Overview
Winner of the AEDEAN ""Enrique García Díez"" Literature Research Award 2023 Winner of the European Society for the Study of English Book Award 2024 Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos: Matter, Stage, Form 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 a sublime mood or ethos which predisposes audiences intellectually and emotionally for the full experience of sublime pathos, explored in the companion volume, Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare’s invention of sublime matter, his exploitation of the special characteristics of the Elizabethan stage, and his dramaturgical and formal simulacra of absolute space and time. In the process, it considers Shakespeare’s conception of the universe and man’s place in it and uncovers the epistemological and existential implications of key aspects of his art. As the argument unfolds, a case is made for a transhistorically baroque Shakespeare whose ""bastard art"" enables the dramatic restoration of an original innocence where ignorance really is bliss. Taken together, Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos and Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.
Full Product Details
Author: Jonathan P. A. Sell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
Weight: 0.489kg
ISBN: 9781032018140
ISBN 10: 1032018143
Pages: 260
Publication Date: 30 July 2021
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
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
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
Author Information
Jonathan P. A. Sell is Professor of English Literature at the Universidad de Alcalá, Spain. He holds degrees from the universities of Oxford, London and Alcalá, and his main fields of research are early modern and contemporary literature. He has written numerous articles and several books, including Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–1613 (2006), Allusion, Identity and Community (2012) and Conocer a Shakespeare [Getting to Know Shakespeare] (2012).
