The Culture of Violence: Shakespeare, Tragedy, History

by Francis Barker (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $6.64

  In this book, Francis Barker combines readings of early modern English culture - mainly Shakespeare - and contemporary theories of modernity, postmodernity and history. The book falls into three distinct but related parts. Part one looks at King Lear , Hamlet and Macbeth and the complex nexus of power, memory, space and time which inform these texts. Part 2 uses Milton and Hobbes as well as Shakespeare to critique recent theoretical approaches, such as deconstruction and New Historicism. Part 3 on the violence of culture radically challenges accepted notions of contemporary culture. What has come to be called culture , Barker suggests, is not an antidote to generalized violence, merely one of its more seductive strategies.