Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Hamlet in His Modern Guises, Hardback Book

Hamlet in His Modern Guises Hardback

Hardback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

Focusing on Shakespeare's Hamlet as foremost a study of grief, Alexander Welsh offers a powerful analysis of its protagonist as the archetype of the modern hero.

For over two centuries writers and critics have viewed Hamlet's persona as a fascinating blend of self-consciousness, guilt, and wit.

Yet in order to understand more deeply the modernity of this Shakespearean hero, Welsh first situates Hamlet within the context of family and mourning as it was presented in other revenge tragedies of Shakespeare's time.

Revenge, he maintains, appears as a function of mourning rather than an end in itself.

Welsh also reminds us that the mourning of a son for his father may not always be sincere.

This book relates the problem of dubious mourning to Hamlet's ascendancy as an icon of Western culture, which began late in the eighteenth century, a time when the thinking of past generations--or fathers--represented to many an obstacle to human progress.

Welsh reveals how Hamlet inspired some of the greatest practitioners of modernity's quintessential literary form, the novel. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Scott's Redgauntlet, Dickens's Great Expectations, Melville's Pierre, and Joyce's Ulysses all enhance our understanding of the play while illustrating a trend in which Hamlet ultimately becomes a model of intense consciousness.

Arguing that modern consciousness mourns for the past, even as it pretends to be free of it, Welsh offers a compelling explanation of why Hamlet remains marvelously attractive to this day.

Information

Save 12%

£72.00

£63.35

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information