Shakespeare in Hindsight
Counterfactual Thinking and Shakespearean Tragedy
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2017
- Category
- General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781474426046
- Publish Date
- Sep 2017
- List Price
- $32.95
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
Description
We know William Shakespeare matters but we cannot pinpoint, precisely, why he matters. Lacking reasons why, we do our best to involve him in others, or involve others in him. He has been branded many times over - as Catholic, Protestant, Materialist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Feminist, Postcolonial, Popular, Cultural, and, even, Popular-Cultural. In many ways, Shakespeare is overwrought. Why one more "approach" to Shakespeare? One reason is because whatever these approaches say about tragedy in particular, none of them help us to feel tragedy. Or, rather, they subordinate tragedy to something else - to considerations of, say, class, race, or gender. What these approaches manage to do is explain tragedy away. What this book does is to help us feel tragedy first and foremost - hence to perceive it better. The aim of Amir Khan's counterfactual criticism of Shakespeare's tragedies, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, A Winter's Tale and Othello, then, is precisely to reanimate the tragic effect, long since lost in some deluge of explanation.
About the author
Contributor Notes
Amir Khan is affiliated with Liaoning Normal University-Missouri State University.