Download or read book Shakespeare s Tragedies and Modern Critical Theory written by James Cunningham and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individual chapters deal with cultural materialism, new historicism, poststructuralism, and feminist criticism. The theoretical basis of each critical mode is examined and some representative critiques analyzed. Most importantly, in each chapter the various interpretations are tested against Shakespeare's texts, and the strengths and weaknesses of the different readings are assessed.
Download or read book Shakespearean Tragedy written by D. F. Bratchell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-24 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reflects changing critical perceptions of Shakespeare's works from Renaissance to modern times and celebrates the power of Shakespearean tragedy. The selection of critical reaction covers both the general concept of Shakespearean tragedy and its expression in the major plays, illustrating the main directions of critical approaches to Shakespearean tragedy and enabling the reader to develop an informed response to Shakespeare's dramatic works. An introductory chapter traces the development of the concept of tragedy from classical times, and its dramatic expression in the time of Shakespeare. Each of Shakespeare's great tragedies - Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello - is considered in turn, and a final chapter summarizes contemporary critical approaches so that the reader can link the best of the critical past with the present critical scene.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Literary Theory written by Jonathan Gil Harris and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: OXFORD SHAKESPEARE TOPICS General Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley Wells Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. How is it that the British literary critic Terry Eagleton can say that 'it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida', or that the Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek can observe that 'Shakespeare without doubt had read Lacan'? Shakespeare and Literary Theory argues that literary theory is less an external set of ideas anachronistically imposed on Shakespeare's texts than a mode - or several modes - of critical reflection inspired by, and emerging from, his writing. These modes together constitute what we might call 'Shakespearian theory': theory that is not just about Shakespeare but also derives its energy from Shakespeare. To name just a few examples: Karl Marx was an avid reader of Shakespeare and used Timon of Athens to illustrate aspects of his economic theory; psychoanalytic theorists from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan have explained some of their most axiomatic positions with reference to Hamlet; Michel Foucault's early theoretical writing on dreams and madness returns repeatedly to Macbeth; Jacques Derrida's deconstructive philosophy is articulated in dialogue with Shakespeare's plays, including Romeo and Juliet; French feminism's best-known essay is Hélène Cixous's meditation on Antony and Cleopatra; certain strands of queer theory derive their impetus from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's reading of the Sonnets; Gilles Deleuze alights on Richard III as an exemplary instance of his theory of the war machine; and postcolonial theory owes a large debt to Aimé Césaire's revision of The Tempest. By reading what theoretical movements from formalism and structuralism to cultural materialism and actor-network theory have had to say about and in concert with Shakespeare, we can begin to get a sense of how much the DNA of contemporary literary theory contains a startling abundance of chromosomes - concepts, preoccupations, ways of using language - that are of Shakespearian provenance.
Download or read book William Shakespeare written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of William Shakespeare.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Tragic Frontier written by Willard Farnham and published by Literary Licensing, LLC. This book was released on 1963 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier: The World Of His Final Tragedies is a book written by Willard Farnham that explores the themes and settings of William Shakespeare's final tragedies. Farnham argues that Shakespeare's last plays, including Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra, are set in a frontier world where traditional values and structures are breaking down. He examines the ways in which Shakespeare uses this frontier setting to explore themes of power, ambition, betrayal, and redemption.Farnham also delves into the historical context of Shakespeare's final plays, looking at the political and social upheavals of the time and how they may have influenced the playwright's work. He explores the role of gender and sexuality in these plays, as well as the complex relationships between characters.Throughout the book, Farnham provides close readings of key scenes and passages from Shakespeare's final tragedies, offering insights into the language, symbolism, and themes of these works. He also draws on contemporary critical theory to illuminate Shakespeare's use of genre, narrative structure, and other literary techniques.Overall, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier offers a fresh and insightful perspective on some of Shakespeare's most enduring works, shedding new light on their themes, settings, and cultural context.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Folly written by Sam Hall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study contends that folly is of fundamental importance to the implicit philosophical vision of Shakespeare’s drama. The discourse of folly’s wordplay, jubilant ironies, and vertiginous paradoxes furnish Shakespeare with a way of understanding that lays bare the hypocrisies and absurdities of the serious world. Like Erasmus, More, and Montaigne before him, Shakespeare employs folly as a mode of understanding that does not arrogantly insist upon the veracity of its own claims – a fool’s truth, after all, is spoken by a fool. Yet, as this study demonstrates, Shakespearean folly is not the sole preserve of professional jesters and garrulous clowns, for it is also apparent on a thematic, conceptual, and formal level in virtually all of his plays. Examining canonical histories, comedies, and tragedies, this study is the first to either contextualize Shakespearean folly within European humanist thought, or to argue that Shakespeare’s philosophy of folly is part of a subterranean strand of Western philosophy, which itself reflects upon the folly of the wise. This strand runs from the philosopher-fool Socrates through to Montaigne and on to Nietzsche, but finds its most sustained expression in the Critical Theory of the mid to late twentieth-century, when the self-destructive potential latent in rationality became an historical reality. This book makes a substantial contribution to the fields of Shakespeare, Renaissance humanism, Critical Theory, and Literature and Philosophy. It illustrates, moreover, how rediscovering the philosophical potential of folly may enable us to resist the growing dominance of instrumental thought in the cultural sphere.
Download or read book Shakespearean Tragedy written by John Drakakis and published by Longman Publishing Group. This book was released on 1992 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This series takes up the challenge of contemporary literary theory providing collections of seminal modern readings of key authors, genres and critical approaches.
Download or read book Shakespeare The Tragedies written by Nicolas Tredell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's tragedies are among the greatest works of tragic art and have attracted a rich range of commentary and interpretation from leading creative and critical minds. This Reader's Guide offers a comprehensive survey of the key criticism on the tragedies, from the 17th century through to the present day. In this book, Nicolas Tredell: - Introduces essential concepts, themes and debates. - Relates Shakespeare's tragedies to fi elds of study including psychoanalysis, gender, race, ecology and philosophy. - Summarises major critical texts from Dryden and Dr Johnson to Janet Adelman and Julia Reinhard Lupton, and covers influential critical movements such as New Criticism, New Historicism and poststructuralism. - Demonstrates how key critical approaches work in practice, with close reference to Shakespeare's texts. Informed and incisive, this is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in how the category of Shakespeare's tragedies has been constructed, contested and changed over the years.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Judgment written by Kevin Curran and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging widely across law, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, this book offers the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaShakespeare and Judgment gathers together an international group of scholars to address for the first time the place of judgment in Shakespearean drama. Contributors approach the topic from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives, covering plays from across Shakespeare's career and from each of the genres in which he wrote. Anchoring the volume are two critical contentions: first, that attending to Shakespeare's treatment of judgment leads to fresh insights about the imaginative relationship between law, theater, and aesthetics in early modern England; and second, that it offers new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation. Taken together, the essays in Shakespeare and Judgment offer a genuinely new account of the historical and intellectual coordinates of Shakespeare's plays. Building on current work in legal studies, religious studies, theater history, and critical theory, the volume will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working on Shakespeare and early modern drama. Key FeaturesProvides the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaOffers a fresh perspective on the imaginative relationship between law, religion, and aesthetics in Shakespeare's playsModels new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Tragedies written by Emma Smith and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Guide steers students through the critical writing on Shakespeare’s tragedies from the sixteenth century to the present day. Guides students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare’s tragedies. Covers both significant early views and recent critical interventions. Substantial editorial material links the articles and places them in context. Annotated suggestions for further reading allow students to investigate further.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Tragedy written by John Bayley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every generation develops its own approach to tragedy, attitudes successively influenced by such classic works as A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy and the studies in interpretation by G. Wilson Knight. A comprehensive new book on the subject by an author of the same calibre was long overdue. In his book, originally published in 1981, John Bayley discusses the Roman plays, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens as well as the four major tragedies. He shows how Shakespeare’s most successful tragic effects hinge on an opposition between the discourses of character and form, role and context. For example, in Lear the dramatis personae act in the dramatic world of tragedy which demands universality and high rhetoric of them. Yet they are human and have their being in the prosaic world of domesticity and plain speaking. The inevitable intrusion of the human world into the world of tragedy creates the play’s powerful off-key effects. Similarly, the existential crisis in Macbeth can be understood in terms of the tension between accomplished action and the free-ranging domain of consciousness. What is the relation between being and acting? How does an audience become intimate with a protagonist who is alienated from his own play? What did Shakespeare add to the form and traditions of tragedy? Do his masterpieces in the genre disturb and transform it in unexpected ways? These are the issues raised by this lucid and imaginative study. Professor Bayley’s highly original rethinking of the problems will be a challenge to the Shakespearean scholar as well as an illumination to the general reader.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Tragedies written by Susan Zimmerman and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shakespeare in Hindsight written by Khan Amir Khan and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We know William Shakespeare matters but we cannot pinpoint, precisely, why he matters. Lacking reasons why, we do our best to involve him in others, or involve others in him. He has been branded many times over-as Catholic, Protestant, Materialist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Feminist, Postcolonial, Popular, Cultural, and, even, Popular-Cultural. In many ways, Shakespeare is overwrought. Why one more 'approach' to Shakespeare? One reason is because whatever these approaches say about tragedy in particular, none of them help us to feel tragedy. Or, rather, they subordinate tragedy to something else-to considerations of, say, class, race, or gender. What these approaches manage to do is explain tragedy away. What this book does is to help us feel tragedy first and foremost-hence to perceive it better. The aim of Amir Khan's counterfactual criticism of Shakespeare's tragedies, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, A Winter's Tale and Othello, then, is precisely to reanimate the tragic effect, long since lost in some deluge of explanation.
Download or read book Shakespeare written by Alfred Harbage and published by Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall. This book was released on 1964 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary critical opinion and commentary on the tragedies of Shakespeare.
Download or read book Macbeth William Shakespeare written by Alan Sinfield and published by MacMillan. This book was released on 1992 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of a series of books concerned with modern critical theory and its effect on current approaches to the study of literature. This particular book looks at Shakespeare's "Macbeth" by a series of 12 articles by authors such as Marilyn French, Peter Stallybrass and Sigmund Freud.
Download or read book Shakespearean Tragedy written by John Drakakis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-06 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespearean Tragedy brings together fifteen major contemporary essays on individual plays and the genre as a whole. Each piece has been carefully chosen as a key intervention in its own right and as a representative of an influential critical approach to the genre. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides both a guide and explanation to the various ways in which contemporary criticism has determined our understanding of the tragedies, and the opportunity for assessing the wider issues such criticism raises. The collection begins by considering the impact of social semiotics on approaches to the tragedies, before moving on to deal, in turn, with the various forms of Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Great Tragedies written by John Hardy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-25 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's great tragedies portray through their richly imagined worlds the inescapable fact of human mortality. As the work of a great creative genius, they are so diverse that critical formulas used to describe their overall impact tend to be somewhat suspect. Their impact follows from a response to the entire dramatic action, what is felt at the end with the weight or experience of the whole play behind it. It draws on how our feelings and judgement are exercised and engaged throughout the drama. Shakespeare portrays what life can be like, without pandering to the wish for something easier to contemplate. Something more invigorating than consolation is provided, such art at its greatest achieving the strength of truth. What it compels is a complex acceptance, reflected in Edgar's words, "The weight of this sad time we must obey". Not only implicit positives give value to these plays. Their significance finally results from what they imaginatively invite their audience to experience and witness. This gives a sense not only of the value of life, but also of what can threaten it.
