Shakespeare the Thinker - Couverture souple

Nuttall, A. D.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0300136293 ISBN 13 : 9780300136296

Editeur : Yale University Press, 2008

Synopsis

A. D. Nuttall's study of Shakespeare's intellectual preoccupations is a literary tour de force and comes to crown the distinguished career of a Shakespeare scholar. Certain questions engross Shakespeare from his early plays to the late romances: the nature of motive, cause, personal identity and relation, the proper status of imagination, ethics and subjectivity, language and its capacity to occlude and to communicate. Yet Shakespeare's thought, Nuttall demonstrates, is anything but static. The plays keep returning to, modifying, and complicating his creative preoccupations. Nuttall allows us to hear and appreciate the emergent cathedral choir of play speaking to play. By the later stages of Nuttall's book this choir is nearly overwhelming in its power and dimensions. The author does not limit discussion to moments of crucial intellection but gives himself ample space in which to get at the distinctive essence of each work. Much recent historicist criticism has tended to 'flatten' Shakespeare by confining him to the thought-clichés of his time, and this in its turn has led to an implicitly patronizing view of him as unthinkingly racist, sexist, and so on. Nuttall shows us that, on the contrary, Shakespeare proves again and again to be more intelligent and perceptive than his 21st-century readers. This book challenges us to reconsider the relation of great literature to its social and historical matrix. It is also, perhaps, the best guide to Shakespeare's plays available in any language.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

A. D. Nuttall was professor of English at Oxford University and the author of numerous books, including A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination and Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? His books Two Concepts of Allegory and A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality, are also published by Yale University Press.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Yale University Press
• Date d'édition: 2008
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0300136293
• ISBN 13: 9780300136296
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 428
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible