Bestsellers and masterpieces

This book examines Shakespeare's works in relation to different contexts of production and reception. Several of the chapters explore Shakespeare's relationship with actual printers, patrons and readers, while others consider the representation of writing, reading and print within his works themselves. The collection gives us glimpses into different Shakespeares: Shakespeare the man who lived and worked in Elizabethan and Jacobean London; Shakespeare the author of the works attributed to him; and 'Shakespeare', the construction of his colleagues, printers and readers. In examining these Shakespeares, and the interactions, overlaps and disjunctions between them, the chapters offer different conceptions of Shakespearean 'authorship'. Some chapters try to trace Shakespeare as the creative force behind his works, charting, for example, what variations between different editions of the same play might tell us about his processes of composition. Others focus on the ways in which Shakespeare was the product of a particular historical and cultural moment, and of the processes of publishing and reading. What all of the contributors share, however, is a sense of the importance of books – the books Shakespeare read, the books he represented within his works, the books within which his works were first read – to our understanding of Shakespeare's cultural significance for his contemporaries and for us.

Tattoos in crime and detective narratives: Marking and remarking examines representations of the tattoo and tattooing in literature, television and film, from two periods of tattoo renaissance (1851–1914, and around 1955 to the present). The collection reads tattoos and associated scarification, such as branding, as mimetic devices that mark and remark crime and detective narratives in complex ways. The chapters utilise a variety of critical perspectives drawn from posthumanism, spatiality, postcolonialism, embodiment and gender studies to read the tattoo as individual and community bodily narratives. The collection develops its focus from the first tattoo renaissance and considers the rebirth of the tattoo in contemporary culture through literature, children's literature, film and television. This book has a broad appeal and will be of interest to all literature and media scholars and, in particular, those with an interest in crime and detective narratives and skin studies.

This book is dedicated to the study of computer games in terms of the stories they tell and the manner of their telling. It applies practices of reading texts from literary and cultural studies to consider the computer game as an emerging mode of contemporary storytelling. The book contains detailed discussion of narrative and realism in four of the most significant games of the last decade: ‘Tomb Raider’, ‘Half-Life’, ‘Close Combat’, and ‘Sim City’. It recognises the excitement and pleasure that has made the computer game such a massive global phenomenon.