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The Mirror and the Feather: Tragedy and Animal Voice in King Lear
- ELH
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 80, Number 3, Fall 2013
- pp. 661-680
- 10.1353/elh.2013.0031
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay considers King Lear’s invocation of an animal voice as a mode of expressing the nothingness that contests and eludes speech. I argue that the imitation of animal voice, in its resistance of the play’s representative frame, offers an experience of a positive negativity that radicalizes Cordelia’s inexpressible love and effectively indicts the construction of discursive meaning. At this thematic ground zero, I contend that King Lear not only explores the porous boundary between man and animal but also depicts a tragic vision that arises from the tension between linguistic meaning and inarticulate grief.