Bøger i Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy serien

This book traces the complexity and richness of Merchant's Jewish aspect, spanning encounters with Jews and the Hebrew Bible in the early modern world as well as modern adaptations of Shakespeare's play on the Yiddish stage.

Renews our understanding of Shakespeare through an interdisciplinary focus on hospitality In this critical analysis, Sophie E. Battell examines hospitality in Shakespeare's plays. By drawing on literary theory, modern philosophy and anthropology, as well as early modern scientific and religious texts, the book advances our understanding of Shakespeare as a dramatist concerned with the ethical questions at stake in encounters between guests and hosts of various kinds. The close readings and scholarly interventions presented here reconceive Shakespeare's plays in terms of a poetics of hospitality while arguing for an expansive, far-reaching vision of what it means to be open to the world and welcoming of others. Moving from the levels of subjectivity, the body and the senses to architecture, economics, legal discourse and the natural environment, On the Threshold not only makes important contributions to Shakespeare studies but forges new connections between Renaissance literary scholarship and contemporary debates on the politics of migrants and refugees. Sophie E. Battell is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Zurich.

Second Death seeks to revitalise our understanding of the soul as a philosophically profound, theoretically radical, and ultimately and counterintuitively theatrically realised concept.

What were Shakespeare's politics? As this study demonstrates, contained in Shakespeare's plays is an astonishingly powerful reckoning with the tradition of Western political thought, one whose depth and scope places Shakespeare alongside Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. This book is the first attempt by a political theorist to read Shakespeare within the trajectory of political thought as one of the authors of modernity. From Shakespeare's interpretation of ancient and medieval politics to his wrestling with issues of legitimacy, religious toleration, family conflict, and economic change, Alex Schulman shows how Shakespeare produces a fascinating map of modern politics at its crisis-filled birth. As a result, there are brand new readings of Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Richard II and Henry IV, parts I and II , The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure.

This book brings to light Derrida's rich and thought-provoking discussions of Shakespearean drama.

Explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stageAdvances a new critical methodology that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire, and pleasure itselfExplores the philosophical underpinnings of erotic metaphors, drawing from ancient, early modern, and contemporary thinkers such as Aristotle, Giordano Bruno, Gaston Bachelard, Emmanuel Levinas, Kenneth Burke, George Lakoff, and Mark TurnerIlluminates the dramatic vitality of philosophical and contemplative erotic speechProvides the first full-length study that pairs John Lyly's and William Shakespeare's drama, uncovering new forms of intimacy in their playsTo 'conceive' desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Gillian Knoll traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors - motion, space and creativity - that shape desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Metaphors, she argues, do more than narrate or express eros; they constitute erotic experience for Lyly's and Shakespeare's characters.

Highlighting the necessity of literary thinking to political philosophy, this book explores Shakespeare's responses to sixteenth-century debates over the revolutionary potential of Cynic critical activity.

Examines literary engagement with immateriality since the 'material turn' in early modern studiesProvides six case studies of works by Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert, offering new readings of important literary texts of the English Renaissance alongside detailed chapters outlining attitudes towards immateriality in works of natural philosophy, medicine, and theologyEmploys an innovative organization around three major areas in which problem of immaterial was particularly pitched: Ontology, Theology, and Psychology (or Being, Believing, and Thinking)Includes wide-ranging references to early modern literary, philosophical, and theological textsDemonstrates how innovations in natural philosophy influenced thought about the natural world and how it was portrayed in literatureEngages with current early modern scholarship in the areas of material culture, cognitive literary studies, and phenomenologyImmateriality and Early Modern English Literature explores how early modern writers responded to rapidly shifting ideas about the interrelation of their natural and spiritual worlds. It provides six case studies of works by Shakespeare, Donne and Herbert, offering new readings of important literary texts of the English Renaissance alongside detailed chapters outlining attitudes towards immateriality in works of natural philosophy, medicine and theology. Building on the importance of addressing material culture in order to understand early modern literature, Knapp demonstrates how the literary imagination was shaped by changing attitudes toward the immaterial realm.

This ground-breaking study fearlessly combines latest research in evolutionary psychology, historical scholarship and philosophy to answer a question that has eluded critics for centuries: what is Shakespeare's moral vision?

Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic' introduces Shakespeare as a historian of ancient Rome alongside figures such as Sallust, Cicero, St Augustine, Machiavelli, Gibbon, Hegel and Nietzsche.

This richly contextualized study of Shakespeare's comic engagement with sadness contends that the playwright rethinks melancholy through comic theatre and conversely, re-theorizes comedy through melancholy.

This book traces the dialectical development of auditory modes over six decades of commercial theatre history, combining surveys of the theatrical marketplace with focused attention to specific plays .

Focusing on the central striking claim that all necessity is consequent. Tritten engages with ancient and contemporary philosophers including Quentin Meillassoux, Richard Kearney, Friedrich Schelling, Emile Boutroux and Markus Gabriel. He argues that even reason and God, while necessary according to essence, are contingent in existence.

Explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stageTo 'conceive' desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Gillian Knoll traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors - motion, space and creativity - that shape desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Metaphors, she argues, do more than narrate or express eros; they constitute erotic experience for Lyly's and Shakespeare's characters.Gillian Knoll is Assistant Professor of English at Western Kentucky University.

The first annotated translation of the 9th-century Islamic apocalyptic work The Book of Tribulations the earliest complete Muslim apocalyptic text to survive.

Chaste Value reassesses chastity s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage s production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference.

Thomas P. Anderson explores how the parameters of contemporary radical politics take shape in Coriolanus, King John, Henry V, Titus Andronicus, The Winter's Tale and Julius Caesar.

These 13 essays explore Bruno Latour's legal theory from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. They combine analytical tools drawn from Latour's actor-network theory developed in Science in Action, Reassembling the Social and The Making of Law with the philosophical anthropology of the Moderns in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence to blaze a new trail in legal epistemology.