Shakespeares Tragic Imagination

Author : Nicholas Grene
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230379192
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination written by Nicholas Grene and published by Springer. This book was released on 1991-12-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra, or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the relation of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heroic endeavour. In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic interrelationships. Taking the English history play as his starting point, he argues that Shakespeare established two different modes of imagining: the one mythic and visionary, the other sceptical and analytic. In the tragic plays that followed, themes and situations are dramatised, alternately, in sacred and secular worlds. A chapter is devoted to each tragedy, but with a continuing awareness of companion plays: the analysis of Julius Caesar informing that of Hamlet, discussion of Troilus and Cressida counterpointed by the critique of Othello and the treatment of King Lear growing out from the limitations of Timon of Athens. The aim is to resist homogenising the plays but to recognise and explore the unique imaginative enterprise from which they arose.

Author : Nicholas Grene
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 134924970X
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination written by Nicholas Grene and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra, or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the relations of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heoric endeavour. In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic interrelationships. Taking the English history play as his starting point, he argues that Shakespeare established two different modes of imagining: the one mythic and visionary, the other sceptical and analytic. In the tragic plays that followed, themes and situations are dramatised, alternately, in sacred and secular worlds. A chapter is devoted to each tragedy, but with a continuing awareness of companion plays: the analysis of Julius Caesar informing that of Hamlet, discussion of Troilus and Cressida counterpointed by the critique of Othello and the treatment of King Lear growing out from the limitations of Timon of Athens. The aim is to resist homogenising the plays but to recognise and explore the unique imaginative enterprise from which they arose.

Author : Kiernan Ryan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 135031837X
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare written by Kiernan Ryan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2001-11-07 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published to critical acclaim in 1989, this book is now recognised as one of the most original and influential critical studies of Shakespeare to have appeared in recent times. For this brand-new edition, Kiernan Ryan has not only revised and updated the text throughout, but he has also added a great deal of new material, expanding the book to twice the size of the first edition. The section on Shakespearean comedy now includes an essay on Shakespeare's first scintillating experiment in the genre, The Comedy of Errors, and a study of his most perplexing problem play, Measure for Measure. A provocative new last chapter, '"Dreaming on things to come": Shakespeare and the Future of Criticism', reveals how much modern criticism can learn from the appropriation of Shakespeare by Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce. Students, teachers, and anyone with a passionate interest in what the plays have to say to us today, will find this modern classic of Shakespeare criticism indispensable.

Author : Andy Amato
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350373583
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Tragic Imagination in Shakespeare and Emerson written by Andy Amato and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-03-07 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the “tragic imagination”? And what role does it play in the works of William Shakespeare and Ralph Waldo Emerson? Explaining the tragic imagination as a creative faculty employed to answer the perennial Riddle of the Sphinx – a theory of the world that advances human freedom and dignity in the face of historical injustice, cruelty and violence – Andy Amato seeks to recover and rehabilitate this concept by revealing its significance to both key works of philosophy and literature and our contemporary world. This book begins with a close and careful reading of Emerson's first major work, Nature, in conversation with nineteenth and 20thcentury continental philosophy, critical theory and post-structuralism. Uncovering neglected elements of Emerson's philosophy, beyond his reputation as the philosopher of 'cheer', this book explores how Emersonian transcendentalism affirms rather than denies the tragic sense of life – “tragic idealism” – and makes a substantial contribution to philosophy's perpetual endeavour to solve the Riddle. In the second part of the book, Amato then employs Emerson's theoretical lens to interpret Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear. In doing so, he innovatively reframes the central themes of suffering, vision, nature, nothing, foolishness and silence toward achieving liberation. By pairing these two giants of literature and philosophy, The Tragic Imagination in Shakespeare and Emerson not only offers fresh interpretations of Nature and King Lear, but also makes the case for the renewed deployment of tragic imagination, in creative redress, to our current social-political situation.

Author : Piotr Sadowski
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
ISBN 13 : 9780874138467
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dynamism of Character in Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies written by Piotr Sadowski and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory considers human behavior in terms of functional equilibrium between the stable properties of the mind, independent from the pressures of the sociocultural environment and the immediate situational context. What we call "character" thus denotes an autonomous configuration of psychological elements, which remains stable despite the changing external circumstances.

Author : Rowan Williams
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019873641X
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Tragic Imagination written by Rowan Williams and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of "the literary" has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognized as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. This short but thought-provoking volume asks the question, "What is it that tragedy makes us know?" The focus is on tragedy as a mode of representing the experience of radical suffering, pain, or loss, a mode of narrative through which we come to know certain things about ourselves and our world--about its fragility and ours. Through a mixture of historical discussion and close reading of a number of dramatic texts--from Sophocles to Sarah Kane--the book addresses a wide range of debates: how tragedy is defined, whether there is such a thing as "absolute tragedy," various modern attempts to rework the classical heritage and the relation of comedy to tragedy. There is also a fresh discussion of whether religious--particularly Christian--discourse is inimical to the tragic and of the necessary tension between tragic narrative and certain kinds of political as well as religious rhetoric. Rowan Williams argues that tragic drama both articulates failure and frailty and, in affirming the possibility of narrating the story of traumatic loss, refuses to settle for passivity, resignation, or despair. In this sense, it still shows the trace of its ritual and religious roots. And in challenging two-dimensional models of society, power, humanity and human knowing, it remains an intrinsic part of any fully humanist culture.

Author : Stephen Orgel
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9781403911773
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Imagining Shakespeare written by Stephen Orgel and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-08-06 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this beautifully illustrated book, one of the foremost Shakespeareans of our time explores the ways in which Shakespeare has been imagined from his time to ours. In a penetrating series of interpretations, Stephen Orgel explores the ironies and paradoxes that have characterized the reconstruction of Shakespeare's texts, his image, the staging and illustration of his plays over the past four centuries, as he is perennially reinvented for new cultural ends. Drawing on performance history, textual history, and the visual arts (including a fascinating chapter on portraiture), Imagining Shakespeare displays throughout the cultural versatility, elegance, lucidity, and wit which have become the hallmarks of Orgel's style.

Author : John Bayley
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000350444
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Jennifer Ann Bates
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438432437
Total Pages : 411 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination written by Jennifer Ann Bates and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2010-09-29 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Study of self-consciousness in Hegel and Shakespeare.

Author : D. F. Bratchell
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113496708X
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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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.