Shakespearean Tragedy (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

Introduction by Karin S. Coddon

On Sale: Mar 13, 2012
Page Count: 496 pages
Publisher: BookAnnex
ISBN-13: 9781411466784

$3.99

$4.99 CAD

Format

ebook (Digital original)

Format:

ebook (Digital original) $3.99 $4.99 CAD

Buy from Other Retailers:

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.

Shakespearean Tragedy is a landmark work of literary criticism. It is at once the pinnacle of the nineteenth century’s love affair with Shakespeare and the starting point for a new century of Shakespeare scholarship.

Critics have charged that A.C. Bradley attends to character at the expense of other elements of the plays, such as theme, dramatic structure, and historical background; Bradley’s defenders have praised the work for its philosophical and psychological insights. As the first important, book-length academic study in English of four of Shakespeare’s major tragedies – Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth – Bradley’s work both influenced and enabled modern Shakespearean literary criticism even as it engaged with, and often rebutted, conventional Romantic and Victorian interpretations of the plays and their author.

Genre:

Series:

Barnes & Noble Digital Library

Andrew Cecil Bradley was born in 1851. His father, the Revered Charles Bradley, was a clergyman renowned for the powerful and eloquent sermons he preached to his congregations. Reverend Bradley was also a prolific progenitor, siring twenty-two children (of which Andrew Cecil was the youngest). Andrew Cecil Bradley seems to have developed a passion for poetry early in life. He especially admired the great English Romantics Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. At seventeen Bradley enrolled at Oxford University, where he went from undergraduate to fellow, then lecturer, at Balliol College, a hub of progressive thinking and intellectual skepticism about traditional knowledge, such as literal interpretations of the Bible. Although a philosopher by training, Bradley found subsequent academic positions in first Liverpool, then Glasgow, chiefly in modern literature. In 1901 Bradley returned to Oxford to accept a five year position as Chair of Poetry.