Succeeding King Lear
Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics
Publication Year: 2010
Published by: Fordham University Press
Title Page, Copyright
Acknowledgments
I thank my teachers Shoshana Felman and Paul Fry for their warm and generous support throughout my graduate work, when I wrote my dissertation on Keats and Flaubert, and for their encouragement in the writing of this present book...
Introduction
This book investigates Shakespeare’s King Lear and its originative force in modern literature, with specific attention to the early work of the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and to James Agee and Walker Evans’s 1941 book...
1. Sovereignty, Exposure, Theater: A Reading of King Lear
What are the political stakes of reading or watching a play? How might a literary work, specifically a work of theater, shed light on our human existence as essentially plural political beings? I propose to examine in this chapter how Shakespeare’s...
2. Wordsworth on the Heath: Tragedy, Autobiography, and the Revolutionary Spectator
What does Shakespearean tragedy have to do with Wordsworth’s origination of a new and revolutionary way of writing poetry in the wake of the French Revolution? In what way might Wordsworth’s poetic project be read in terms of an effort to succeed...
3. Poetry against Indifference: Responding to ‘‘The Discharged Soldier’’
A group of so-called encounter poems have become over the last twenty to thirty years the focal points of critical debates over the political implications of Wordsworth’s poetry. These poems have in common the narrator’s encounter with...
III. Agee and Evans
4. From the Division of Labor to the Discovery of the Common: James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
What kind of a work is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? The question continues to baffle interpreters almost seventy years after the 1941 publication of this unpredictable, idiosyncratic, and extravagant work that fits so uneasily under its prevailing...
E-ISBN-13: 9780823249145
Print-ISBN-13: 9780823232802
Print-ISBN-10: 0823232808
Page Count: 176
Publication Year: 2010
OCLC Number: 667537238
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Succeeding King Lear
