Surveying the complex field of Shakespeare studies today, this book argues that a return to original practices would revive the field. Pechter advances the idea that scholars can perform more effectiv
During the past twenty years or so, Othello has become the Shakespearean tragedy that speaks most powerfully to our contemporary concerns. Focusing on race and gender (and on class, ethnicity, sexuali
Professor Pechter's book attempts to describe the consistent structure, of both style and method, within which Dryden examines, orders and evaluates literary experience. This mode permits Dryden to recognise the real differences between French and English drama, Virgilian and Ovidian style, judgement and fancy (to take some of the more familiar from among Dryden's typical conjunctive pairs), without either merging their differences into some grand synthesis or transforming them into mutually exclusive antitheses. Dryden's is above all a comprehensive theory of literature which aims at responding to a broad range of various literary styles, genres, faculties and effects. Dryden's balance is classical, the poise of the golden mean, and Professor Pechter endeavours to give fresh life to 'classical' as an epithet often previously applied to Dryden. Ranging among writers in ancient Greece and Rome and among Dryden's contemporaries in England and France, the author outlines a rich literary
This Norton Critical Edition includes:·The First Folio text (1623).· An introduction, explanatory footnotes, note on the text, and textual notes by Edward Pechter.· Fifteen illustrations.· Giraldi Cin