This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear

Jennifer Mae Hamilton

Research output: Book/Research ReportAuthored Book

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationU.K.
PublisherBloomsbury Academic
Number of pages256
ISBN (Print)9781474289047
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • 1564-1616
  • King Lear (Shakespeare
  • Shakespeare
  • William
  • William)
  • ecocriticism
  • storms in literature

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this