Patricia Parker

Providing innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives on Shakespeare's plays, Patricia Parker offers a series of dazzling readings that demonstrate how easy-to-overlook textual or semantic details reverberate within and beyond the Shakespearean text, and suggest that the boundary between language and context is an incontinent divide.

Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords

Shakespearean Intersections

Geoffrey H. Hartman

The theoretical ferment which has affected literary studies over the last decade has called into question traditional ways of thinking about, classifying and interpreting texts. Shakespeare has been not just the focus of a variety of divergent critical movements within recent years, but also increasingly the locus of emerging debates within, and with, theory itself. This collection of essays, written by distinguished and powerful critics in the fields of literary theory and Shakespeare studies, is intended both for those interested in Shakespeare and for those interested more generally in the emerging debates within contemporary criticism and theory.

Shakespeare and the Question of Theory

Patricia A. Parker

Professor Patricia Parker

In the interpretation of Shakespeare, wordplay has often been considered inconsequential, frequently reduced to a decorative "quibble." But in Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context, Patricia Parker, one of the most original interpreters of Shakespeare, argues that attention to Shakespearean wordplay reveals unexpected linkages, not only within and between plays but also between the plays and their contemporary culture. Combining feminist and historical approaches with attention to the "matter" of language as well as of race and gender, Parker's brilliant "edification from the margins" illuminates much that has been overlooked, both in Shakespeare and in early modern culture. This book, a reexamination of popular and less familiar texts, will be indispensable to all students of Shakespeare and the early modern period.

Language, Culture, Context

Shakespeare from the Margins

Through pain we grow and find our way. I found out what love is each live long day. None of us are perfect yet, If we reach out and seek out truth. We find our truth along the way.

A Journey by Verse Through Bipolar

An Orchid of the Sweetest Kind

An Overview of Historic Archeological Resources at Joshua Tree National Monument

One Hundred Years of History in the California Desert

Margo Hendricks

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Women, 'Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period

A Journey By Verse Through Bipolar

First published in 1987, the essays in this volume focus on questions of gender, property and power in the use of rhetoric and the practice of literary genres, and provide a historicised cultural critique. They analyse the links between rhetoric and property, but also representations of women as unruly, excessive, teleology-breaking figures — intermeshing with feminist theory in the wake of Freud, Lacan and Derrida. A wide variety of texts — from Genesis to Freud, by way of Shakespeare, Milton, Rousseau and Emily Brontë — are examined, held together by a concern for the entanglements of rhetorical questions of literary plotting, hierarchy, ideological framing and political consequence.

Rhetoric, Gender, Property

Routledge Revivals: Literary Fat Ladies (1987)

What does the keyword "continence" in Love's Labor's Lost reveal about geopolitical boundaries and their breaching? What can we learn from the contemporary identification of the "quince" with weddings that is crucial for A Midsummer Night's Dream? How does the evocation of Spanish-occupied "Brabant" in Othello resonate with contemporary geopolitical contexts, wordplay on "Low Countries," and fears of sexual/territorial "occupation"? How does "supposes" connote not only sexual submission in The Taming of the Shrew but also the transvestite practice of boys playing women, and what does it mean for the dramatic recognition scene in Cymbeline? With dazzling wit and erudition, Patricia Parker explores these and other critical keywords to reveal how they provide a lens for interpreting the language, contexts, and preoccupations of Shakespeare's plays. In doing so, she probes classical and historical sources, theatrical performance practices, geopolitical interrelations, hierarchies of race, gender, and class, and the multiple significances of "preposterousness," including reversals of high and low, male and female, Latinate and vulgar, "sinister" or backward writing, and latter ends both bodily and dramatic. Providing innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives on Shakespeare, from early to late and across dramatic genres, Parker's deeply evocative readings demonstrate how easy-to-overlook textual or semantic details reverberate within and beyond the Shakespearean text, and suggest that the boundary between language and context is an incontinent divide.

Patricia Parker

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