1st Edition

Shakespeare’s Returning Warriors – and Ours

By Alan Warren Friedman Copyright 2022
192 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

192 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

192 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Shakespeare’s Returning Warriors – and Ours takes its primary inspiration from the contemporary U.S. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) crisis in soldiers transitioning from battlefields back into society. It begins by examining how ancient societies sought to ease the return of soldiers in order to minimize PTSD, though the term did not become widely used until the early 1980s. It then... Read more

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Preface

Chapter 1. PTSD and the Failure of Re-integration

Chapter 2. Homer, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and PTSD

Chapter 3. Militarism in Shakespeare’s History Plays

Chapter 4. Paradigmatic Returning Warrior Plays: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Othello,

Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus

Chapter 5. Dramatic Variants: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing,

Troilus and Cressida

Chapter 6. Hamlet’s Warrior Problems

Chapter 7. Returning Warriors, Drones, and PTSD

Bibliography

Index

Biography

Alan Warren Friedman, Thaman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, specializes in modern British, Irish, and American literature, the novel, and Shakespearean drama. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1966, writing a dissertation on Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, the subject of his first book. Subsequent authored books include Multivalence: The Moral Quality of Form in the Modern Novel; William Faulkner; Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise; Party Pieces: Oral Narrative and Social Performance in Joyce and Beckett; and Surreal Beckett: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Surrealism. He has edited or co-edited six books and a dozen special journal issues, and published on Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Marlowe's Jew of Malta. He has won both the President’s Associates and Plan II's Chad Oliver Teaching Awards, and both the English Department's Faculty Service Award and UT's Civitatis Award conferred annually "upon a member of the faculty in recognition of dedicated and meritorious service to the University above and beyond the regular expectations of teaching, research, and writing." He has served as Chair of the University’s Faculty Council and as Secretary of the General Faculty.