Who were Mary Quite Contraryand Georgie Porgie? How could Hey Diddle Diddleoffer an essential astronomy lesson? And if Ring a Ring a Rosesisn't about catching the plague, then, what is it really about? The ingenious book delves into the hidden meanings of the nursery rhymes and songs we all know so well and discovers all kinds of strange tales ranging from Viking raids to firewalking and from political rebellion to slaves being smuggled to freedom. Children have always played at being grown up and all kinds of episodes in our history are still being re-enacted today in a series of dark games (Oranges and Lemons traces a condemned man's journey across London to his execution, Goosie Gander is about dragging a hidden Catholic priest to prison) And there are many many more... Full of vivid illustrations and with each verse reproduced, here are a multitude of surprising stories you won't be able to resist passing on to everyone you know. Your childhood songs and rhymes will never sound the same again.
This builds on the reinterpretations of Rossetti that have emerged in the last 20 years, showing her as a persistent critic of her culture, as well as one who explored language, sexuality and feminine identity.
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN: UOM:39015041910822
Category: Feminism and literature
Page: 200
View: 649
Although Elizabeth Bishop is often viewed as an apolitical, purely descriptive poet, her poems are much more rhetorical than they initially seem. Bishop armed her poems with paradox, oxymorons, and strangely androgynous speakers in order to invite the reader to question his or her own ideas about poetry, feminism and gender politics. Starting literally with the first poem in her first book, Bishop's work asks the reader to question not only their casual reading habits, but also the very ability of language to represent reality - a very deconstructive move for a poet who eschewed literary movements and manifestoes.
Through detailed considerations of poetry by Shakespeare, Keats, Edward Lear, Yeats, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Paul Muldoon, along with sustained meditations on question-forms in poems, the role of fact in fictions, the nature of literary value, speech acts and performative utterances issued by poets, the book sets out a fresh model for relationships between poetry, poets, and readers - one which allows the historical fact of poems having made things happen to be itself happening."--Jacket.
"[Wichmann's] writing has authority rarely encountered.... Not only a comprehensive study but [a] study of Beijing theater. A marvelous overview, a virtual encyclopedia." --Choice "Overall, this is a pathbreaking book in terms of contributing to our understanding of the important Chinese art form that is the Beijing opera. It is a model of production. Its wealth of detail does not prevent it from being eminently readable. The author has unparallelled mastery of knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of her subject. The book will certainly help not only to make Beijing opera better understood in the West but also to make it more widely performed and appreciated." --China Review International, Spring 1994
Poetry. Rhyme and ancestry--literary and otherwise--become contemporary in Elizabeth Treadwell's newest collection, BIRDS & FANCIES, which traces a deepening initiation into the mysteries and continuities of history and biology brought on by motherhood. "Oh daughter thou/shalt grounde & playe." Elizabeth Treadwell was born in Oakland, California in 1967, of Cherokee, English, Irish and unknown heritage; she lives there now with her family. Since 2000 she has served as the director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
