Description
Book SynopsisIn these essays, brought together here for the first time, world-renowned critic Catherine Belsey puts theory to work in order to register Shakespeare's powers of seduction.
Trade ReviewAll of the essays attest to Belsey's career-long commitment to theory and its ability to deliver new ways of reading ! Her attention in this collection to materiality and wordplay is indicative of her considerable skills as a close reader. Shakespeare Survey These are essays of love, as well as about love, and this makes them unusually sensitive...Belsey's insistence on the anarchy of desire seems both timely and genuinely radical. -- Peter Holbrook Times Literary Supplement All of the essays attest to Belsey's career-long commitment to theory and its ability to deliver new ways of reading ! Her attention in this collection to materiality and wordplay is indicative of her considerable skills as a close reader. These are essays of love, as well as about love, and this makes them unusually sensitive...Belsey's insistence on the anarchy of desire seems both timely and genuinely radical.
Table of ContentsPreface; 1. Introduction: Practising with Theory; 2. Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan with Augustine and Montaigne; 3. Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis; 4. Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece; 5. Antinomies of Desire and the Sonnets; 6. Peter Quince's Ballad: Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis, History and A Midsummer Night's Dream; 7. The Illusion of Empire: Elizabethan Expansionism and Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy; 8. Making Histories Then and Now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V; 9. The Case of Hamlet's Conscience; 10. Iago the Essayist; Notes; Index.
