Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th-17th Centuries

Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th-17th Centuries PDF

Author: Robin Leigh O'Bryan

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789463728119

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This collection of essays examines the vogue for games and game playing as expressed in art and literature in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Focusing on games as a leitmotif of creative expression, these scholarly inquiries are framed as a response to two main questions: how were games used to convey special meanings in art and literature, and how did games speak to greater issues in European society? In chapters dealing with chess, playing cards, board games, dice, gambling, and outdoor and sportive games, essayists show how games were used by artists, writers, game makers and collectors, in the service of love and war, didactic and moralistic instruction, commercial enterprise, politics and diplomacy, and assertions of civic and personal identity. Offering innovative iconographical and literary interpretations, their analyses reveal how games"played, written about, illustrated and collected"functioned as metaphors for a host of broader cultural issues related to gender relations and feminine power, class distinctions and status, ethical and sexual comportment, philosophical and religious ideas, and conditions of the mind.

Games and Gaming in Early Modern Drama

Games and Gaming in Early Modern Drama PDF

Author: Caroline Baird

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-24

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 3030508579

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This book is a close taxonomic study of the pivotal role of games in early modern drama. The presence of the game motif has often been noticed, but this study, the most comprehensive of its kind, shows how games operate in more complex ways than simple metaphor and can be syntheses of emblem and dramatic device. Drawing on seventeenth-century treatises, including Francis Willughby’s Book of Games, which only became available in print in 2003, and divided into chapters on Dice, Cards, Tables (Backgammon), and Chess, the book brings back into focus the symbolism and divinatory origins of games. The work of more than ten dramatists is analysed, from the Shakespeare and Middleton canon to rarer plays such as The Spanish Curate, The Two Angry Women of Abington and The Cittie Gallant. Games and theatre share common ground in terms of performance, deceit, plotting, risk and chance, and the early modern playhouse provided apt conditions for vicarious play. From the romantic chase to the financial gamble, and in legal contest and war, the twenty-first century is still engaging the game. With its extensive appendices, the book will appeal to readers interested in period games and those teaching or studying early modern drama, including theatre producers, and awareness of the vocabulary of period games will allow further references to be understood in non-dramatic texts.

A Cultural History of Comedy in the Early Modern Age

A Cultural History of Comedy in the Early Modern Age PDF

Author: Andrew McConnell Stott

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-12-30

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1350187704

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Drawing together scholars with a wide range of expertise across the early modern period, this volume explores the rich field of early modern comedy in all its variety. It argues that early modern comedy was shaped by a series of cultural transformations that included the emergence of the entertainment industry, the rise of the professional comedian, extended commentaries on the nature of comedy and laughter, and the development of printed jestbooks. It was the prime site from which to satirize a rapidly-changing world and explore the formation of new social relations around questions of gender, authority, identity, and commerce, amongst others. Yet even as it reacted to the novel and the new, comedy also served as a receptacle for the celebration of older social rituals such as May games and seasonal festivities. The result was a complex and contested mix of texts, performances, and concepts providing a deep tradition that abides to this day. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to early modern comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

Cinderella's Glass Slipper

Cinderella's Glass Slipper PDF

Author: Genevieve Warwick

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-10-20

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1009263978

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Cinderella's Glass Slipper studies Renaissance material cultures through the literary prism of fairy-tale objects. The literary fairy-tale first arose in Renaissance Venice, originating from oral story-telling traditions that would later become the Arabian Nights, and subsequently in the Parisian salons of Louis XIV. Largely written by, for, and in the name of women, these literary fairy-tales took a lightly comic view of life's vicissitudes, especially female fortune in marriage. Connecting literary representations of bridal goods - dress, jewellery, carriages, toiletries, banqueting and confectionary foods - to the craft histories of their making, this Element offers a newly-contextualised socio-economic account of Renaissance luxe, from architectural interiors to sartorial fashioning and design. By coupling Renaissance luxury wares with their fairy-tale representation, it locates the recherché materialities of bridal goods - gold, silver, diamonds and silk - within expanding colonialist markets of a newly-global early modern economy in the age of discovery.

Games and War in Early Modern English Literature

Games and War in Early Modern English Literature PDF

Author: Jim W. Daems

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2019-08-14

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 9048544831

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This pioneering collection of nine original essays carves out a new conceptual path in the field by theorizing the ways in which the language of games and warfare inform and illuminate each other in the early modern cultural imagination. They consider how warfare and games are mapped onto each other in aesthetically and ideologically significant ways in the early modern plays, poetry or prose of William Shakespeare, Thomas Morton, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Jonathan Swift, among others. Contributors interpret the terms 'war games' or 'games of war' broadly, freeing them to uncover the more complex and abstract interplay of war and games in the early modern mind, taking readers from the cockpits and clowns of Shakespearean drama, through the intriguing manuals of cryptographers and the ingenious literary wargames of Restoration women authors, to the witty but rancorous paper wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama PDF

Author: Mark Kaethler

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-05-10

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1501513990

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Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama represents the first sustained study of Middleton’s dramatic works as responses to James I’s governance. Through examining Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London, Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. By drawing upon earlier forms of dramatic intervention, James’s writings, and popular literature that blossomed during the Jacobean period, including news pamphlets, the book surveys a selection of Middleton’s writings, ranging from his first extant play The Phoenix (1604) to his scandalous finale A Game at Chess (1624). In the course of this investigation, the author identifies that although Middleton’s drama spurs political awareness and questions authority, it nevertheless simultaneously promotes alternative structures of power, which manifest as misogyny and white supremacy.

Perspectives on the European Videogamehb

Perspectives on the European Videogamehb PDF

Author: NAVARRO-REMESAL

Publisher:

Published: 2021-12-20

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9789463726221

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1. Despite the creative and innovative strength of European videogame companies, the study of the European videogame, as well as of the European gaming culture, is still a rather unexplored field. 2. This book includes and emphasises a supranational perspective on the European videogame, unlike other previous works focused on specific national cases. 3. Very often, the link Europe-videogames has been addressed through the question of the representations of Europe and, especially, European history (with World War II as the most common case). This book includes the question of representations of Europe but it doesn't limit itself to it, paying also attention to the design styles and approaches of European creators.

A United Europe of Things

A United Europe of Things PDF

Author: Jakub Sawicki

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2024-01-01

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 3031483367

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This volume studies high and late medieval material culture in a Pan-European context. The idea of ‘unity of culture’ in Medieval Latin Europe is well known in historical texts, especially when it concerns the so-called ‘Europe North of the Alps’. This book investigates the similarities and differences in material culture between areas, regions and political entities and opens the dialogue for a more interregional discussion. The editors acknowledge that there are numerous challenges in understanding the phenomenon the volume addresses, the fundamental one being defining (or even redefining) a common material culture of Europe. Important in determining this is greater appreciation of how objects reflect interactions between peoples, both local and foreign, which can be driven by a variety of factors, including trade, conflict and diplomacy etc. But just as important is observing the differences between ‘things’ across Europe, reflecting developments and transformations its cultural, social and economic history. These works are traditionally presented in isolation or at the local level, maybe even in very specialized tomes, as often it is thought their observation are not relevant to wider discourses. Conversely, what is clear, however, is that by interconnecting these seemingly introvert studies of specific artefact types or sites etc., readers can better appreciate the similarities and differences in material culture across Europe. This book is of interest to researchers in archaeology and material culture.

The Royal Game of the Goose

The Royal Game of the Goose PDF

Author: Adrian Seville

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 9781605830575

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"Numerous illustrations in color and black and white. Preface by former Grolier Club president William H. Helfand and introductory essays by Adrian Seville, followed by a catalogue of 71 games on show at the Club, February 24-May 14, 2016. Includes bibliography and index. "The Royal Game of the Goose" dates from medieval times. It is the simplest of games: throw the dice to race to the end of the spiral track. No choice of move, no demonstration of skill. Yet this game has spawned thousands of variants, has influenced early American board games, and is still going strong in Europe. The exhibition, based on Adrian Seville's collection in London, brings together 70 of these remarkable games. They are not primarily aimed at children, though some are educational, including the finely-printed games for the aristocratic cadets of 17th and 18th century France. Others are definitely for adults, including a polemical game on a religious heresy that still has power to shock by its imagery. Here too are games for politics, advertising - and just sheer family fun. One group of Goose Games shows how America was viewed from across the pond, including a 17th century game that depicts unique images of Native Americans. And, at the end of the 19th century, Jules Verne published a novel which describes a fantastical Goose Game in which the players travel across America to win a legacy from a Chicago millionaire. The final section invites you to try your luck in progressing from Errand Boy to "respected Banker and a good citizen." -- description from Oak Knoll Books.

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