Overview
This remarkable volume challenges scholars and students to look beyond a dominant European and North American 'metropolitan bank' of Shakespeare knowledge. As well as revealing the potential for a new understanding of Shakespeare's plays, Martin Orkin adopts a fresh approach to issues of power, where 'proximations' emerge from a process of dialogue and challenge traditional notions of authority. Since their first performances, Shakespeare's plays and their audiences or readers have journeyed to one another across time and space, to and from countless and always different historical, geographical and ideological locations. Engagement with a Shakespeare text always entails in part, then, cultural encounter or clash, and readings are shaped by a reader's particular location and knowledge. Part I of this book encourages us to recognise the way in which 'local' or 'non-metropolitan' knowledges and experiences might extend understanding of Shakespeare's texts and their locations. Part II demonstrates the use of local as well as metropolitan knowledges in exploring the presentation of masculinity in Shakespeare's late plays. These plays themselves dramatise encounters with different cultures and, crucially, challenges to established authority. Questioning the authority of metropolitan scholarship, twenty-first century global capitalism and the masculinist imperatives that drive it, Orkin's daring, powerful work will have reverberations throughout, but also well beyond the field of Shakespeare studies.
Full Product Details
Author: Martin Orkin (University of Haifa, Israel)
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 1.60cm
, Length: 23.40cm
Weight: 0.476kg
ISBN: 9780415348782
ISBN 10: 0415348781
Pages: 230
Publication Date: 09 June 2005
Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
General
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.
Reviews
'Local Shakespeares shows just how timid and predictable most comparative criticism is. Timid and predictable Local Shakespeares is not.' - Bruce Smith, University of Southern California, USA 'This is a lively, combative book which merits a place among the relatively few new books on Shakespeare which are worth pulling off the library shelf more than once... This is a significant critical intervention and a valuable contribution to Shakespeare studies, not least because Orkin's readings of the late plays incorporate the insights of many other fine critics, but because his own scholarship and sensitivity illuminate each of the plays with which he engages.' - Michael Jardine, Literature and History
Author Information
University of Haifa, Israel
