No abstract

Discussions of eroticism usually commence with references to Georges Bataille and his L’Erotisme, whose first English edition was published under the title Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (1962), thus encouraging analyses in terms of transgression. This article opens with a quotation from Zygmunt Bauman’s essay, “On Postmodern Uses of Sex,” which reflects on the instability of the concept and emphasizes its contextualization. This openly declared incongruity raises questions of applicability. What is meant by eroticism today, i.e. in and after postmodernism? The article seeks to explore the relevance of the term in studies of urban drama and tries to suggest a workable approach that would differentiate between the commonly observable erotic material found on display within the premises of the city and the eroticism of the city itself. In the latter case the erotic relationship involves the materiality of the urban context and its user. The essay, focusing on drama, assumes that plays are written for the stage-their proper mode of existence-and deems it necessary to include the city/theatre and city/drama interdependence as well as the nexus of concepts such as urban drama and its genre restrictions into the following analysis.

No abstract

Liminality is inherent in the adaptation process situated ‘in-between’. Proposing the ‘biological’ concept of symbiosis, David Cowart distinguishes between the ‘host’ and the ‘guest’ text. Symbiosis as a shape-shifting concept involves a two-directional adaptation process, an ‘epistemic dialogue’, where interest is in how the later text’s meaning is produced in relation to the earlier and how the overall production of meaning is affected by the hypertext. To obliterate the lines of influence, temporal distance, privilege and importance, it is possible to conceive of the relation between hypotext and the hypertextual ‘attachment’ as rhizomatic and thus to locate the ‘hypertext product’ in a region where historical genealogies either no longer matter or need to be seriously reconceptualized The article discusses the hypotext–hypertext relations in a selection of modern and postmodern adaptations by Maurice Baring, Gordon Bottomley, WTG and Elaine Feinstein and Linda Bamber, as ‘symbiotic attachments’ or rhizomatic developments whose relationship with the Shakespearean text, or rather ‘aggregate’ can be variously defined in narrative terms. I argue that texts located in the position of prologues, epilogues or separately published ‘letters’ – defined as prequels, sequels or gap-fillers and often pointing to an ontological or temporal elsewhere – can be variously defined as elements of the main text, metatexts masquerading as paratexts or framing borders and that they function as generators of meaning.

William Oldroyd’s film Lady Macbeth (2016 release from the UK) is a dark and disturbing portrait of a young woman, Katherine Lester, set in the bleak context of nineteenth-century provincial Scotland. The film offers a transmedia re-reading of Nikolai Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” (1865), a novella roughly appropriating and involving the eponymous Shakespearean character. Avoiding the poetics of period drama á la Belgravia (2020) or Downton Abbey (2010–2015), which offers global audiences shortbread-tin versions of British literature and culture as windswept and white, Oldroyd’s film introduces colour-blind casting to reveal the less-known facts of Britain’s provincial life—astounding numbers of Black people in nineteenth-century north-east England and a complex system of race, class, and gender oppression. The film’s poetics aligns itself with Leskov’s naturalism and thus with the post-heritage darker, dirtier, and more brutal images of the past defined by Andrew Higson as “dirty realism”. This article argues that Lady Macbeth is more interested in the experience of boredom that precedes storytelling than in the story’s well-constructed plot, employs slow cinema strategies, and is influenced by Vilhelm Hammershøi’s art. The film reproduces both Hammershøi’s aesthetics and atmosphere. Rather than consider Oldroyd’s work politically in terms of oppressive white privilege and patriarchy, this article tries to read the adaptation through the lens of a less-conspicuous undercurrent of storytelling, which foregrounds experience instead of scenarios focusing on narratives where moral judgment matters, and where the storyteller assumes responsibility for the life they are retelling.