| William Shakespeare Contributor(s): Eagleton (Author) |
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ISBN: 0631145540 ISBN-13: 9780631145547 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons OUR PRICE: $50.44 Product Type: Paperback Published: March 1986 Annotation: This is a bold and original reinterpretation of almost all Shakespeare's major plays, in the light of the Marxist, feminist and semiotic ideas of our own time. Through a set of tenaciously detailed readings, the book illuminates a number of persistent problems or conflicts in Shakespearean drama--in particular a contradiction between words and things, body and language, which is also explored in terms of law, sexuality and Nature. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Shakespeare |
| Dewey: 822.33 |
| LCCN: 85022927 |
| Series: Rereading Literature |
| Physical Information: 0.53" H x 5.47" W x 8.54" (0.39 lbs) 128 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This is a bold and original reinterpretation of almost all of Shakespeare's major plays, in the light of the Marxist, feminist and semiotic ideas of our own time. Through a set of tenaciously detailed readings, the book illuminates a number of persistent problems or conflicts in Shakespearean drama - in particular a contradiction between words and things, body and language, which is also explored in terms of law, sexuality and Nature. Language and desire, Terry Eagleton argues, are seen by Shakespeare as a kind of 'surplus' over and above the body, stable and social roles and a fixed human nature. But the attitude of the plays to such a 'surplus' is profoundly ambivalent; if they admire it as the very source of human creativity, they also fear its anarchic, trangressive force. Underlying such ambiguities, the book convincingly shows, is a deeper ideological struggle, between feudalist traditionalism on the one hand, and the emergence of new forms of bourgeois individualism on the other. This book revels how, in the light of our own contemporary theories of language, sexuality and society, we can understand the issues present in Shakespeare's drama which previously have remained obscure. |