Karagiozis―a form of comic folk drama employing stock puppet figures―was immensely popular in Greece until recent years, when newer forms of entertainment have virtually eclipsed it. Derived from ancient Byzantine and Greek sources, it takes its name from the principal puppet character, the clever, humpbacked fool-hero Karagiozis, who appears in many guises, surrounded by a cast of folk caricatures from all walks of life. Kostas and Linda Myrsiades present here a tripartite view of Karagiozis: a translation of a typical text taken directly from a live performance; interviews with one of the last master Karagiozis puppeteers; and an analysis of the place of this indigenous genre in Greek life and culture. The first part of the book examines critical issues concerning the context of Karagiozis performance: its place as an expression of an unofficial social world, as a gender statement that reveals the split vision of its culture, as an expression of a pluralistic society, and as an indigenous event shaped by economic, geographic, political, and social forces. The second portion offers insights from interviews with Giorgos Haridimos, until his retirement Greece's preemi-nent Karagiozis player, and a translation of his classic text "Karagiozis Baker" reflecting an actual performance by Haridimos. Through novel verbal and typographic devices, Kostas Myrsiades succeeds in preserving the full flavor of his oral source―its rhythms and intonations, its linguistic nuances, and even audience reactions―to convey the actual experience of the theatergoer. This unique translation thus establishes a model for collecting and disseminating oral theatrical tradition. Folklorists, cultural historians, and students of theater will appreciate this introduction to an ancient but little known folkloric form.

Karagiozis: Culture and Comedy in Greek Puppet Theater

Myrsiades, Linda

Myrsiades, Kostas

Humor & Entertainment

University Press of Kentucky

Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection: The Legal Culture and Trials, 1794-1795

History

Americas

University of Georgia Press

Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection treats the legal culture that informed the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and its trials. Linda Myrsiades examines conflicts between state and federal courts and the judicial philosophy of Federalist judges, as well as grand jury charges, law reports, judges' bench notes, and defense notes for the trials, to develop a portrait of the hegemony of official interpretations of the law. At the same time, the book illuminates popular attitudes about the courts and the law and explores the nature of extralegal courts operated by the people. Myrsiades captures the agitation-propaganda efforts mounted by rebel communities and groups together with petitions and speeches in the rebel assemblies in demonstrating that popular culture offered a clear politico-legal justification within the rebel movement on the unofficial side of legal culture. Myrsiades thus presents a holistic picture of the legal culture of the rebellion. Her examination denies the common perception that the rebel movement was incoherent and chaotic and presents an alternative view that its perceptions are a necessary correlative to understanding how treason law functioned and what its critical elements were in the late-eighteenth century, serving as a lesson for democracy in the present era.

Splitting the Baby is one of the few cultural approaches to the study of abortion. It considers abortion culture in the variety of its faces in American history and law through the literary and visual arts – poetry, short fiction, cartoons, advertising, and rhetoric. Examining the expressive world of cultural products presents a more human side to the abortion wars, interrupting our hold on singular ideas to more fully engage abortion as a conversation. Intended for students of literature and law, cultural studies, women’s studies, and interdisciplinary studies, this book capitalizes on the richness of abortion culture without limiting it to a singular political or disciplinary perspective. Because it accesses the deep well of care and concern behind the legal and political problems that arise from the abortion debate, it opens its readers to an experience that is fundamental to the human condition – an experience that touches both life and death, the cradle and the grave.

Splitting the Baby: The Culture of Abortion in Literature and Law, Rhetoric and Cartoons (Eruptions: New Feminism Across the Disciplines)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

Focusing on doctors' feuds and duels, yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia, and a court-martial of the medical director of army hospitals in the Revolutionary War, this title is set during a time when American medicine was caught in a period of catastrophic change.

Medical Culture in Revolutionary America: Feuds, Duels and a Court Martial

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Book by Myrsiades, Linda, Myrsiades, Kostas

Cultural Representation in Historical Resistance: Complexity and Construction in Greek Guerrilla Theater

UNKNO

Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America: Dissecting the Rush v. Cobbett Trial, 1799 offers the first deep analysis of the most important libel trial in post-revolutionary America and an approach to understanding a much-studied revolutionary figure, Benjamin Rush, in a new light as a legal subject. This libel trial faced off the new nation’s most prestigious physician-patriot, Benjamin Rush, against its most popular journalist, William Cobbett, the editor of Porcupine’s Gazette. Studied by means of a rare and substantial surviving transcript, the trial features six litigating counsel whose narrative of events and roles provides a unique view of how the revolutionary generation saw itself and the legacy it wished to leave to its progeny. The trial is structured by assaults against medical bleeding and its premier practitioner in yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s in Philadelphia, on the one hand, and castigates the licentiousness of the press in the nation’s then-capital city, on the other. As it does so, it exemplifies the much-derided litigiousness of the new nation and the threat of sedition that characterized the development of political parties and the partisan press in late eighteenth-century America.

Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America: Dissecting the Rush v. Cobbett Trial, 1799 (Studies in Eighteenth-Century America and the Atlantic World)

Lehigh University Press

Law in early America was culturally special, not just a foundation for history but for the culture that bound the nation and its collective identity. From Treason to Runaway Slaves studies six high-profile trials (military order, Indian murder, land seizure, treason, libel, interracial urban crime) that incorporate themes to which the early republic attached special significance. The trials demonstrate the criticality of legal culture and legal history and the central role of the rule of law in a democracy. Tracking the new nation's bitterest and most challenging moments, we are led to ask what lies below the surface; what is American society really like; how did we come to be who we are? The book fits into the area of eighteenth-century legal culture and history, tracing across the chapters the development of early American law during the critical formative period 1783 to 1808 and focusing on important historical moments (courts martial in the American Revolution, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Philadelphia Yellow Fever epidemic, runaway slaves, among others). It attends to such areas of law as treason, libel, land law, murder, and racial justice as well as the growth of a legal profession and the changing influence of judges, juries, and lawyers.

From Treason to Runaway Slaves: Legal Culture in New Republic Trials, 1783–1808 (The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Law, Culture, and the Humanities)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Myrsiades, Linda. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Myrsiades, Linda

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Myrsiades, Linda. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Karagiozis: Culture and Comedy in Greek Puppet Theater

Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection: The Legal Culture and Trials, 1794-1795

Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection: The Legal Culture and Trials, 1794-1795

Splitting the Baby: The Culture of Abortion in Literature and Law, Rhetoric and Cartoons (Eruptions: New Feminism Across the Disciplines)

Medical Culture in Revolutionary America: Feuds, Duels and a Court Martial

Cultural Representation in Historical Resistance: Complexity and Construction in Greek Guerrilla Theater

Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America: Dissecting the Rush v. Cobbett Trial, 1799 (Studies in Eighteenth-Century America and the Atlantic World)

From Treason to Runaway Slaves: Legal Culture in New Republic Trials, 1783–1808 (The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Law, Culture, and the Humanities)