Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781350213982)

Drawing on both historical analysis and theories from the modern affective sciences, Shakespeare and Disgust argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the 'gatekeeper emotion', disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools - poetic images, thematic considerations and narrative possibilities - to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders.

Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays (Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Othello and Hamlet) and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors, including food, disease, bodily violation, race and sex disgust. Disgust, the book argues, is one of the central engines of human behaviour - and, somewhat surprisingly, it must be seen as a centrepiece of Shakespeare's affective universe.

Author: Bradley J. Irish
ISBN-10: 1350213985
ISBN-13: 9781350213982
Publisher: Arden Shakespeare
Language: English
Published: 03/09/2023
Pages: 280
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.04lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.69d