Shakespearean representation : mimesis and modernity in Elizabethan tragedy /

We are often told that Shakespeare is our contemporary, yet we insist just as often on the Elizabethan quality of his work as it reflects a culture remote from our own. Beginning with this paradox, Howard Felperin explores the question of modernity in literature. He directs his attention toward seve...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Felperin, Howard
Corporate Authors: De Gruyter.
Published: Princeton University Press,
Publisher Address: Princeton, N.J. :
Publication Dates: [2015]
©2015
Literature type: eBook
Language: English
Subjects:
Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9781400868292
http://www.degruyter.com/doc/cover/9781400868292.jpg
Summary: We are often told that Shakespeare is our contemporary, yet we insist just as often on the Elizabethan quality of his work as it reflects a culture remote from our own. Beginning with this paradox, Howard Felperin explores the question of modernity in literature. He directs his attention toward several older poets and examines Shakespeare in particular to show how literary modernity depends, not on chronological considerations, but on the process of mimesis, or imitation, that art has traditionally claimed for itself. In analyzing Shakespeare's major tragedies, Professor Felperin notes that each carries within it a model of its dramatic prototypes, and therefore requires a conservative response from its interpreters. In the interest of being truer to life than its model, however, each play departs from that model and so requires a Romantic or modernist response as well. The author contends that Shakespeare's meaning arises from this ambivalent relation to the forms of the past.Originally published in 1978.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Carrier Form: 1 online resource(216pages) : illustrations
ISBN: 9781400868292
Index Number: PR2983
CLC: I561.073
Contents: Frontmatter --
Acknowledgments --
Contents --
Preface --
1. The Poetics of Modernity: Homer and Others --
2. O'erdoing Termagant: Hamlet --
3. Plays Within Plays: Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra --
4. A Painted Devil: Macbeth --
5. "Jacobean Decadence": Tourneur, Middleton, Webster, Ford --
Index.