Critical Survey

Early modern ballads supplied tools for managing information, allowing audiences to compare stories, handle variants and sort through multiple interpretations. These activities revised how and what people learn when they come together, a transformation of social life similarly explored in Macbeth, where this technology takes shape in the messenger Ross. Ross dispenses information but also disrupts and sometimes shuts down lines of communication, connecting courts with battlefields, inventorying the dead and preparing bodies for slaughter. Drawing on scholarship about ballad reception, cognitive ecology and Shakespearean surveillance, I consider Ross's communications within a larger early modern social world which deactivates its members.

Agamben claimed that the experience of language, as it is manifested in the oath, precedes and gives rise to religion, law and politics, and therefore should be seen as a crucial element of the human process. It is my contention to argue here that a particular aspect of Agamben's own language suffers from substantial and conceptual flaws and self-assertive opinions on language and oath. They may put in question his own engagement with the textual evidence and philosophical literature, which makes his own text self-recommending and self-gratifying. In addition, he relied on obscure authors and obsolete interpretations and he failed to engage the relevant issues in the relevant literature that are crucial to his argument. More importantly, Agamben's argument on a certain impotence of language offers little suggestion, except calling upon philosophical obfuscation, to break down the state of exception in the current post-modern condition and avoid the technical apparatuses of the sacrament of power that led first to oath, and then to religion, law and politics.

This article explores how Shakespeare combines dreams and animal symbolism to foreground the characterological driving forces of his plots. The article comprises two case studies. Firstly, it investigates Stanley's dream of a boar in Richard III, showing that Shakespeare draws on the boar's various cultural meanings to construct an image of Richard III that is consistent with revisionist Tudor myths, but that Shakespeare also adapts and reshapes these cultural references for the purpose of character representation. Secondly, the article explores Cleopatra's dream of a dolphin-like Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, arguing that the dream image of the dolphin captures Antony's mercurial character and highlights the tragic distance between Cleopatra's celebration of his delphine character and the steadier character types that the play's social and political reality demands.

This article examines the portrayal of Islam and Muslim women in Renaissance England by considering the historical framework and the changes in the attitudes towards Islam at that time. It contends that Renaissance drama has presented Islam as the Other and the Muslim world as antithetical to Christendom. This article examines two specific Muslim women characters in two early English plays, Queen Tota in Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West Parts I and II, and the Turkish queen in George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar. The work relies on the ideas of several critics, historians and theorists in its analysis of these dramatic works. The two texts are read from a New Historicist perspective. Historical, socio-political and economic factors prevalent during the time are brought back to life and the plays will be explored in light of these.

This article attempts to study a selection of short stories by the contemporary Canadian writer Alice Munro (1931–) focusing on the theme of childhood. It examines the representation of childhood as remembered by adult narrators. The research approaches the stories through the theories of narratology and psychoanalysis. The concepts of the narrator in addition to Freud's theorisation about childhood memories are especially utilised to explore the childhood memories of the adult narrators. The stories selected for this study are ‘The Ottawa Valley’ (1974), ‘Chaddeleys and Flemings’ (1979), ‘The Progress of Love’ (1985) and ‘The Eye’ (2012) with adult narrators.

This article aims at a comparative reading of a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets and Mawlana's ghazals from a Levinasian perspective. We will argue how Shakespeare and Mawlana (Rumi) both represent an ethical relationship with the Other in their poems, where the needs and demands of the Other are prioritised. We will also contend that although Shakespeare's sonnets are not exclusively concerned with secular love or eroticism, they are closer to the Levinasian notion of desire or a-satiable desire in which transcendence becomes possible through need. On the other hand, Mawlana's ghazals in which need and erotic feelings are disparaged also warn about satiable desire and need. This is not to suggest that the results of this comparison can be extended to Shakespeare's sonnets and Mawlana's ghazals in general, but that a similar Levinasian reading is occasionally possible and might shed new light on connections between English and Persian lyric poetry.

Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical tragedies, such as Dynamo, Days Without End, The Iceman Cometh and More Stately Mansions, are characteristic of the misogynistic murder motif. In these tragedies, the male protagonists actually kill or are motivated to kill their mistresses, wives and mothers. We argue that this unique phenomenon is in essence a matricide in disguise, which originated from August Strindberg's philosophy of misogyny and O'Neill's own adolescent psychological trauma. The revelation of O'Neill's misogynistic murder motif and its genealogical origin from the perspective of biographical criticism helps to explicate the dramatist's sense about the tragic fate of human beings.

This article will consider how Carrie Fisher's presentation of the postmodern psyche draws attention to the popular assimilation of Freudian theory during the twentieth century and foregrounds the cultural currency of psychoanalysis and therapy in the Hollywood community. Postcards From the Edge follows the progress of recovering drug addict, Suzanne Vale, whose experience is often characterised by emotional, psychological, linguistic and reality displacement. I begin my discussion by examining the numerous acts of displacement exhibited in the text before considering how the postmodern displacement of reality is linked to Fisher's presentation of the contemporary psyche. The acts of displacement in the novel involve a generalised sense of substitution, replacement or removal as well as offering a more specific engagement with the Freudian concept of displacement as the projection of an anxiety or desire from an original object onto the image of another.