I'm going out and have a real life. I'm going to be somebody. - Esther Blodgett Few Hollywood films have had the impact of the original version of A Star Is Born. Released in 1937 and starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, it was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won two (for best original story and best cinematography). Since then, the movie has been remade three times, attesting to its continued allure. But none have matched the genius and wit of the original. A Star Is Born speaks to the longing for fame and its costs. Young Esther Blodgett leaves her home in North Dakota to make her way as an actress in Hollywood. She attracts the attention of cinema heartthrob Norman Maine, who not only falls in love with her but sees her star potential. He shepherds her through to acclaim. In the meantime, Norman Maine's career plunges in the opposite direction. He was once a favorite leading man, but his alcoholism plunges him into escapades that embarrass the studio and destroy his talents as an actor. Esther's love for Norman is undying, but in the end she cannot protect him from himself. This magnificent and poignant story illumines the ups and downs of celebrity--its pains, its pleasures, its glamor, and its uncertainties. We experience the splendor of Hollywood at the height of its Golden Age. We are also see the heartbreaks and tragedies that accompanied it.

Celebrated but impetuous film director Guido Contini succumbing to the pressures of filming his latest film epic (a musical version of the Casanova story) suffers a midlife crisis. One by one women from his past and present - including his mother his wife his mistress and his leading lady - haunt instruct scold seduce and encourage him until he finally learns to grow up. This new Ensemble version of the hit Broadway musical has an updated score and offers more flexible casting for productions featuring fewer performers. Nine was also adapted into a major motion picture from Rob Marshall the acclaimed director of the 2002 film version of Chicago. Of the Broadway musical Marshall said it is "a sumptuous and emotional work that translates naturally to the film musical genre because of its seamless relationship between fantasy and reality." Composer and lyricist Maury Yeston worked on the film adaptation and created three new songs for the movie musical which was released in December 2009.

Reissued with an essay on Macbeth, this is a collection of essays on Shakespeare's tragedies.

Paul Cantor provides a new and clearly structured introduction to Shakespeare's most famous tragedy. Hamlet's status as tragic hero and the central enigma of the delayed revenge are seen in the light of the play's historical place in the Renaissance at the crossroads of the Christian and the classical traditions. The dramatic and poetic techniques used in the play are discussed, and a final chapter deals with the uniquely varied reception of Hamlet on the stage and in literature generally, from the seventeenth century to the present day.

"In this useful guide, Paul Cantor provides a structured introduction to Shakespeare's most famous tragedy. Cantor examines Hamlet's status as tragic hero and the central enigma of his delayed revenge in light of the play's Renaissance context. He offers students a discussion of the dramatic and poetic techniques used in the play. In the final chapter he deals with the varied reception of Hamlet on the stage and in literature generally from the seventeenth century to the present day."--BOOK JACKET

A new edition of a major philosophical work This remarkable text, first published in 1964, was a landmark of its era and remains, in the words of Michael Löwy, a work of “remarkable richness.” Drawing on Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness , Lucien Goldmann applies the concept of “world visions” to flesh out the similarities between Pascal’s Pensées and Kant’s critical philosophy, contrasting them with the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume. For Goldmann, a leading exponent of the most fruitful method of applying Marxist ideas to literary and philosophical problems, the “tragic vision” marked an important phase in the development of European thought, as it moved from rationalism and empiricism to the dialectical philosophy of Hegel, Marx and Lukàcs. Here he offers a general approach to the problems of philosophy, of literary criticism, and of the relationship between thought and action in human society.

This book examines the far-reaching legacy of one of the great myths of classical antiquity. According to Greek legend, Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, secretly buried her brother in defiance of the orders of Creon, king of Thebes. Creon sentenced Antigone to death, but, before the order could be executed, she committed suicide. The theme of the conflict between Antigone and Creon--between the state and the individual, between young and old, between men and women--has captured the Western imagination for more than 2,000 years. Antigone and Creon are as alive in the politics and poetics of our own day as they were in ancient Athens. Here, Steiner examines the treatment of the Antigone theme in Western art, literature and thought, leading us to look again at the unique influence Greek myths exercise on twentieth-century culture. About the Author: George Steiner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge

For centuries, the author argues, Christian theology has preached the Cross and denied the tragic reality of the human condition. At the same time the secular world has denied the Cross and absorbed endless acts of violence and disaster. This book is not concerned with the horrors of war and reality of conflict, but with their constant pressure upon Western culture. Starting with the Biblical tradition and recalling the triumphs of the Athenian stage, the author traces the vitality of both through the development of the theatre and of European literature. This survey ends in the 20th century and draws conclusions which are critical of cheap religiosity. It proposes an acceptable synthesis of Christian existence and tragic involvement.

This commentary on the action and argument of Sophocles' Antigone is meant to be a reflection on and response to Hegel's interpretation in the Phenomenology (VI.A.a-b), and includes, in addition, two appendixes dealing with Aeschylus' Septem. It thus moves within the principles Hegel discovers in the play but reinserts them into the play as they show themselves across the eccentricities of its plot. Wherever plot and principles do not match, there is a glimmer of the argument: Haemon speaks up for the city and Tiresias for the divine law but neither for Antigone. The guard who reports the burial and presents Antigone to Creon is as important as Antigone or Creon for understanding Antigone. The Chorus too in their inconsistent thoughtfulness have to be taken into account, and in particular how their understanding of the canniness of man reveals Antigone in their very failure to count her as a sign of man's uncanniness: She who is below the horizon of their awareness is at the heart of their speech. Megareus, the older son of Creon, who sacrificed his life for the city, looms as large as Eurydice, whose suicide has nothing in common with Antigone's. She is "all-mother": Antigone is anti-generation.

Discusses the role Greek, Elizabethan, and later tragedy played in society, as well as society's effect on the drama, with regard to tribal belief, kingship, the dead, women, and social order

The first full-length study of Children of Herakles and Suppliant Women to appear in fifty years, Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays uses fresh insights into the Greek conception of gender and the Athenian ideology of civic identity to demonstrate at last the formal elegance and intellectual complexity of two works that are still dismissed as artistic failures within the poet's oeuvre.