Description
Book SynopsisWinner of the AEDEAN Enrique García Díez Literature Research Award 2023
Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos: Person, Audience, Language breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates experiences of sublime pathos, for which audiences have been prepared by the sublime ethos described in the companion volume, Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare's model of mutualistic character, in which entangled language brokers a psychic communion between fictive persons and real-life audiences and readers. In the process, Sublime Critical platitudes regarding Shakespeare's liberating ambiguity and invention of the human are challenged, while the sympathetic imagination is reinstated as the linchpin of the playwright's subl
Trade Review
"Complex, far-ranging, at times dazzling, there is nothing really comparable to the sweep of this work"
- Clark Hulse, University of Illinois at Chicago
"This is a magnum opus in every sense of the word […] A thorough, indeed breath-takingly thorough knowledge of Shakespearean writing is everywhere in evidence"
- Andrew Hiscock, Bangor University
"Complex, far-ranging, at times dazzling, there is nothing really comparable to the sweep of this work"
--Clark Hulse, University of Illinois at Chicago
"This is a magnum opus in every sense of the word […] A thorough, indeed breath-takingly thorough knowledge of Shakespearean writing is everywhere in evidence"
--Andrew Hiscock, Bangor University
"Taken together, then, these two works on Shakespeare’s sublime [Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos and Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos] represent an outstanding contribution not only to Shakespeare studies, but more broadly to intellectual history. In seeking to make intelligible the seemingly inexplicable, Sell has succeeded in revealing the secrets of the apparent magic of the sublime."
--Rocío G. Sumillera, Universidad de Granada
"The powerful categorizing of the sublime’s coefficients is proof of Sell’s immense merit and designates this monograph as superior research destined to become seminal in Shakespeare studies."
--Zenón Luis-Martínez
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Aims and "ethos"
Plan of the work
Chapter 1. The Conundrum of Character, the Sublime Mistook
Judith’s face
Ambiguity, realism, sublimity
Ambiguity, freedom, sublimity
Contemptus mundi
Chapter 2. Hollow Men
Liberal humanist character
Protean persons
The moral core
Freedom of choice?
Mutualistic character
Myriad minds
Chapter 3. Sympathetic Imagination
Sympathy and imagination
Psychology and phantasia
Passionate playgoing
Chapter 4. Language of Passion
Cause and effect
"Conceit deceitful"
Thought in progress
Botching words
Entangled, obscure, baroque
Chapter 5. The Mutualist’s Dividend
Going mad with Shakespeare
Transcendence?
"The sticking place"
General Conclusions
The Shakespearean sublime
Shakespeare’s originality
Enter perfection?
Letting in the daylight
Epilogue
Mechanical dreams
Orsino’s luck
Index
