This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear
Abstract
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. 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.
Keywords
Literary studies: plays and playwrights; Comparative literature; Literature: history and criticismDOI
10.5040/9781474289078ISBN
9781474289061, 9781474289054, 9781474289061Publisher
Bloomsbury AcademicPublisher website
https://www.bloomsbury.com/academic/Publication date and place
London, 2017Imprint
Bloomsbury AcademicSeries
Environmental Cultures,Classification
Literary studies: plays and playwrights
Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800
English
Relating to specific and significant cultural interests
Literary studies: general
Literary theory