This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear

by Jennifer Mae Hamilton

Overview

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

From providential apocalypticism to climate change, this ground-breaking ecocritical study traces the performance history of the storm scene in King Lear to explore our shifting, fraught and deeply ideological relationship with stormy weather across time.

This Contentious Storm offers a new ecocritical reading of Shakespeare's classic play, illustrating how the storm has been read as a sign of the providential, cosmological, meteorological, psychological, neurological, emotional, political, sublime, maternal, feminine, heroic and chaotic at different points in history. The big ecocritical history charted here reveals the unstable significance of the weather and mobilises details of the play's dramatic narrative to figure the weather as a force within self, society and planet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474289054
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	08/24/2017
Series:	Environmental Cultures
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jennifer Mae Hamilton is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, funded by The Seed Box: A MISTRA+FORMAS Environmental Humanities Collaboratory, Linköping University, Sweden. She also lectures in ecocriticism at New York University, Sydney

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Plot

Introduction: The Case for King Lear

Part 1 - Ecocriticism

Chapter 1: Meteorological Reading

Chapter 2: 'What is the cause of thunder?': The Storm's Three Ambiguities

Chapter 3: Cataclysmic Shame: Three Views of Lear's Mortal Body in the Storm

Part 2 – Performance History
Chapter 4: Ecocritical Big History

Chapter 5: The Spectacular Jacobean Theatre

Chapter 6: Storms of Fortune: Industrial Technology and Nahum Tate,
c.1680-c.1900

Chapter 7: Lear's Head: The Rise of the Psychological Metaphor, 1908-1955.

Chapter 8: Towards the Flood, 1962-2016

Epilogue: The Art of Necessity

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Hamilton’s study stands well as an example of how performance criticism can be motivated by ecocritical and explicitly philosophical analysis of the plays, and vice versa.” - SEL: Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900

From the Publisher