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Serial Shakespeare explores the dissemination and reassemblage of Shakespeare’s plays in contemporary media culture, regarding the way this taps into but also transforms his preferred themes, concerns and constellations of characters. The appropriations discussed include isolated citations in Westworld and The Wire, a typology of the first female president modelled on figures of female sovereignty, as well as a discussion of what one might call a specifically Shakespearean dramaturgy in Deadwood and The Americans. By proposing a reciprocal exchange between the early modern plays and contemporary serial TV drama, the book focusses on the transhistoric and transmedial dialogue a revisitation of the Bard entails. The readings consider the Shakespeare text again, from a different perspective, but also address the fact that his text comes back to us again, from the past. The book claims that serial TV drama keeps appropriating Shakespeare to give voice to unfinished cultural business regarding the state of the American nation because both share the sense of writing in and for a period of interim. Given that the Bard continues to write and read America, what the book draws into focus is how both scriptwriters and cultural critics can, by repurposing him, come up with narratives that are appropriate to our times.
the first female president is open-ended. More is potentially still to come regarding the countersovereignty each of these anti-heroines embodies, even if the TV shows themselves have aired their final season. Seriality is, furthermore, at play in that, as in House of Cards , all the other TV dramas of the second wave continue to revolve around a first female president. As though cognisant of each other, they seem to be trying out different narrative variations on a thematic concern common to all of them. In that the first female president keeps returning, her
his Lady, and, indeed, in the final season of House of Cards , the appropriation of this tragedy is explicitly stated. 4 After a confrontation with Claire, in which Annette Shepherd was not able to sway the first female president of the United States to sign a deregulation bill that would profit her foundation, she voices her frustration to her son, Duncan: ‘I know that expression. She can’t decide if she’s Lady Macbeth or Macbeth.’ 5 It is precisely this uncertainty which makes the resuscitation of one of Shakespeare’s most conflicted queens in House of
This book examines a range of concepts in the light of feminist critiques, and considers whether they may need to be reconstituted in the light of these critiques. It assesses the impact of feminist debates on mainstream thought. The book provides a balance between 'classic' political concepts and those that are being currently developed by feminist theorists, and to reflect the interconnections between the various sub-fields of Politics as a discipline. Many chapters engage with the concept of politics itself and with the public/private dichotomy. Some chapters discuss issues around the state, power, care, difference and equality and the ways in which different aspects of inequality intersect. Others attempt to contextualise gender in relation to other structural inequalities such as class and 'race'. All the chapters engage in some way with feminist critiques of the dualistic thinking that underpins conventional and narrow understandings of the political, particularly in liberal thought. The book demonstrates that if feminist analysis is taken seriously, conventional patterns of thought and practice are significantly disrupted. It plays a role in encouraging all political theory students and academics to see that good, effective theory requires serious engagement with feminist ideas. As such, these ideas help lay the foundations for more genuinely inclusive political thought.
Women Art Workers constitutes the first comprehensive history of the network of women who worked at the heart of the English Arts and Crafts movement from the 1870s to the 1930s. Challenging the long-standing assumption that the Arts and Crafts simply revolved around celebrated male designers like William Morris, this book instead offers a new social and cultural account of the movement, which simultaneously reveals the breadth of the imprint of women art workers upon the making of modern society. Thomas provides unprecedented insight into how women – working in fields such as woodwork, textiles, sculpture, painting, and metalwork – navigated new authoritative roles as ‘art workers’ by asserting expertise across a range of interconnected cultures so often considered in isolation: from the artistic to the professional, intellectual, entrepreneurial, and domestic. Through examination of newly discovered institutional archives and private papers, and a wide range of unstudied advertisements, letters, manuals, photographs, and calling cards, Women Art Workers elucidates the critical importance of the spaces around which women conceptualised alternative creative and professional lifestyles: guild halls, exhibitions, homes, studios, workshops, and the cityscape. Shattering the traditional periodisation of the movement as ‘Victorian’, this research reveals that the early twentieth century was a critical juncture at which women art workers became ever more confident in promoting their own vision of the Arts and Crafts. Shaped by their precarious gendered positions, they opened up the movement to a wider range of social backgrounds and interests, and redirected the movement’s radical potential into contemporary women-centred causes.
finished with all that, with history and martyrs and fields … being, as I believed, on the brink of daring emancipation.4 Mary Robinson, on her election as the first female President of Ireland in 1990, hailed the women of Ireland in particular – ‘mná na hÉireann’ – who, in choosing a liberal, feminist candidate, ‘instead of rocking the cradle [had] rocked the system’; Irish people, she said, had ‘stepped out from the faded flags of the Civil War and voted for a new Ireland’.5 Some thirty years after O’Brien, Robinson too associates the liberation of Irish women – and
, the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform. The Campaign group comprised mainly law students, and they secured their first legal advisor among Norris’s colleagues at Trinity College. Mary McAleese, then Reid Professor of Law and later President of Ireland, served as their legal advisor from 1975–79. McAleese’s successor, Mary Robinson, was also appointed as Reid Professor of Penal Legislation, constitutional and criminal law, and the law of evidence, and became the first female President of Ireland. Norris sought and received the support of established politicians and
and the other women were not to be invited to the dinner that evening, and wrote to them taking issue with this, that the following year, four women Academicians were finally invited to dine with the men. The Times reported that after dinner that night Hermes enjoyed a ‘thoroughly masculine cigar’.10 Looking at this now from the distance of the twenty-first century it is sobering that the election of the first female President was only announced in December 2019 (painter and printmaker Rebecca Salter). In 1972, Joan Hassall became Master of the Art Workers’ Guild
) of one drug lord leads to the coronation of his violent successor. The two chapters at the centre of the book make use of the pathos formula of the female ruler to discuss the fascination and anxiety that female sovereignty poses in relation to a crisis in American democracy regarding the question of legitimate and illegitimate power. The crossmapping of a series of first female presidents with a typology of queenship in Shakespeare’s plays begins in Chapter 3 with Beau Willimon’s Gothic political thriller, House of Cards , because of its explicit references
the beginning of the decade Mary Robinson was elected the Republic of Ireland’s first female president and her liberal pluralist perspective, together with a committed attachment to human rights reform and feminist causes, reflected the forward-looking attitudes of a younger generation. This was a decade during which long-running debates on divorce and abortion paved the way for new legislation that weakened the influence of the Catholic Church on matters of state and offered women more control over their private lives.3 This change marked a radical shift in how