Susan Snyder

Two-plus centuries of the most beautiful of personal histories, illustrated diaries, from the Bancroft Library collection bringing us diarists from an 18th century friar to Lawrence Ferlnghtetti

200 Years of Illustrated Diaries

Beyond Words

Poetry has long been the language of rage. The disquiet ghosts of our own discomfort and paralyzing fear rising up in sometimes-broken verse to express itself in bellowed whispers. Splatterpunk nominee Susan Snyder's debut chapbook of poetry 'Broken Nails' is no exception to this, each poem overflowing with the emotional outpourings of a woman who has too often been told to paint herself in the veneer of societal femininity only to be beaten down and left with chipped paint and broken nails.

Broken Nails

Emeritus Professor of English Literature Susan Snyder

Before her death in September 2001, Susan Snyder collected a number of her essays that she felt represented some of her best work in Shakespearean criticism over a period of about three decades. Many of them were written for specific occasions or specific reasons having to do with teaching or with panel discussions before diverse audiences, which she entered into along with others. In the process she contributed some of the best work on Shakespeare that was then extant, as this collection demonstrates. Searching for a principle of organization, Professor Snyder decided that it would be best to arrange the essays in chronological order. The result was a kind of "intellectual autobiography," as she calls it in her Preface, and the title she chose was Shakespeare: A Wayward Journey, since it reflects her travels over the various avenues of Shakespearean criticism.

A Wayward Journey

Shakespeare

Originally published in 1988. Selections here are organised chronologically looking at both theatrical commentary and literary criticism. The organisation brings out the shifts in emphasis as each generation reinvents Shakespeare, and Othello, by the questions asked, those not asked, and the answers given. Chapters cover the theme of heroic action, Iago’s motivation, guilt and jealousy, and obsession. Some entries from the world of theatre delve into the portrayal of the Moor, Desdemona and Iago from the 1940s on. Authors include A. C. Bradley, William Hazlitt, Ellen Terry, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Helen Gardner and Edward A. Snow.

Critical Essays

Othello

David Mas Masumoto

A Harvest of Memories

Letters to the Valley

Josuah Sylvester

A scholarly edition of works by Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur du Bartas. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur Du Bartas:

Comic elements in Shakespeare's tragedies have often been noted, but while most critics have tended to concentrate on humorous interludes or on a single play, Susan Snyder seeks a more comprehensive understanding of how Shakespeare used the conventions, structures, and assumptions of comedy in his tragic writing. She argues that Shakespeare's early mastery of romantic comedy deeply influenced his tragedies both in dramaturgy and in the expression and development of his tragic vision. From this perspective she sheds new light on Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The author shows Shakespeare's tragic vision evolving as he moves through three possibilities: comedy and tragedy functioning first as polar opposites, later as two sides of the same coin, and finally as two elements in a single compound. In the four plays examined here, Professor Snyder finds that traditional comic structures and assumptions operate in several ways to shape the tragedy: they set up expectations which when proven false reinforce the movement into tragic inevitability; they underline tragic awareness by a pointed irrelevance; they establish a point of departure for tragedy when comedy's happy assumptions reveal their paradoxical "shadow" side; and they become part of the tragedy itself when the comic elements threaten the tragic hero with insignificance and absurdity. Susan Snyder is Professor of English at Swarthmore College. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Susan Snyder

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