This new Handbook offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the meanings and uses of the term ‘peacebuilding’, and presents cutting-edge debates on the practices conducted in the name of peacebuilding. The term ‘peacebuilding’ has had remarkable staying power. Other terms, such as ‘conflict resolution’ have waned in popularity, while the acceptance and use of the term ‘peacebuilding’ has grown to the extent that it is the hegemonic and over-arching term for many forms of mediation, reconciliation and strategies to induce peace. Despite this, however, it is rarely defined and often used to mean different things to different audiences.
Shakespeare’s plays continue to be circulated on a massive scale in a variety of guises – as editions, performances, and adaptations – and it is by means of such mediation that we come to know his drama. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation addresses fundamental questions about this process of mediation, making use of the fraught category of adaptation to explore how we currently understand the Shakespearean work. To adapt implies there exists something to alter, but what constitutes the category of the ‘play’, and how does it relate to adaptation? How do ‘play’ and ‘adaptation’ relate to drama’s twin media, text and performance?
Stories do not actually exist in the world but are created and structured - modeled - through the process of mediation, i.e. through the means and techniques by which they are represented. This is an important field, not only for narratology but also for literary and media studies. The articles in this volume, contributed by international scholars from seven countries, address this problem anew by reviewing the differentiation of mediation and re-defining its dimensions both in literary texts and other media such as drama and theater, film, and computer games.
