Shakespeare and the Truth-Teller: Confronting the Cynic Ideal

ISBN-13: 9781474439589 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 264 str.

David Hershinow

Opis

Highlighting the necessity of literary thinking to political philosophy, this book explores Shakespeare's responses to sixteenth-century debates over the revolutionary potential of Cynic critical activity debates that persist in later centuries and inform major developments in Western intellectual history. Analysing cynic characterisations of Lear's Fool, Hamlet and Timon of Athens, Hershinow presents new ways of thinking about modernity's engagement with classical models and literature's engagement with politics.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I: Our Cynic Legacy; 1. Cynicism and the Courage of Truth; 2. The Realist Turn: Parrhêsia, Character, and the Limits of Didacticism; Part II: Shakespeare’s Cynics; 3. Shakespeare’s Bitter Fool: The Politics and Aesthetics of Free Speech; 4. Cynicism, Melancholy, and Hamlet’s Memento Moriae; 5. Cash is King: Timon, Diogenes, and the Search for Sovereign Freedom; Coda; Index.