Phantasmatic Shakespeare : imagination in the age of early modern science / Suparna Roychoudhury.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Roychoudhury, Suparna, author.

Series:

Cornell scholarship online.

Cornell scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Criticism and interpretation.

Shakespeare, William.

Literature and science--England--History--17th century.

Literature and science.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 online resource.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca ; London : Cornell University Press, 2018.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Representations of the mind have a central place in Shakespeare's artistic imagination, as we see in Bottom struggling to articulate his dream, Macbeth reaching for a dagger that is not there, and Prospero humbling his enemies with spectacular illusions. Phantasmatic Shakespeare examines the intersection between early modern literature and early modern understandings of the mind's ability to perceive and imagine. Suparna Roychoudhury argues that Shakespeare's portrayal of the imagination participates in sixteenth-century psychological discourse and reflects also how fields of anatomy, medicine, mathematics, and natural history jolted and reshaped conceptions of mentality. Although the new sciences did not displace the older psychology of phantasms, they inflected how Renaissance natural philosophers and physicians thought and wrote about the brain's image-making faculty. The many hallucinations, illusions, and dreams scattered throughout Shakespeare's works exploit this epistemological ferment, deriving their complexity from the ambiguities raised by early modern science.Phantasmatic Shakespeare considers aspects of imagination that were destabilized during Shakespeare's period-its place in the brain; its legitimacy as a form of knowledge; its pathologies; its relation to matter, light, and nature-reading these in concert with canonical works such as King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Shakespeare, Roychoudhury shows, was influenced by paradigmatic epistemic shifts of his time, and he in turn demonstrated how the mysteries of cognition could be the subject of powerful art.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Theseus, Phantasia, and the Scientific Renaissance

Chapter 1. Between Heart and Eye Anatomies of Imagination in the Sonnets

Chapter 2. Children of Fancy Academic Idleness and Love's Labor's Lost

Chapter 3. Of Atoms, Air, and Insects: Mercutio's Vain Fantasy

Chapter 4. Seeming to See: King Lear's Mental Optics

Chapter 5. Melancholy, Ecstasy, Phantasma The Pathologies of Macbeth

Chapter 6. Chimeras Natural History and the Shapes of The Tempest

Epilogue The Rude Fantasticals

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2018.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781501726569

1501726560

OCLC:

1031428521