Nuclear Shakespeare: Apocalypse and Annihilation in King Lear and Hamlet Recent scholarship on Shakespeare's plays centres around the question of their relevance for the present day. Feminist, Marxist and post-colonial analyses speak to our globalised political context; post-structuralist methods explore the relationship between language and power; historicist methods look at the construction of modernity in Shakespeare's day; presentism considers the plays from a self-consciously present-focused perspective; and the recent eco-critical approach reads Shakespeare's plays in the light of the so-called "Anthopocene." In this thesis, I use an updated method of Derridean nuclear criticism, combined with materialist feminist critique, to examine the relevance of King Lear and Hamlet to today's heterogeneous threat of annihilation (including nuclear destruction, genocide, and ecological disaster through climate change), focusing on the implications of annihilation for artistic representation - literature, in particular. I also look at King Lear and Hamlet in their context of early modern Christian apocalypticism, taking apocalypticism as a possible precursor to today's discourses of annihilation. I argue that the spectre of annihilation problematises traditional realist mimesis, revealing the complex and...
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:nusl.cz/oai:invenio.nusl.cz:453877 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Kesavan, Vidya |
| Contributors | Procházka, Martin, Vienne-Guerrin, Nathalie, Nováková, Soňa |
| Source Sets | Czech ETDs |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess |
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