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The Ghosts of Hamlet

The Ghosts of Hamlet

The Ghosts of Hamlet

The Play and Modern Writers
Martin Scofield
April 2010
Available
Paperback
9780521135528
£32.00
GBP
Paperback

    If the aim of criticism is, in Arnold's phrase, 'to see the object as in itself it really is', what 'is' Hamlet, when every age has seen the play quite differently? Despite certain notable accounts, there is no single reading that seems to have interpreted the play for our time. This book approaches the play through its influence on the work of some writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Separate chapters show their different responses to Hamlet either as an object of their direct criticism or as a source of myth, symbol, mask and allusion in their own creative works. The aspects of Hamlet that preoccupy the different writers are reflected in their literature. They provide a new perspective in which to see the writers themselves, and contribute to the author's own critical reading of Hamlet in Part II.

    Product details

    April 2010
    Paperback
    9780521135528
    216 pages
    229 × 152 × 12 mm
    0.32kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Part I. Modern Writers and the Ghosts of Hamlet: Introduction: Hamlet, criticism and creation
    • 1. 'Bounded in a nutshell…king of infinite space': Stéphane Mallarmé
    • 2. 'What may this mean?': Claudel and Valéry
    • 3. 'Your only jig-maker': Jules Laforgue
    • 4. 'Taint not thy mind': T. S. Eliot
    • 5. 'Methinks I see my father': Joyce's Ulysses
    • 6. 'To be or not to be': D. H. Lawrence
    • 7. 'O my prophetic soul': Søren Kierkegaard
    • 8. 'Bad dreams': Franz Kafka
    • 9. Hamlet and modern literature
    • Part II. Perception, Authority, and Identity: a Reading of Hamlet
    • Notes
    • Index.
      Author
    • Martin Scofield