Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Shakespeare's Tragic Art

Shakespeare's Tragic Art

Lewis, Rhodri

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0691246696
ISBN13: 9780691246697
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Oct 8 2024
Pages: 400
Weight: 1.85
Height: 1.40 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.30
Language: English

A new account of Shakespearean tragedy as a response to life in an uncertain world

In Shakespeare's Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis offers a powerfully original reassessment of tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it--of what drew him toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter.

After reconstructing tragic theory and practice as Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew them, Lewis considers in detail each of Shakespeare's tragedies from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. He argues that these plays are a series of experiments whose greatness lies in their author's nerve-straining determination to represent the experience of living in a world that eludes rational analysis. They explore not just our inability to know ourselves as we would like to, but the compensatory and generally unacknowledged fictions to which we bind ourselves in our hunger for meaning--from the political, philosophical, social, and religious to the racial, sexual, personal, and familial. Lewis's Shakespeare not only creates tragedies that exceed those written before them. Through his art, he also affirms and invigorates the kinds of knowing that are available to intelligent animals like us.

A major reevaluation of Shakespeare's tragedies, Shakespeare's Tragic Art is essential reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare, tragedy, or the capacity of literature to help us navigate the perplexities of the human condition.

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