Full Product Details
Author: Jeffrey Knapp (Eggers Professor of English, Eggers Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 23.60cm
, Height: 2.80cm
, Length: 15.70cm
Weight: 0.748kg
ISBN: 9780190634063
ISBN 10: 0190634065
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 23 February 2017
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
With its original critical and historiographical strategies and meticulous scholarship, Pleasing Everyone is a remarkable achievement. Knapp's acute comparative analyses of the performance cultures of Shakespeare's London and Hollywood's 'Golden Age' and sophisticated, lively readings of films and plays make this an outstandingly engaging and stimulating read. -RUSSELL JACKSON, University of Birmingham What happens when, putting our high-toned Renaissance drama next to our lowdown Hollywood cinema, we think them together? In Jeffrey Knapp's strongly argued new study, the outcome is an original-and highly usable-conception of 'mass entertainment' in which art and junk, individual and mass, author and collaboration are always inseparable in their dialectical play. For all its immortal verses, the drama proves as fully invested in the business of popular entertainment as anything that came after it; and despite its programmatic accessibility, the cinema acquires an artistic credibility that makes talk of 'authors' and 'self-reflection' necessary categories of analysis. The intricate readings that carry this argument forward are so fresh that even practiced critical hands may feel they are discovering The Winter's Tale or Citizen Kane for the first time. -D.A. MILLER, University of California, Berkeley In taking on the theater/film dyad, Knapp strikes at the heart of many of the theoretical foundations of the entire field of cinema studies itself, patiently eroding the apparent self-evidence of terms such as 'mass,' 'entertainment,' 'art,' 'modernity,' and 'technology,' by giving them a different history and by showing, through a series of tour-de-force close readings, how that history has been shaped and reflected upon by plays and films themselves. Pleasing Everyone is a game-changer, bringing to cinema and media studies a salutary shift in frame of reference that will be the source of much study and debate. -JAMES SCHAMUS, Columbia University
Author Information
Jeffrey Knapp is the Eggers Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of several books, including An Empire Nowhere: England and America from Utopia to The Tempest (1992), Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (2002), and Shakespeare Only (2009).
