Beginning theory (fourth edition)

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.

This book explores representations of queer migrant Muslims in international literature and film from the 1980s to the present. It brings together a variety of contemporary writers and filmmakers of Muslim heritage engaged in vindicating same-sex desire from several Western locations. The book approaches queer Muslims as figures forced to negotiate their identities according to the expectations of the West and of their migrant Muslim communities. It coins the concept of queer micropolitical disorientation via the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Sara Ahmed and Gayatri Gopinath. The author argues that depictions of queer Muslims in the West disorganise the social categories that make up contemporary Western societies. The study covers three main themes: queer desire across racial and national borders; Islamic femininities and masculinities; and the queer Muslim self in time and place. These thematic clusters examine the nuances of artistic depictions of queer Muslims’ mundane challenges to Western Islamophobia and Islamicate heteronormativity. Written in a scholarly but accessible style, this is a timely contribution to the controversial topic of Islam and homosexuality, forging understanding about the dissident position of Muslims who contravene heteronormative values and their equivocal political position in the West.

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.