What use to make of a tyrant? Thomas More’s History of Richard III and the Limits of Early Tudor Historiography

Moreana ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (Number 191- (1-2) ◽  
pp. 159-186
Author(s):  
Gabriela Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Literary Genre ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ideological Stance ◽  
Critical Reflections

The literary genre and ideological stance of More’s History of King Richard III have long been subject to critical debate. While it seems obvious that his portrayal of the last Plantagenet as a full-blown tyrant is anything but historically ‘accurate’, the question remains controversial as to whether this intricately ironic text represents a (somewhat half-hearted) attempt at legitimising the ruling Tudor dynasty’s claim to authority, an implicit rejection of the same, or a more general humanist moral exemplum. Placing More’s Richard within the historiographical practice of its time and reading it alongside his own critical reflections on historiographical method in the debate with Germanus Brixius, this article attempts to access the problem of generic purpose from a meta-literary perspective, reading the text as a self-conscious parodic comment on some of the major strands of early Tudor historiography and as an implicit challenge to the humanists’ confidence in language as a valuable basis for the construction of a commonwealth.

scholarly journals Themes of Chronicle Drama

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-57
Author(s):  
Thamer Mohammad Kadhim ◽  
Safaa Kareem Ali
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Postmodern Literature ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Analytical Methodology ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of ◽  
King John

Chronicle drama occupies a central position in modern literature which represents a field for interaction of ideas and actions, as it works as storage for historical and human experience. It records a sequence for the history. This study aims to examine the main themes of chronicle drama. Thus, it tracks the history of modern literature as a wide source for this literary genre. The study adopts a historical and analytical methodology in order to clarify the broader dimensions related to chronicle drama and its sources. Historically, chronicle drama was used to dramatize the facts and work as an expression of factory life of kings. That’s why King John of Shakespeare in 1553 was the first one of this genre. The study concludes that chronicle drama mirrored surrounding circumstances of the facts since its early times. So, it was effected by the historical conditions. This is clearly appeared in the early works like Henry the Fifths, Tragedy of Richard III The life and Death of Jaike Strew and so, the previously mentioned "The King John". So it was affected politically and socially by the European historical context. The research also indicates that the Elizabethan Dramatists put the basics of the later stage of literature development especially on the level of techniques. This appears in Shakespeare’s works who used to end the drama with restoration and disordering which still exists in postmodern literature.

Shakespeare Afoot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.

scholarly journals Writing letters and chronography in parallel: the case of Michael Glykas’ letter collection and Biblos Chronike in the 12th century

2020 ◽  
Vol 113 (3) ◽  
pp. 837-852
Author(s):  
Eirini-Sophia Kiapidou
Keyword(s):  
Literary Genre ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
Letter Collection

AbstractThis paper focuses on the 12th-century Byzantine scholar Michael Glykas and the two main pillars of his multifarious literary production, Biblos Chronike and Letters, thoroughly exploring for the first time the nature of their interconnection. In addition to the primary goal, i. e. clarifying as far as possible the conditions in which these two works were written, taking into account their intertextuality, it extends the discussion to the mixture of features in texts of different literary genre, written in parallel, by the same author, based on the same material. By presenting the evidence drawn from the case of Michael Glykas, the paper attempts to stress the need to abandon the strictly applied taxonomical logic in approaching Byzantine Literature, as it ultimately prevents us from constitute the full mark of each author in the history of Byzantine culture.

The Diaspora of the Novel

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis
Keyword(s):  
Uneven Development ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type

Reflection on the history of the novel usually begins with consideration of the social, political, and economic transformations within society that favored the “rise” of a new type of narrative. This remains true even with the numerous and important studies appearing during the past ten years, which relate the novel to an everbroadening spectrum of ideological issues—gender, class, race, and, most recently, nationalism. Yet a history of the genre might reflect not just on the novel’s national, but also its transnational, trajectory, its spread across the globe, away from its original points of emergence. Such a history would take into account the expansion of western markets—the growing exportation of goods and ideas, as well as of social, political, and cultural forms from the West—that promoted the novel’s importation by nonwestern societies. Furthermore, it could lead one to examine the very interesting inverse relationship between two kinds of migration, both of which are tied to the First World’s uneven “development” of the Third. In a world system that draws out natural resources in exchange for technologically mediated goods, the emigration of laborers and intellectuals from peripheral societies to the centers of power of the West and the immigration of a western literary genre into these same societies must be viewed as related phenomena.

Wang Guowei and the Establishment of Chinese Drama in the Modern Canon of Classical Literature

T oung Pao ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-201
Author(s):  
Regina Llamas
Keyword(s):  
Yuan Dynasty ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Yuan Dynasty ◽  
Universal Standard

AbstractThis essay examines the process by which Wang Guowei placed Chinese dramatic history into the modern Chinese literary canon. It explores how Wang formed his ideas on literature, drawing on Western aesthetics to explain, through the notions of leisure and play, the impetus for art creation, and on the Chinese notions of the genesis of literature to explain the psychology of literary creation. In order to establish the literary value of Chinese drama, Wang applied these ideas to the first playwrights of the Yuan dynasty, arguing that theirs was a literature created under the right aesthetic and creative circumstances, and that it embodied the value of "naturalness" which he considered a universal standard for good literature. By producing a scholarly critical history of the origins and nature of Chinese drama, Wang placed drama on a par with other literary genres of past dynasties, thus giving it a renewed status and creating at the same time a new discipline of research. Drama had now become an established literary genre.

scholarly journals Prudentia in More’s Utopia: The Ethics of Foresight

2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-68
Author(s):  
Brendan Cook
Keyword(s):  
Thomas More ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
History Of

L’article explore les usages du terme latin prudentia dans l’Utopie (1516) de Thomas More. Cet article explique les apparentes contradictions du traitement de More du mot prudentia, à travers l’étude des utilisations du terme dans un éventail de sources, incluant les dialogues de Cicéron, les écrits éthique de l’humaniste italien du XVe siècle Lorenzo Valla, les écrits d’étude biblique du contemporain de More, Érasme de Rotterdam, et le History of King Richard III de More. Cet article cherche également à évaluer les différentes interprétations de la prudentia dans les versions anglaises de l’Utopie, offre plusieurs options pour les futurs traducteurs.

scholarly journals Musicalization of Literature: Kostas Ostrauskas’s The Quartet

Semiotika ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Giedrė Smolskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Two Systems ◽  
History Of ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Different Levels

In works of literature, music can be found in the form of score fragments, notation symbols, song lyrics, musicological terminology, acoustic aspects of speech, musicians as characters, etc. Such manifestations connect two systems of signification and create an intermedial dialogue between music and literature, which requires a specific methodological approach. According to the intermediality theoretician Werner Wolf, “[t]he verbal text appears to be or become [...] similar to music, or to effects connected with certain compositions, and we get the impression of experiencing music ‘through’ the text”26. This paper discusses possible forms of a musico-literary relationship, the effects they produce, and examples of musicalization found in Kostas Ostrauskas’s play The Quartet (1969). In this play, the musico-literary dialogue is developed on different levels: structure and story, the twofold nature of the characters, intertextuality. Analysis of the play’s architextual relationship with the medium of music helps to identify the specific, musico-literary genre of this play. This unusual genre is defined not only by the content of The Quartet but also by its expression, i.e. graphic nuances, inserted imagery, etc. As shown by the analysis, the play could be understood as a metonymy of the history of both contemporary music and dramatic literature.

Beyond France-Algeria: The Algerian Novel and the Transcolonial Imagination

Algeria ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia C. Harrison
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
Rachid Boudjedra ◽  
Palestinian Question

More than any other literary genre, the Algerian novel has been read as a response to Algeria’s colonial past and as a proving ground for the articulation of a postcolonial national identity. From Kateb Yacine’s anticolonial allegory Nedjma to Kamal Daoud’s attempt to grapple with the legacies of Orientalism in Meursault, contre-enquête, the Algerian novel seems to be caught in a dialectical relationship with the former colonizer, France. Or is it? After a brief survey of post-independence Maghrebi texts that look to other colonial sites, in particular Palestine, to actualize anticolonial critique in the postcolonial period, I examine a series of Algerian novels that activate what I call the transcolonial imagination, connecting heterogenous (post)colonial sites in a critical and comparative exploration of coloniality. Through readings of novels by Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Anouar Benmalek, Yasmina Khadra, and Rachid Boudjedra, I show that the contemporary Algerian novel continues to excavate traces of the colonial, broadly conceived, in the purportedly postcolonial present, casting the Palestinian question, the post-9/11 war on terror, and the 2010-2011 uprisings within a multidirectional and palimpsestic history of the colonial condition writ large.

“This is Not Who We Are:” Progressive Media and Post-Race in the New Era of Overt Racism

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Katherine M Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mentally Ill ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
New Era ◽  
Cable Network ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ideological Stance ◽  
News Outlet

Abstract This analysis explores how a liberal mainstream news outlet—MSNBC—grapples with the overt racism of the current right-wing populist presidential administration in the United States. With a plethora of “good” conservatives and its stable of liberal pundits, the cable network has painted the president as mentally ill or declining, an incompetent purveyor of chaos. In perpetuating a mantra of “this is not who we are” in coverage of overt racism, MSNBC pivots to a more comfortable mainstream space of post-race, an ideological stance that places racism as a fringe anomaly. The post-race pivot belies the country’s ongoing racist legacy, and potentially lulls viewers toward acceptance of official antiracisms that serve hegemonic interests. Thus, the news coverage of the current presidency plays a role in forestalling a meaningful reckoning with the country’s ongoing history of institutional and everyday racism.

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