Shakespeare: His Infinite Variety. Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of His Death

Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney, Grzegorz Zinkiewicz

The great asset of Shakespeare: His Infinite Variety is its wide historical and geographical range - that is, from the time of the Bard himself to the latest metamorphoses of meanings new electronic media made available. Every reader, depending on his/her age and prior experience with Shakespeare, is at a different moment of this great historical-theoretical continuum of world culture. Everyone can also begin one’s own intellectual journey through cultural history - any time, any place. [...] Despite the once popular but now outdated post-truths, history has not ended. This volume testifies to the benefits of combining historical perspective in its fairly elementary version, which is a linear sequence of events, with an in-depth analysis of the transformations in understanding, exhibiting, and using (appropriating) Shakespeare’s works in our rapidly changing reality. Prof. Marta Wiszniowska-Majchrzyk

Shakespeare: His Infinite Variety. Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of His Death. Second Edition

Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney, Grzegorz Zinkiewicz

The great asset of Shakespeare: His Infinite Variety is its wide historical and geographical range - that is, from the time of the Bard himself to the latest metamorphoses of meanings new electronic media made available. Every reader, depending on his/her age and prior experience with Shakespeare, is at a different moment of this great historical-theoretical continuum of world culture. Everyone can also begin one’s own intellectual journey through cultural history - any time, any place. [...] Despite the once popular but now outdated post-truths, history has not ended. This volume testifies to the benefits of combining historical perspective in its fairly elementary version, which is a linear sequence of events, with an in-depth analysis of the transformations in understanding, exhibiting, and using (appropriating) Shakespeare’s works in our rapidly changing reality. Prof. Marta Wiszniowska-Majchrzyk

Some Renaissance/ Early Modern Topoi in the Twenty First Century

Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney, Grzegorz Zinkiewicz

This collection of essays is in part the result of an international research project “Revisiting the Renaissance: Poland and the Low Countries in Early Modern Europe – The Culture of Self-Deception”, which was carried out by the British and Commonwealth Department of the University of Lodz in Poland and the Vakgroep Nederlandse Literatur en Alegemene Literatuuretenschap of the University of Ghent in Belgium (2009–2012). The goal of this project was to validate the ongoing debate on the Renaissance by looking at its significance in European civilization through the prism of marginalized cultures. As the essays presented in this volume demonstrate, the scope of our interest has grown over time so that issues such as literature, religion, diplomacy, politics, and arts are seen not only from Polish and Netherland perspectives. This book is a unique publication on the sixteenth-seventeenth European culture, politics and societal studies. Although the book is primarily addressed to scholars and academics who study the Renaissance / Early Modern episteme, it can also attract the attention of many other circles of readers interested in an interdisciplinary discourse devoted to e.g. governance, theology, religion, politics, diplomacy and literature. Since the essays focus on facts, processes, texts and state formations, which do not generally belong to the general discourse, they pose a challenge to the conventional perception of the period under discussion.