In this companion volume to Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen, Victor Kiernan sets out to rescue Shakespearean studies from the increasingly solipsistic terrain of literary criticism, focusing on historical location as a means to understanding his work.

Tragedy in Transition is an innovative and exciting introduction to the theory and practice of tragedy. Looks at a broad range of topics in the field of tragedy in literature, from ancient to contemporary times Explores the links between writers from different times and cultures Focuses on the reception of classical texts in subsequent literatures, and discusses their treatment in a range of media Surveys the lasting influence of the most resonant narratives in tragedy Contemplates exciting and unexpected combinations of text and topic among them the relationship between tragedy and childhood, science fiction, and the role of the gods

In the first hundred years of the UK rail network, the seaside figures as a nerve centre, managing and making visible the period’s complex interplay between health, death, gender and sexuality. This monograph discusses around 130 novels of the railway age to show how the seaside infiltrates a diverse range of literature, subverting the boundaries between high and low literary culture. The seaside holiday galvanises innovative literary forms, including early twentieth-century holiday crime and romance fiction, which has its origins in the sensational strategies of mid-nineteenth-century authors. Where reading takes place is at least as important as what is read, and case studies on literary Brighton and Dickensian Kent explore the occasionally fraught relationship between seaside towns and the metropolis, as London visitors are represented in – and are the target audience for – literary accounts of the seaside holiday. The act of reading by the sea is itself overdetermined and problematic, a dilemma that is managed in part through the development of text-free literary tourism in the late nineteenth century. Deploying strategies from literary criticism, histories of reading, libraries and the book, and literary tourism, this book recovers ‘seaside reading’ as both a literary sub-genre and a deeply contested mode of engagement.

This book has two main theses. First, for the biblical/Christian doctrine of sin the root of the human problem is hardness of heart--the corruption of the core self, of the seat of understanding and will. On the other hand, for an important strand of Greek tragedy the root of human harm-doing is the nonculpable blindness and anxiety of finitude that despite the initial nonculpability lead to evil and suffering. The Hardened Heart shows that these two different interpretations of human existence are amenable to a degree of synthesis that leads to this conclusion: hardness of heart and our ordinary finitude together collude to cause sin in its fullness. The second thesis of this volume is that exegetical studies disclose a deconstructive strand in certain biblical texts that represents the finite world that God created as a source of distress and harm-doing in something like the tragic sense. This subdominant deconstructive position challenges the dominant biblical vision, in which the creation came forth from God's creative word as good without qualification.

As an authority on the religion of medieval and early modern England, Professor Eamon Duffy is preeminent. In his revisionist masterpiece The Stripping of the Altars, Duffy opened up new areas of research and entirely fresh perspectives on the origin and progress of the English Reformation. Duffy's focus has always been on the practices and institutions through which ordinary people lived and experienced their religion, but which the Protestant reformers abolished as idolatry and superstition. The first part of A People's Tragedy examines the two most important of these institutions: the rise and fall of pilgrimage to the cathedral shrines of England, and the destruction of the monasteries under Henry VIII, as exemplified by the dissolution of the ancient Anglo-Saxon monastery of Ely. In the title essay of the volume, Duffy tells the harrowing story of the Elizabethan regime's savage suppression of the last Catholic rebellion against the Reformation, the Rising of the Northern Earls in 1569. In the second half of the book Duffy considers the changing ways in which the Reformation has been thought and written about: the evolution of Catholic portrayals of Martin Luther, from hostile caricature to partial approval; the role of historians of the Reformation in the emergence of English national identity; and the improbable story of the twentieth century revival of Anglican and Catholic pilgrimage to the medieval Marian shrine of Walsingham. Finally, he considers the changing ways in which attitudes to the Reformation have been reflected in fiction, culminating with Hilary Mantel's gripping trilogy on the rise and fall of Henry VIII's political and religious fixer, Thomas Cromwell, and her controversial portrayal of Cromwell's Catholic opponent and victim, Sir Thomas More.

This volume reflects changing critical perceptions of Shakespeare's works from Renaissance to modern times and celebrates the power of Shakespearean tragedy. The selection of critical reaction covers both the general concept of Shakespearean tragedy and its expression in the major plays, illustrating the main directions of critical approaches to Shakespearean tragedy and enabling the reader to develop an informed response to Shakespeare's dramatic works. An introductory chapter traces the development of the concept of tragedy from classical times, and its dramatic expression in the time of Shakespeare. Each of Shakespeare's great tragedies - Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello - is considered in turn, and a final chapter summarizes contemporary critical approaches so that the reader can link the best of the critical past with the present critical scene.

This book demonstrates how a group of tragedies by Shakespeare and his contemporaries stage the fear and exhilaration generated by encounters with the unknown and the extraordinary. Arguing that the maritime art of fathoming--that is, dropping a lead and line into water to measure its depth--operates as a master-image for these plays, it illustrates how they create sublime horror through intuitions of mysterious more-than-human agencies and of worlds beyond the visible. Though tightly focused on a specific body of imagery, the book strikes up dialogue with a number of critical fields, including theories and histories of tragedy; ecocriticism and the environmental humanities; oceanic studies; and work on early modern ideas about the body, madness, and language. Countering a tendency within tragic theory to value the textual over the dramatic, it also demonstrates how the tragic effects to which it points are created through specific theatrical strategies, including the use of offstage space, intertheatricality, and the violation of dramatic conventions. Situating its arguments within recent criticism on these plays and on tragedy more generally, and pushing back against scholarship that regards the genre in Shakespeare's time as concerned more with pity than with fear, the book offers fresh and detailed readings of some of the most frequently studied plays in the English canon, including Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Changeling.

A selection of essays on tragedy, this volume begins with the premise that any reading of tragedy can be stimulated and enriched by supplementary critical texts which have been selected for precisely those qualities that would enhance one's response to tragedy. The text attempts a reconstruction of the canon of the criticism of tragedy through a critical overview of traditional classical commentary, Russian Formalism, Reader Response Theory, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Deconstructionism, and Marxist criticism. Includes selections from the writings of Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Georg Lukacs, Arthur Miller, Karl Jaspers, Max Sheler, Laurence Michel, Henry Alonzo Myers, Northrop Frye, Albert C. Outler, and others.