Böcker av Alfred Thomas

The first complete translation of a fascinating piece of Czech literature.

Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 brings a holistic and comparative perspective to ¿plague writing¿ from the later Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. It argues that while the human ¿hardware¿ has changed enormously between the medieval past and the present (urbanization, technology, mass warfare, and advances in medical science), the human ¿software¿ (emotional and psychological reactions to the shock of pandemic) has remained remarkably similar across time. Through close readings of works by medieval writers like Guillaume de Machaut, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century, select plays by Shakespeare, and modern ¿plague¿ fiction and film, Alfred Thomas convincingly demonstrates psychological continuities between the Black Death and COVID-19. In showing how in times of plague human beings repress their fears and fantasies and displace them onto the threatening ¿other,¿ Thomas highlights the danger of scapegoating vulnerable minority groups such as Asian Americans and Jews in today¿s America. This wide-ranging study will thus be of interest not only to medievalists but also to students of modernity as well as the general reader.

Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare's Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.

Although Chaucer is typically labeled as the "Father of English Literature," evidence shows that his work appealed to Europe and specifically European women. Rereading the Canterbury Tales , Thomas argues that Chaucer imagined Anne of Bohemia, wife of famed Richard II, as an ideal reader, an aspect that came to greatly affect his writing.

Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War is the first book to read Shakespeare's drama through the lens of Cold War politics. The book uses the Cold War experience of dissenting artists in theatre and film to highlight the coded religio-political subtexts in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and The Winter's Tale.

In The Winter's Tale, Antigonus announces that his ship has washed up on the shores of Bohemia. How and why landlocked Bohemia? Did Shakespeare not know his geography, or is something else at work here? Alfred Thomas answers these questions by...

A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. This interdisciplinary study helps to explain why Prague - more than any other major European city - has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.