Research Catalog

Succeeding King Lear : literature, exposure, and the possibility of politics

Title: Succeeding King Lear : literature, exposure, and the possibility of politics / Emily Sun.
Author: Sun, Emily.
Publication: New York : Fordham University Press, ©2010.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	PR2819 .S86 2010	Off-site

Details

Description

x, 179 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

This book investigates Shakespear's King Lear and its originative power in modern literature with specific attention to the early work of the English Romantic poet William Words-worth and to the American writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans's 1941 collaboration, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It examines how these later readers return to the play to interrogate emphatically the question of the relations between literature and politics in modernity and to initiate in this way their own creative trajectories. King Lear opens up a literary genealogy or history of successors, at the heart and origin of which, the author claims, is a crisis of sovereignty. The tragedy famously begins with the title character's decision to give up his throne and divide the kingdom prior to his demise. In bringing to light the assumptions behind this logic and in dramatizing its disastrous consequences, the play performs an implicit analysis and critique of sovereign as the guiding principle.
Of political life and gestures, beyond sovereignty, toward the possibility of a new aesthetic and political future.
The question of the relations between literature and politics not only opens up immanently or internally within King Lear, this book argues, but also occasions a literary history of readers who return to the play as to an ordinary locus for dealing with a problem. Among such successors are Wordsworth in the 1790's after the French Revolution and Agee and Evans during the Depression in the 1930's, whose engagements with Lear, this book argues, were crucial to their development of new artistic means of creating a democratic literature. In bringing British Romanticism and American modernism into contact with their literary and political origins in Shakespeare, this book offers an original way of thinking about literary history and a new approach to the question of the relations between literature and politics in modernity. In its interdisciplinary and cross-period scope, it will appeal to students and scholars of Shakespeare, Romanticism, modernism, and literary theory, as well as.
Those of literature and photography. --Book Jacket.

Subject

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Shakespeare. Sovereignty, exposure, theater: a reading of King Lear -- Wordsworth. Wordsworth on the heath: tragedy, autobiography, and the revolutionary spectator; Poetry against indifference : responding to "The discharged soldier" -- Agee and Evans. From the division of labor to the discovery of the common: James Agee and Walker Evans's Let us now praise famous men.

ISBN

9780823232802
0823232808
9780823232819
0823232816
9780823232826
0823232824

LCCN

2010013604

OCLC

ocn491916974
491916974
SCSB-14687594

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library