1st Edition
Shakespeare's Serial Universe Patterns, Obsessions, Repetitions
Acknowledgements; Prologue. Serial reading as a hermeneutic process; 1. Dreamscapes and spectral visions; 2. The theatrical charm of cryptomania; 3. A dead beloved returns; 4. War as serial drama; 5. Female sovereignty: A typology; 6. The signifying body as evidence; 7. Follow the objects; 8. The end as a new beginning; Appendix: Notes on References; Index
Biography
Elisabeth Bronfen is Emerita Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, USA. Her areas of specialization are Literature and visual culture, femininity and death, cross mapping as a hermeneutic process, and psychoanalysis.
Shakespeare NOW is Shakespeare NEW. It is amazing what this author managed to do with that old cultural heritage treasure, the work of one of the word’s greatest poets. The foregrounding of seriality turns this oeuvre into something entirely new, while remaining totally loyal to the original texts which it nevertheless changes drastically. I have never read such a profoundly innovative approach to a historical oeuvre, that remains totally adequate and never falls into the trap of wildly anachronizing this precious work that returns into the present. - Mieke Bal, co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
Renowned public intellectual and established expert in literary and cultural studies Elisabeth Bronfen offers readers inside and outside the academy an original and fascinating study of the compulsive repetitions and reworkings across the genres of topics that tantalised Shakespeare. A brilliant, absorbing book that will delight and illuminate. - Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Professeure émérite, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
Imagine that it is possible to listen into a conversation in which Shakespeare reveals to a friend, or perhaps to a therapist, his deepest obsessions, the repetition compulsions that haunted him throughout his career. In this innovative book, full of surprising connections and half-hidden echoes, Elisabeth Bronfen uncovers those fantasies from which Shakespeare could never completely free himself and to which his creative genius returned in play after play. - Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.
