From providential apocalypticism to climate change, this ground-breaking ecocritical study traces the performance history of the storm scene in King Lear to explore our shifting, fraught and deeply ideological relationship with stormy weather across time.
This Contentious Storm offers a new ecocritical reading of Shakespeare's classic play, illustrating how the storm has been read as a sign of the providential, cosmological, meteorological, psychological, neurological, emotional, political, sublime, maternal, feminine, heroic and chaotic at different points in history. The big ecocritical history charted here reveals the unstable significance of the weather and mobilises details of the play's dramatic narrative to figure the weather as a force within self, society and planet.
Author(s): Jennifer Mae Hamilton
Series: Environmental Cultures
Edition: 1.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 250
City: New York/London
FC
......Page 1
Half title......Page 2
Environmental Cultures Series......Page 3
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Quote
......Page 7
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgements......Page 9
List of Illustrations......Page 13
Note on the edition of King Lear in this book and referencing style
......Page 15
Preface: The Plot......Page 16
Introduction: The Case for King Lear......Page 24
Part 1 Ecocriticism......Page 32
1 Meteorological Reading......Page 34
2 ‘What is the cause of thunder?’: The Storm’s Three Ambiguities......Page 54
3 Cataclysmic Shame: Three Views of Lear’s Mortal Body in the Storm......Page 88
Part 2 Performance History......Page 132
4 Ecocritical Big History......Page 134
5 The Spectacular Jacobean Theatre......Page 138
6 Storms of Fortune: Industrial Technology and Nahum Tate, c. 1680–c. 1900......Page 150
7 Lear’s Head: The Rise of the Psychological Metaphor, 1908–1955......Page 176
8 Towards the Flood, 1962–2016......Page 190
Epilogue: The Art of Necessity......Page 218
Bibliography......Page 222
Index......Page 246
