Shakespeare S Tragedies And Modern Critical Theory

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.

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.

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.

Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of William Shakespeare.

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.

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.

This series takes up the challenge of contemporary literary theory providing collections of seminal modern readings of key authors, genres and critical approaches.

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.