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Description: Beginning Shakespeare introduces students to the study of Shakespeare and ground their understanding of his work in theoretical discourses. It breaks down fears and preconceptions to offer student both a map of the current critical practices of others and a sense of the possibilities for developing their own. After an introductory survey of dominant approaches of the past, seven further chapters introduces students to all the major current critical approaches to Shakespeare, with separate chapters on psychoanalysis, New Historicism, Culture Materialism, gender studies and queer theory, postcolonial criticism and performance criticism, as well as one which looks at the growing roles of biography, attribution studies, and textual studies. Each chapers also offers a list of suggested further reading and interactive exercises focusing on key facts and issues raised in the chapter.
The way in which each chapters analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the perspective on which it focuses allows students a clear critical purchase on the respective approaches and enables them to make informed choices between them, thus suggesting ways of continuing to make meaning out of Shakespeare which are both theoretically informed and new. An invaluable introduction for anyone studying English at university, Beginning Shakespeare, by addressing what is primarily at stake in these various theoretical approaches and by mapping the territory, ultimately allows student to negotiate it for themselves.
Contents: Critical histories • 1598–1741: a bumpy ride • 1741–1904: enter Shakespeare • Enshrinement • A. C. Bradley and character study • The 1930s: images and patters • Tillyard and the ‘Elizabethan world picture’ • Jan Kott: Shakespeare our contemporary • Further reading • Psychoanalysis • Freud and his early followers • C. G. Jung and the theory of ‘types’ and ‘archetypes’ • Jacques Lacan and the theory of the subject • Post-Lacanian psychoanalytic approaches • Further reading • New Historicism • Stephen Greenblatt: ‘Invisible Bullets’ • Louis Montrose: New Historicism meets psychoanalysis • Leonard Tennenhouse and the interest in power • Later developments: New Historicism meets gender • Further reading • Cultural Materialism • Political Shakespeare: a landmark text • Dollimore and Sinfield: literature and power • Terence Hawkes and the politics of meaning • Further reading • New factualisms • The ‘new biography’ • Attribution studies • Editing • Further reading • Gender studies and queer theory • Boy actors • Political feminisms • Queer theory • Further reading • Postcolonial criticism • The Tempest • Postcolonial Tempests • Othello • Further reading • Shakespeare in performance • Henry V in performance • The Olivier version • Stratford-upon-Avon • Political performance criticism • Further reading • IndexISBN - 9788130912783
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Pages : 222
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