A01=Alexander Welsh
Abel Magwitch
Allusion
Amleth
Author_Alexander Welsh
Autobiographical novel
Autobiography
Bildungsroman
Blackmail
Category=DSBD
Category=DSG
Charles Dickens
Compeyson
Criticism
Despair (novel)
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Estella (Great Expectations)
Exposition (narrative)
Faust
Fiction
Fortinbras
George Eliot
Gertrude (Hamlet)
Hamlet and Oedipus
Hamlet's Father
Harold Bloom
Havisham
His Family
Horwendill
Ibid (short story)
In Parenthesis
Irony
Joke
King Lear
Laertes
Laertes (Hamlet)
Literary modernism
Literature
Little Dorrit
Miss Havisham
Monomania
Most Secret
Narrative
Novel
Novelist
Odysseus
Oedipus complex
Ophelia
Parody
Parricide
Playwright
Polonius
Prince Hamlet
Psychoanalysis
Redgauntlet
Resentment
Revenge play
Revenge tragedy
Ridicule
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (play)
Satire
Seriousness
Shakespeare's plays
Snob
Soliloquy
Stephen Dedalus
Telemachus
The Unnamed
Tragedy
Ur-Hamlet
William Empson
William Shakespeare
Writer
Yorick
Product details
- ISBN 9780691050935
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 23 Jan 2001
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Focusing on Shakespeare's Hamlet as foremost a study of grief, Alexander Welsh offers a powerful analysis of its protagonist as the archetype of the modern hero. For over two centuries writers and critics have viewed Hamlet's persona as a fascinating blend of self-consciousness, guilt, and wit. Yet in order to understand more deeply the modernity of this Shakespearean hero, Welsh first situates Hamlet within the context of family and mourning as it was presented in other revenge tragedies of Shakespeare's time. Revenge, he maintains, appears as a function of mourning rather than an end in itself. Welsh also reminds us that the mourning of a son for his father may not always be sincere. This book relates the problem of dubious mourning to Hamlet's ascendancy as an icon of Western culture, which began late in the eighteenth century, a time when the thinking of past generations--or fathers--represented to many an obstacle to human progress. Welsh reveals how Hamlet inspired some of the greatest practitioners of modernity's quintessential literary form, the novel.
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Scott's Redgauntlet, Dickens's Great Expectations, Melville's Pierre, and Joyce's Ulysses all enhance our understanding of the play while illustrating a trend in which Hamlet ultimately becomes a model of intense consciousness. Arguing that modern consciousness mourns for the past, even as it pretends to be free of it, Welsh offers a compelling explanation of why Hamlet remains marvelously attractive to this day.
Alexander Welsh is the Emily Sanfard Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of Freud's Wishful Dream Book. The Hero of the Waveriey Novels: With New Essays on Scott. and Reflections on the Hero as Quixote (all Princeton), as well as books on Dickens and George Eliot.
