King Lear: Language and Writing

by Howard, Jean E.; Callaghan, Dympna

• ISBN13: 9781472518361
• ISBN10: 1472518365
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2018-02-22
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare

Summary

This guide argues that King Lear's elemental power springs from its language, which is at once simple, relentless, and riddling, and from its full-blown double plot that multiplies unbearably both the follies and the pain of its protagonists. It also explores recent critical approaches to the play and its theatre history.

The Language and Writing series offers a new type of study aid which combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the critical and writing skills students need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's rich and complex dramatic language, and the student's own critical language and how she or he can improve and develop this to become a critical writer.

Author Biography

Jean E. Howard is the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, USA. Author of Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, Engendering a Nation (with Phyllis Rackin, 1994) and Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy (2001), she has edited six collections of essays, including the four-volume Blackwell's Companion to Shakespeare's Works (2003). General Editor of the Bedford contextual editions of Shakespeare, Howard is Past President of the Shakespeare Association of America. She has received numerous fellowships and awards including Guggenheim, ACLS, NEH, Folger, Huntington, and Newberry Library Fellowships. At Syracuse University she received the Wasserstrom Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and at Columbia University the University Graduate Mentoring Award.

Table of Contents

Undergraduate students in the UK, US and Australia; Shakespeare studies and criticism; A-level teachers; students of Literary Criticism and introductory literature courses, as well as Shakespeare courses.