NORWAY AUTHOR · TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH · FICTION
Also known as: Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson, Bjornstjerne Bjornson
Norwegian writer, Nobel Prize winner in 1903.
SCENE: A spacious whitewashed room in Dreissiger's house at Peterswaldau, where the weavers must deliver their finished webs.
— from Three Plays
Mary, queen of Scots
1882
From the rhyme sung by our children to the bloodline of English royalty, no one can deny Mary, Queen of Scots has unbeknown to us permanently taken root in the English people. Born in the aftermath of Henry VIII's "Great Matter" to a king who would have preferred a son, never knowing his daughter would be the matriarch of a powerful dynasty. In 14 December 1542 with only 6 days of age she was the anointed queen of Scotland, for a year the 17 year old was also the queen of France. She lived with regal dignity, chivalry and pride. However, she was unable to prevent her downfall due to the fact that she upheld medieval values in an increasingly Machiavellian world, but above all, that unlike Elizabeth I who was first a monarch, Mary Stuart nee Bruce was first a woman
Prentice Hall Literature -- Platinum
A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the Italian: novella for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning 'new'. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term romance.
Three Plays
World-renowned historian Howard Zinn has turned to drama to explore the legacy of Karl Marx and Emma Goldman and to delve into the intricacies of political and social conscience perhaps more deeply than traditional history permits. Three Plays brings together all this work, including the previously unpublished Daughter of Venus, along with a new introductory essay on political theater, and prefaces to each of the plays.“The first act of ‘Emma,’ Howard Zinn’s play about Emma Goldman, is a small miracle. Here is a drama that holds down the heroics, polemics and didacticism to which works about heroes and heroines are prone. True, Emma is idealized; she is loving, honest, selfless, daring, but she is also human and believable.”—Walter Goodman, New York Times“[Marx in Soho is] an imaginative critique of our society’s hypocrisies and injustices, and an entertaining, vivid portrait of Karl Marx as a voice of humanitarian justice — which is perhaps the best way to remember him.” —Kirkus Reviews“[Daughter of Venus’s] central concerns — personal and social ethics; the balance of obligations to ourselves, our families, and our fellow citizens; the uses and abuses of political and scientific power — remain as timely as ever. . . . Zinn not only displays a fluid and passionately committed style but also is attempting to do something interesting with it: to interweave a story of familial tensions and national politics, and in doing so to remind us that the way we live our lives on the small, local, day-to-day scale of family life can have repercussions and implications for the life of the nation at large.”—Louise Kennedy, Boston Globe