“The Real Thing”

“The Real Thing”
Author: William Baker
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-05-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1443849022

With a writing career spanning over half a century and encompassing media as diverse as conferences, radio, journalism, fiction, theatre, film, and television, Tom Stoppard is probably the most prolific and significant living British dramatist. The critical essays in this volume celebrating Stoppard’s 75th birthday address many facets of Stoppard’s work, both the well-known, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Shakespeare in Love, as well as the relatively critically neglected, including his novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon and his short stories, “The Story,” “Life, Times: Fragments,” and “Reunion.” The essays presented here analyze plays such as Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Real Thing, and Jumpers, Stoppard’s film adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, his television adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, and his stage adaptations of Chekhov’s plays Ivanov, The Seagull, and The Cherry Orchard, as well as his own theatrical trilogy on Russian history, The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage). Also included is an interview with Tom Stoppard on the 16 November 1982 debut of his play The Real Thing at Strand Theatre, London, and a detailed account of the Stoppard holdings in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. From his fascination with Shakespeare and other historical figures (and time periods) to his exploration of the connection between poetic creativity and scholarship to his predilection for word play, verbal ambiguity and use of anachronism, Stoppard’s work is at once insightful and wry, thought-provoking and entertaining, earnest and facetious. The critical essays in this volume hope to do justice to the brilliant complexity that is Tom Stoppard’s body of work.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron
Author: Julian Cox
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 580
Release: 2003-03-20
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 0892366818

According to one of Julia Margaret Cameron’s great-nieces, “we never knew what Aunt Julia was going to do next, nor did anyone else.” This is an accurate summation of the life of the British photographer (1815–1879), who took up the camera at age forty-eight and made more than twelve hundred images during a fourteen-year career. Living at the height of the Victorian era, Cameron was anything but conventional, experimenting with the relatively new medium of photography, promoting her own art though exhibition and sale, and pursuing the eminent personalities of her age—Alfred Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Thomas Carlyle, and others—as subjects for her lens. For the first time, all known images by Cameron, one of the most important nineteenth-century artists in any medium, are gathered together in a catalogue raisonné. In addition to a complete catalogue of Cameron’s photographs, there is information on her life and times, initial experiments, artistic aspirations, techniques, small-format images, albums, commercial strategies, sitters, and sources of inspiration. Also provided are a selected bibliography of publications on Cameron, a list of exhibitions of her work held both in her time as well as our own, and a summary of important collections where her pictures can be found.

To Walt Whitman, America

To Walt Whitman, America
Author: Kenneth M. Price
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2005-10-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807876119

Walt Whitman "is America," according to Ezra Pound. More than a century after his death, Whitman's name regularly appears in political speeches, architectural inscriptions, television programs, and films, and it adorns schools, summer camps, truck stops, corporate centers, and shopping malls. In an analysis of Whitman as a quintessential American icon, Kenneth Price shows how his ubiquity and his extraordinarily malleable identity have contributed to the ongoing process of shaping the character of the United States. Price examines Whitman's own writings as well as those of writers who were influenced by him, paying particular attention to Whitman's legacies for an ethnically and sexually diverse America. He focuses on fictional works by Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Dos Passos, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Naylor, among others. In Price's study, Leaves of Grass emerges as a living document accruing meanings that evolve with time and with new readers, with Whitman and his words regularly pulled into debates over immigration, politics, sexuality, and national identity. As Price demonstrates, Whitman is a recurring starting point, a provocation, and an irresistible, rewritable text for those who reinvent the icon in their efforts to remake America itself.

Alamo Defenders

Alamo Defenders
Author: James W Bancroft
Publisher: Frontline Books
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2024-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 139900994X

At a critical stage of the Texas Revolution a large Mexican army surrounded a makeshift fortification known locally as the Alamo. It was there that a small defensive force of mostly Texans had become holed up, and where they vowed to ‘never surrender or retreat’. After a siege lasting thirteen days, the Mexicans assaulted the fortification during the early hours of Sunday, 6 March 1836. Except for a few women and children, and one male slave, everyone inside was killed. All this is well known, and to this day the Alamo Mission is an American national monument sacred to the people of Texas. The Battle of Alamo sits alongside such dramatic last stands as Little Big Horn and Rorke’s Drift as one of the most heroic and sacrificial battles against the odds in military history. But what few realise is that a large number of those who fought and died for Texas at the Alamo were British. For the first time, the stories of these men, their lives and their deaths at the Alamo, are revealed. They include an Englishman named William Blazeby, who led a troop of New Orleans Greys; a Scotsman named John McGregor, who took to his bagpipes and accompanied Davy Crockett on the fiddle to keep up the spirits of the defenders; and an Irishman named Robert Evans, who, as Master of Ordnance was shot down while trying to set light to the gunpowder in the chapel when the battle was lost. Through men such as these, the full story of this iconic encounter in the history of the United States of America is told in detail by the author. The roles of the opposing commanders, the infamous General Santa Anna and Lieutenant Colonel William ‘Buck’ Travis, are also examined. At the same time, James Bancroft also investigates the death of James Bowie, renowned, of course, for his large hunting knife, and Davy Crockett. Exactly how the so called ‘King of the Wild Frontier’ met his end has been the subject of controversial debate ever since Texas fought off its Mexican shackles – thanks in no small measure to those Britons who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their American comrades on the crumbling walls of the Alamo more than 185 years ago.

An Eye for Genius

An Eye for Genius
Author: Kerry Sutherland
Publisher: Kerry Sutherland
Total Pages: 152
Release:
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

A middle aged author declining in popularity. An up and coming literary agent with an eye for genius. A partnership that would forge a prodigious legacy in American literature. Henry James was a middle-aged author who had established himself on a transatlantic scale when he employed James Brand Pinker as his literary agent in 1898. The changing preferences of a growing audience of readers along with James’s self-defeating practice of shifting from publisher to publisher, rather than adhering to the trade courtesy of remaining loyal to one house, were making the author’s efforts to keep his work in print increasingly difficult; bringing Pinker, who managed the literary business of over 100 authors including Stephen Crane, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and Jack London, into the picture made it possible for James to maintain a presence before the reading public to an extent that would have been impossible without the agent’s assistance. Pinker’s involvement was vital to the continuance of James’s career, as his later works and the New York Edition proved difficult material to place. The agent’s role as the mediator of conflict between the commercial writer and literary artist, positions that James had difficulty reconciling, had considerable influence on the shape of James’s later career and thus the way in which the author is remembered; James’s legacy is therefore clearly tied to Pinker’s efforts. Using correspondence between Pinker, James, and the primary publishers of James’s material from 1898 until Pinker’s death in 1922, along with secondary works addressing the agent’s endeavors during this period, this volume demonstrates the link between Pinker’s work and James’s continued presence in print, both during the author’s lifetime and after his death.