Books published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Hamlet stands as a high water mark of canonical art, yet it has equally attracted rebels and experimenters, those avant-garde writers, dramatists, performers, and filmmakers who, in their adaptations and appropriations, seek new ways of expressing innovative and challenging thoughts in the hope that they can change perceptions of their own world. One reason for this, as the book argues, is that the source text that is their inspiration was written in the same spirit. Hamlet as a work of art exhibits many aspects of the ';vanguard' movements in every society and artistic milieux, an avant-garde vision of struggle against conformity, which retains an edge of provocative novelty. Accordingly, it has always inspired unorthodox adaptations and can be known by a neglected portion of the company it keeps, the avant-garde in every age. After placing Hamlet alongside ';cutting edge' works in Shakespeare's time, such as Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, chapters deal with the ways in which experimental writers, theatre practitioners, and film-makers have used the play down to the present day to develop their own avant-garde visions. This is a part of the uncanny ability of Shakespeare's Hamlet to be ';ever-now, ever-new.'

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a host of journalists, ministers, medical doctors, businessmen, lawyers, labor leaders, politicians, and others called for an assault on poverty, slums, disreputable boarding houses, alcoholism, prostitution, sweatshop conditions, inadequate educational facilities, and other social evils. Although they represented an array of political positions and advocated a range of strategies to deal with what they deemed problems, historians have come to term this impulse urban reform or the urban reform movement. This book considers the history of reform ideology in Canada. It does so by considering four leading reformers living in what might be described as the most Canadian of Canadian cities, Winnipeg, Manitoba. While the book engages in discussions/debates surrounding the particular individuals it considers, its more general argument is that to understand the history of reform in Canada requires viewing reformers as simultaneously experiencing and responding to two basic phenomena simultaneously. It requires understanding them as confronting the polarizing tendencies, exploitation, and sometimes grinding poverty that was central to the economic order they (often unwittingly) helped to impose in northern North America. It also, however, requires seeing them as fundamentally shaped by the process and legacy of the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples, and the changing nature of Aboriginal-settler relations that were also central to the development of Canada.

This is a memoir of the early years of a well-known Chicano scholar whose work and activism were motivated by his Mormon faith. The narrative follows him as an immigrant boy in San Antonio, Texas, who finds religion, goes to segregated schools, participates in the first major school boycott of the modern era in Texas, goes to Viet Nam where he heads an emergency room in the Mekong Delta, and then to college where he becomes involved in the Chicano Movement. Throughout this time he juggles, struggles, and comes to terms with the religious principles that provide him the foundation for his civil rights activism and form the core of his moral compass and spiritual beliefs. In the process he pushes back against those religious traditions and customs that he sees as contrary to the most profound aspects of being a Mormon Christian. This memoir is about activism and religion on the ground and reflects the militancy of people of color whose faith drives them to engage in social action that defies simple political terminology.

Yeats, Shakespeare, and Irish Cultural Nationalism examines Yeats's writing on Shakespeare in the context of his work on behalf of the Irish Literary Revival. While Shakespeare's verse drama provides a source of inspiration for Yeats's poetry and plays, Yeats also writes about Shakespeare in essays and articles promoting the ideals of the Revival, and on behalf of Irish literary nationalism. These prose pieces reveal Yeats thinking about Shakespeare's art and times throughout his career, and taken together they offer a new perspective on the contours of Yeats's cultural politics. This book identifies three stages of Yeats's cultural nationalism, each of which appropriates England's national poet in an idiosyncratic manner, while reflecting contemporary trends in Shakespeare reception. Thus Yeats's fin-de-siecle Shakespeare is a symbolist poet and folk-artist whose pre-modern sensibility detaches him from contemporary English culture and aligns him with the inhabitants of Ireland's rural margins. Next, in the opening decade of the twentieth century, following his visit to Stratford to see the Benson history cycle, Yeats's work for the Irish National Theatre adopts an avant-garde, occultist stagecraft to develop an Irish dramatic repertoire capable of unifying its audience in a shared sense of nationhood. Yeats writes frequently about Shakespeare during this period, locating on the Elizabethan stage the kind of transformational emotional affect he sought to recover in the Abbey Theatre. Finally, as Ireland moves towards political independence, Yeats turns again to Shakespeare to register his disappointment with the social and cultural direction of the nascent Irish state. In each case, Yeats's thinking about Shakespeare responds to the remarkable conflation of aesthetic and religious philosophies constituting his cultural nationalism, thus making a unique case of Shakespearean reception. Taken together, Yeats's writings deracinate Shakespeare, and so contribute significantly to the process by which Shakespeare has come to be seen as a global artist, rather than a specifically English possession.