Bøker av Graham Holderness

This highly original novel by the internationally acclaimed author Graham Holderness is part historical novel, part contemporary chronicle, part autobiographical fiction. It explores the challenges of personal ancestry and heritage, and the contemporary loyalties of us all in a rapidly changing country. Holderness tells the story of a typical modern intellectual, nearing the end of his career as an academic, a radical political activist and internationalist facing fundamental choices of how to live and where to belong.The focal figure is rootless, unanchored, a citizen of the world, but with no homeland of his own. Yet on his sixtieth birthday his son, who has taken an interest in family history, gives him as a present a genealogical DNA test. From this modest intervention flow various unforeseen consequences which ultimately turn his world upside down. Exploring an unknown history, he realises that his own ancestry is nothing like what he believed it might be. He has to learn more about remote periods of history endured and shaped by his ancestors. He is forced to revalue his parents, his children, himself and his place in the world. Eventually he is compelled to revalue his country.In parallel to the modern story is a separate narrative, tracing the fortunes of his putative ancestors, a father and son forced to flee from Denmark after the Saxon invasion of 934, and then compelled to quit Iceland by a volcanic eruption. Eventually they settle in England, and after fighting for King Aethelstan at the battle of Brunanburh, find their status changing from refugees to settlers with their own stake in the country,The two narratives converge in Brexit Britain. In the light of his new knowledge and understanding, and a new relationship with his children, our ''hero'' encounters the challenges of asking where do his loyalties lie? To whom does he belong - to the world, or to the past, family, country? Is he a cosmopolitan internationalist, an arriviste who has never truly belonged, whose homeland is always somewhere else? Or a native of England, and a citizen of a new, revalued Britain?

This highly original new book by a leading Shakespeare expert and cultural critic is a book of convergences.First, the collision between Japan and Shakespeare, who was imported by the Meiji Empire in the 1880s, along with western technology and culture, as a contemporary dramatist.Second, the later historicist juxtaposition of Shakespeare''s plays with the 600-year long samurai era, as engineered by Japanese cinema and theatre directors such as Akira Kurosawa and Yukio Ninagawa, whose major productions of Shakespeare''s tragedies form the focus of this study.And third, the encounter between these masterpieces of Japanese Shakespeare adaptation and the author''s own idiosyncratic perspective on the world of the samurai, shaped over a lifetime of diverse cultural influences.Here the focus is much broader and more eclectic: 1950s war films, CND anti-nuclear propaganda, Ian Fleming''s You Only Live Twice, Edward Zwick''s film The Last Samurai. Nothing is off limits in this personal testimony, as the author writes frankly about his wife''s Buddhism, his collection of samurai swords, his problems with alcohol, his wanderings in Kew Gardens, his experience of Coronavirus lockdown.This frank revelation of how a specific hermeneutic perspective is formed throws light on Japanese Shakespeare, on the nature of critical interpretation, and on the role of imagination in our reception of literature and drama.

William Shakespeare stills stands head and shoulders above any other author in the English language, a position that is unlikely ever to change. Yet it is often said that we know very little about him - and that applies as much to what he believed as it does to the rest of his biography. Or does it? In this authoritative new study, Graham Holderness takes us through the context of Shakespeare's life, times of religious and political turmoil, and looks at what we do know of Shakespeare the Anglican. But then he goes beyond that, and mines the plays themselves, not just for the words of the characters, but for the concepts, themes and language which Shakespeare was himself steeped in - the language of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Considering particularly such plays as Richard ll, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, Holderness shows how the ideas of Catholicism come up against those of Luther and Calvin; how Christianity was woven deep into Shakespeare's psyche, and how he brought it again and again to his art.

A study that describes and chronicles the mythology of Venice that was formulated in the Middle Ages. It focuses on how that mythology was employed by Shakespeare to explore themes of conversion, change, and metamorphosis.

One in a series on Shakespeare's original texts, including facsimile pages, this version of "The Taming of a Shrew" is claimed to be, in some ways, the most authentic version of the play that we have. Included are an introduction, notes, and a theoretical, historical and contextual critique.