but a past that conceptualizes the Scottish nation in terms of local self-identification, linguistic multiplicity, cultural and religious difference, and transnational political and cultural affiliations. This fluid conception of the nation may accommodate a post-Union British self-identification, but it also recognizes the instrumental and historically contingent nature of “Britishness.” Whether male or female, loyalist or radical, literati or autodidacts, poets such as Alexander Wilson, Carolina Olyphant, Robert Tannahill, and John Lapraik, among others, adamantly refuse to imagine a single nation, British or otherwise, instead preferring an open, polyvocal field, on which they can stage new national and personal formations and fight new revolutions. In this sense, “Scotland” is a revolutionary category, always subject to creative destruction and reformation.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 
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cover of Challenging the Bard: Dostoevsky and Pushkin, a Study of Literary Relationship

Challenging the Bard

Dostoevsky and Pushkin, a Study of Literary Relationship

Gary Rosenshield

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

When geniuses meet, something extraordinary happens, like lightning produced from colliding clouds, observed Russian poet Alexander Blok. There is perhaps no literary collision more fascinating and deserving of study than the relationship between Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), Russia's greatest poet, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), its greatest prose writer. In the twentieth century, Pushkin, "Russia's Shakespeare," became enormously influential, his literary successors universally acknowledging and venerating his achievements. In the nineteenth century, however, it was Dostoevsky more than any other Russian writer who wrestled with Pushkin's legacy as cultural icon and writer. Though he idolized Pushkin in his later years, the younger Dostoevsky exhibited a much more contentious relationship with his eminent precursor.
            In Challenging the Bard, Gary Rosenshield engages with the critical histories of these two literary titans, illuminating how Dostoevsky reacted to, challenged, adapted, and ultimately transformed the work of his predecessor Pushkin. Focusing primarily on Dostoevsky's works through 1866—including Poor Folk, The Double, Mr. Prokharchin, The Gambler, and Crime and Punishment—Rosenshield observes that the younger writer's way to literary greatness was not around Pushkin, but through him. By examining each literary figure in terms of the other, Rosenshield demonstrates how Dostoevsky both deviates from and honors the work of Pushkin. At its core, Challenging the Bard offers a unique perspective on the poetry of the master, Pushkin, the prose of his successor, Dostoevsky, and the nature of literary influence.
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cover of Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660-1740

Marketing the Bard

Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660-1740

Don-John Dugas

University of Missouri Press, 2006

To posterity, William Shakespeare may be the Bard of Avon, but to mid-seventeenth-century theatergoers he was just another dramatist. Yet barely a century later, he was England’s most popular playwright and a household name. In this intriguing study, Don-John Dugas explains how these changes came about and sealed Shakespeare’s reputation even before David Garrick performed his work on the London stage.

            Marketing the Bard considers the ways that performance and publication affected Shakespeare’s popularity. Dugas takes readers inside London’s theaters and print shops to show how the practices of these intersecting enterprises helped transform Shakespeare from a run-of-the-mill author into the most performed playwright of all time—persuasively demonstrating that by the 1730s commerce, not criticism, was the principal force driving Shakespeare’s cultural dominance.
            Displaying an impressive command of theater and publishing history, Dugas explains why adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays succeeded or failed on the stage and shows that theatrical and publishing concerns exerted a greater influence than aesthetics on the playwright’s popularity. He tells how revivals and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays while he was relatively unknown fueled an interest in publication—exploited by the Tonson publishing firm with expensive collected editions marketed to affluent readers—which eventually led to competition between pricey collections and cheap single-play editions. The resulting price war flooded the market with Shakespeare, which in turn stimulated stage revivals of even his most obscure plays.
In tracing this curious reemergence of Shakespeare, Dugas considers why the Tonsons acquired the copyright to the plays, how the famous edition of 1709 differed from earlier ones, and what effect its publication had on Shakespeare’s popularity. He records all known performances of Shakespeare between 1660 and 1705 to document productions by various companies and to show how their performances shaped the public’s taste for Shakespeare. He also discloses a previously overlooked eighteenth-century engraving that sheds new light on the price war and Shakespeare’s reputation.
            Marketing the Bard is a thoroughly engaging book that ranges widely over the Restoration landscape, containing a wealth of information and insight for anyone interested in theater history, the history of the book, the origins of copyright, and of course Shakespeare himself. Dugas’s analysis of the complex factors that transformed a prolific playwright into the inimitable Bard clearly shows how business produces and packages great art in order to sell it.
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cover of St. Austin Review, The Bard of Avon & the Church of Rome, January/February 2014, Vol. 14, No. 1

St. Austin Review, The Bard of Avon & the Church of Rome, January/February 2014, Vol. 14, No. 1

Joseph Pearce

St. Augustine's Press, 2014

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cover of The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volume 1

The Bard in the Borderlands

An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volume 1

Edited by Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2023

This volume features a wide range of plays that reimagine Shakespeare works from Borderlands perspectives.
 
For several decades, Chicanx and Indigenous theatermakers have been repurposing Shakespeare’s plays to reflect the histories and lived realities of the US–Mexico Borderlands and to create space to tell stories of and for La Frontera. Celebrating this rich tradition, The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera brings a wide range of Borderlands Shakespeare plays together for the first time in a multi-volume open-access scholarly edition. 

This anthology celebrates the dynamic, multilingual reworking of canon and place that defines Borderlands Shakespeare, and it situates these geographically and temporally diverse plays within the robust study of Shakespeare’s global afterlives. The editors offer a critical framework for understanding the artistic and political traditions that shape these plays and the place of Shakespeare within the multilayered colonial histories of the region. Borderlands Shakespeare plays, they contend, do not simply reproduce Shakespeare in new contexts but rather use his work in innovative ways to negotiate colonial power and to envision socially just futures.
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cover of The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volume 2

The Bard in the Borderlands

An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volume 2

Edited by Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2024

An anthology that reimagines Shakespeare’s works from the perspective of the United States–Mexico Borderlands.

For decades, Chicanx and Indigenous theater-makers have worked to repurpose the plays of William Shakespeare to reflect the histories and lived realities of the United States–Mexico Borderlands, or La Frontera. Celebrating this rich tradition, The Bard in the Borderlands brings a wide range of Borderlands Shakespeare plays together for the first time in a multi-volume, open-access scholarly edition, creating space to tell stories of and for this complex and important region.

This second volume continues to celebrate the dynamic, multilingual reworking of canon and place that defines Borderlands Shakespeare, situating geographically and temporally diverse plays within the robust study of Shakespeare’s global afterlives.
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cover of The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volume 3

The Bard in the Borderlands

An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volume 3

Edited by Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2026

The third volume in the anthology, featuring a wide range of plays that reimagine Shakespeare works from Borderlands perspectives.

For several decades, Chicanx and Indigenous theatermakers have been repurposing Shakespeare’s plays to reflect the histories and lived realities of the US–Mexico Borderlands and to create space to tell stories of and for La Frontera. Celebrating this rich tradition, The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera brings a wide range of Borderlands Shakespeare plays together for the first time in a multi-volume open-access scholarly edition. This anthology celebrates the dynamic, multilingual reworking of canon and place that defines Borderlands Shakespeare, and it situates these geographically and temporally diverse plays within the robust study of Shakespeare’s global afterlives.

The plays featured in this volume diverge drastically from Shakespeare, bringing elements of Hamlet, Henry IV, Part 1, Macbeth, and The Tempest into a range of subcultures that challenge dominant structures of power. In so doing, they remix and revise intersecting histories and traditions to heal colonial wounds and to call forth new worlds for fronterizos.

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