Synopses & Reviews
Shakespeare's tragedies--the plays which represent human experience in its starkest and most terrifying dimensions--are crucial to the postmodern study of early modern subjectivity. In this collection of ground-breaking essays, eminent Shakespearean scholars examine ten of these tragedies through a variety of postmodern frameworks: historical, linguistic and psychoanalytical. Although each essay presents an original perspective on one of Shakespeare's tragedies, the collection taken as a whole reveals the interdependence of these new critical approaches. The editor's introduction discusses key issues that link the essays, as well as aspects of postmodern theory that have particular relevance to Shakespeare's tragedies.
About the Author
Susan Zimmerman is Associate Professor of English at Queens College at City University of New York.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments * Editor's Preface * Introduction--Susan Zimmerman * Escaping the Matrix: The Construction of Masculinity in
Coriolanus --Janet Adelman * The Name of the Rose in
Romeo and Juliet --Catherine Belsey * Spheres of Influence: Cartography and the Gaze in Shakespeare's Roman Plays--Philip Armstrong * "Fashion It Thus:"
Julius Ceasar and the Politics of Theatrical Representation--John Drakakis * Perspectives: Dover Cliff and the Condition of Representation--Jonathan Goldberg * Fantasies of "Race" and "Gender:" Africa,
Othello and Bringing to Light--Patricia Parker * Transvestism and the "Body Beneath:" Speculating on the Boy Actor--Peter Stallybrass * "The Swallowing Womb:" Consumed and Consuming Women in
Titus Andronicus --Marion Wynne-Davies * "Funeral Bak'd Meats:" Carnival and the Carnivalesque in
Hamlet --Michael D. Bristol * The Ideology of Superfluous Things:
King Lear as Period Piece--Margreta De Grazia * Further Reading * Notes on Contributors * Index