Dynamism of Character in Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies

Dynamism of Character in Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies PDF Author: Piotr Sadowski
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874138467
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The theory considers human behavior in terms of functional equilibrium between the stable properties of the mind, independent from the pressures of the sociocultural environment and the immediate situational context. What we call "character" thus denotes an autonomous configuration of psychological elements, which remains stable despite the changing external circumstances.

Dynamism of Character in Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies

Dynamism of Character in Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies PDF Author: Piotr Sadowski
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874138467
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The theory considers human behavior in terms of functional equilibrium between the stable properties of the mind, independent from the pressures of the sociocultural environment and the immediate situational context. What we call "character" thus denotes an autonomous configuration of psychological elements, which remains stable despite the changing external circumstances.

Character and the Supernatural in Shakespeare and Achebe

Character and the Supernatural in Shakespeare and Achebe PDF Author: Kenneth Usongo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000349608
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Through mainly a New Historicist critical approach, this book explores how Shakespeare and Achebe employ supernatural devices such as prophecies, dreams, gods/goddesses, beliefs, and divinations to create complex characters. Even though these features indicate the preponderance of the belief in the supernatural by some people of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and traditional Igbo societies, Shakespeare and Achebe primarily use the supernatural to represent the states of mind of their protagonists. Both writers appropriate supernatural features to mirror tragic flaws such as ambition, arrogance, impulsiveness, and fear that contribute to the downfall of Macbeth, Lear, Okonkwo, and Ezeulu. We relate to some of these characters because they project our inner minds, principal drives that may be hidden within us. Therefore, Shakespeare and Achebe’s preoccupation with the supernatural adds subtlety to their characterization and enhances their readability by situating their art beyond time, place, or particularity.

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438129424
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare and Modern Culture

Shakespeare and Modern Culture PDF Author: Marjorie Garber
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307377954
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
From one of the world's premier Shakespeare scholars comes a magisterial new study whose premise is "that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare." Shakespeare has determined many of the ideas that we think of as "naturally" true: ideas about human character, individuality and selfhood, government, leadership, love and jealousy, men and women, youth and age. Marjorie Garber delves into ten plays to explore the interrelationships between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, from James Joyce's Ulysses to George W. Bush's reading list. From the persistence of difference in Othello to the matter of character in Hamlet to the untimeliness of youth in Romeo and Juliet, Garber discusses how these ideas have been re-imagined in modern fiction, theater, film, and the news, and in the literature of psychology, sociology, political theory, business, medicine, and law. Shakespeare and Modern Culture is a brilliant recasting of our own mental and emotional landscape as refracted through the prism of the protean Shakespeare.

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: John E. Curran
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644530538
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama: Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy studies instantiations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside such fraught questions as the history of Renaissance subjectivity and individualism on the one hand and Shakespearean exceptionalism on the other, we can find that in some plays, by a range of different authors and collaborators, a conception has been evidenced of who a particular person is, and has been used to drive the action. This evidence can take into account a number of internal and external factors that might differentiate a person, and can do so drawing on the intellectual context in a number of ways. Ideas with potential to emphasize the special over the general in envisioning the person might come from training in dialectic (thesis vs hypothesis) or in rhetoric (ethopoeia), from psychological frameworks (casuistry, humor theory, and their interpenetration), or from historiography (exemplarity). But though they depicted what we would call personality only intermittently, and with assumptions different from our own about personhood, dramatists sometimes made a priority of representing the workings of a specific mind: the patterns of thought and feeling that set a person off as that person and define that person singularly rather than categorically. Some individualistic characters can be shown to emerge where we do not expect, such as with Fletcherian personae like Amintor, Arbaces, and Montaigne of The Honest Man’s Fortune; some are drawn by playwrights often uninterested in character, such as Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, Jonson’s Cicero, and Ford’s Perkin Warbeck; and some appear in being constructed differently from others by the same author, as when Webster’s Bosola is set in contrast to Flamineo, and Marlowe’s Faustus is set against Barabas. But Shakespearean characters are also examined for the particular manner in which each troubles the categorical and exhibits a personality: Othello, Good Duke Humphrey, and Marc Antony. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Shakespeare Studies Today

Shakespeare Studies Today PDF Author: E. Pechter
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230119360
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The Romantics invented Shakespeare studies, and in losing contact with our origins, we have not been able to develop an adequate alternative foundation on which to build our work. This book asserts that among Shakespeareans at present, the level of conviction required to sustain a healthy critical practice is problematically if not dangerously low, and the qualities which the Romantics valued in an engagement with Shakespeare are either ignored these days or fundamentally misunderstood.

William Shakespeare's Othello

William Shakespeare's Othello PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438132751
Category : Othello (Fictitious character) in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
A collection of critical essays on the Shakespeare play, Othello, arranged in chronological order of publication.

William Shakespeare's Macbeth

William Shakespeare's Macbeth PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 160413884X
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
A collection of literary criticism focusing on Shakespeare's play Macbeth.

Histrionic Hamlet

Histrionic Hamlet PDF Author: Piotr Sadowski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040127428
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
According to psychological research on acting, the histrionic personality consists of a compulsive tendency to play-act, exaggerate emotions, succumb to illusions, seek attention through speech, body language and costume, to be seductive and impulsive. An original intervention in the critical history of Shakespeare’s most famous play, Histrionic Hamlet argues that the Danish Prince is a stage representation of just such a personality—a born actor and a drama queen rather than a politician—incongruously thrown in the middle of ruthless high-stakes power struggle requiring pragmatic rather than theatrical skills. Uniquely among other English revenge tragedies, in Hamlet a histrionic protagonist striking a series of gratuitous, baffling, self-indulgent, and counterproductive poses is called upon to carry out a challenging and brutal political task, which he spectacularly and tragically mismanages. Unable to perform on a theatrical stage as a professional actor, the Clown Prince bitterly play acts anyway, turning all situations into opportunities of pretend play rather than effective political action. In consequence he wastes tactical advantages over his enemies, endangers himself, and jeopardizes his revenge plan, if ever there was one. Histrionic Hamlet should be of interest to students of Shakespeare, theater practitioners, and anyone interested in human dysfunctional and maladaptive behavior.

Systemic Semiotics

Systemic Semiotics PDF Author: Piotr Sadowski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350240680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Against the background of often esoteric literature in semiotics, this book offers a fresh and rigorous new interpretation of how to approach the study of communication, signs and meaning. Grounded in a deductive theory of interacting systems, Piotr Sadowski's book provides an accessible account of the hierarchy of communication. Divided into two parts, this book argues in the first section that a deductive semiotic theory generates communication situations of increasing complexity, from contiguous communication to indirect, referential forms based on indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs. Within this system, Sadowski explains how key concepts of the semiotic model such as information, parainformation and metainformation can account for degrees of cognitive complexity of communication processes, including the perception and interpretation of signs on literal and figurative levels. After this clear, step-by-step exposition of the theory of interacting systems, Systemic Semiotics then explores various applications of this theory, providing new insights into problems subsumed under communication studies, cultural theory, literary and film studies, and psychology.