Kiernan Ryan

Secondly, the new theoretical approaches to the study of Shakespeare of the last 30 years are thoroughly integrated into the analyses of the plays. Students and teachers of Shakespeare at all levels will find Shakespeare: Texts and Contexts indispensable."--BOOK JACKET.

Texts and Contexts

Shakespeare

Iris Murdoch

Charlotte Mendelson

Under the Net

This is the first collection of criticism on Shakespeare's romances to register the impact of modern literary theory on interpretations of these plays. Kiernan Ryan brings together the most important recent essays on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, the greatest of the `last plays', staging a dynamic debate between feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and new historicist views of the masterpieces Shakespeare wrote at the close of his career. The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is at stake in the choice of a particular critical approach. It allows the student to compare the strengths and limitations of a deconstructive and a feminist reading of the same romance, or to test the plausibility of one psychoanalytic angle on the last plays against another. The headnotes that preface the essays highlight their distinctive slants on Shakespearean romance, unpack the theoretical assumptions that steer their interpretations, and throw into relief the key points at which their authors collide or converge. The editor's introduction places the essays in the context of twentieth-century criticism of the last plays and makes a powerful case for a fundamental reappraisal of Shakespearean romance. The comprehensive, fully annotated bibliography provides an unrivalled guide to further reading on all four plays.

The Last Plays

This ground-breaking study reveals the prophetic, revolutionary vision at the heart of Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespearean Tragedy engages with each of these titanic masterpieces as a singular, complete work of dramatic art with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges. Through compelling new readings of the plays, couched in lively, accessible prose and grounded in close analysis of their language and form, Kiernan Ryan transforms our understanding of Shakespearean tragedy by revealing the radical egalitarian perspective from which it is conceived and written. In recent decades criticism has striven to entrench these plays in the culture of the distant past from which they sprang. This book frees them to show how Shakespeare dramatises the tragic realities of his world from the standpoint of the transfigured future that our world still awaits.

Shakespearean Tragedy

First published to critical acclaim in 1989, this book is now recognised as one of the most original and influential critical studies of Shakespeare to have appeared in recent times. For this brand-new edition, Kiernan Ryan has not only revised and updated the text throughout, but he has also added a great deal of new material, expanding the book to twice the size of the first edition. The section on Shakespearean comedy now includes an essay on Shakespeare's first scintillating experiment in the genre, The Comedy of Errors, and a study of his most perplexing problem play, Measure for Measure. A provocative new last chapter, '"Dreaming on things to come": Shakespeare and the Future of Criticism', reveals how much modern criticism can learn from the appropriation of Shakespeare by Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce. Students, teachers, and anyone with a passionate interest in what the plays have to say to us today, will find this modern classic of Shakespeare criticism indispensable.

Third Edition

Through close readings of a wide range of plays and poems, Kiernan Ryan's compelling polemic sets out to reclaim the idea of Shakespeare's timeless universality from reactionary and radical critics alike. Its argument is driven throughout by the belief that at this moment in history the need to recognise and activate the revolutionary potential of Shakespeare's drama is more urgent than ever. The volume has been shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English 2016 Prize for the best critical study in the field of Literatures in the English Language.

Shakespeare's Universality: Here's Fine Revolution

Looks at the diversity of the latest feminist, post-structuralist and new historicist accounts of King Lear. The contributors include Stephen Greenblatt, Terry Eagleton, Annabel Patterson and Jonathan Goldberg.

King Lear, William Shakespeare

This ground-breaking book reveals the prophetic, revolutionary vision that drives Shakespeare's tragedies, tracing its unbroken development from its beginnings in the Henry VI plays and Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, right through to his last, Coriolanus. The four full-length studies at the heart of the book focus in depth on Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespearean Tragedy engages with each of these titanic masterpieces as a singular, complete work of dramatic art with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges, but with the same unmistakably Shakespearean tragic vision at its core. Through compelling new readings of the plays, grounded in close analysis of their language and form, Kiernan Ryan shows how Shakespeare dramatizes the tragic realities of his world from the standpoint of the transfigured future that our world still awaits.

Shakespeare's Comedies

Providing an introduction to the whole range of Ian McEwan's work, examining his novels, short stories and screenplays, this title draws on McEwan's obsessions with childhood and the body, with regression and abjection, showing how these are deployed to raise disturbing political questions about gender, power, pleasure and narrative.

Ian McEwan

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism have become two of the most powerful and appealing movements in modern criticism. Their conquest of Renaissance studies has escalated into global colonization of English and American literary history. A wealth of innovative work has emerged on everything from the "Canterbury Tales" to the "Cantos," bringing intense theoretical controversy in its wake. This Reader pulls the diversity and polemical vigor of this new critical constellation into focusfor the first time.

Kiernan Ryan

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