This contentious storm : an ecocritical and performance history of King Lear / Jennifer Mae Hamilton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hamilton, Jennifer Mae, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Natural history.

Storms in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (272 pages)

Other Title:

This Contentious Storm

Place of Publication:

London, England : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Summary:

"From providential apocalypticism to climate change, this ground-breaking ecocritical study traces the performance history of the storm scene in King Lear to explore our shifting, fraught and deeply ideological relationship with stormy weather across time. This Contentious Storm offers a new ecocritical reading of Shakespeare's classic play, illustrating how the storm has been read as a sign of the providential, cosmological, meteorological, psychological, neurological, emotional, political, sublime, maternal, feminine, heroic and chaotic at different points in history. The big ecocritical history charted here reveals the unstable significance of the weather and mobilises details of the play's dramatic narrative to figure the weather as a force within self, society and planet."

Contents:

Introduction: the case for King Lear

Ecocriticism. Meteorological reading

"What is the cause of thunder?": the storm's three ambiguities

Cataclysmic shame: three views of Lear's mortal body in the storm

Performance history. Ecocritical big history

The spectacular Jacobean theatre

Storms of fortune: industrial technology and Nahum Tate, c.1680-c.1900

Lear's head: the rise of the psychological metaphor, 1908-1955

Towards the flood, 1962-2016

Epilogue: the art of necessity.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-4742-8905-3