Receiving the Stranger in Shakespeare
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- ISBN 9780367623340
- Weight: 620g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 08 Jun 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Hospitality to strangers has become an increasingly prevalent topic in recent years, from political upheavals resulting in the displacement of millions of people, to the emergence of our collective obligations towards strangers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet the vexed question of when to welcome or reject strangers is nothing new. In the context of an increasingly multicultural early modern London, where disease, including plague, was often rampant, Shakespeare repeatedly explores the subtle ethical complexities that attend seemingly straightforward acts of hospitality or their refusal. Receiving the Stranger in Shakespeare provides critical analysis of the most important moments of hospitality or its denial in Shakespeare’s plays, situating them historically in order to fully explore Shakespeare's engagement with early modern views. The book explores the plays definitions of the self, self-interest, and otherness and their relevance to make sense of the world, and an exploration of the social, economic, and political particularities that make such distinctions as troublesome as they are necessary. This volume will unravel the various attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to balance these obligations and risks.
Joan Fitzpatrick is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University, specializing in the historical and critical study of food in literature. She is author of A History of Food in Literature from the Fourteenth Century to the Present, co-authored with Charlotte Boyce (Routledge, 2017); Three Sixteenth Century Dietaries: A Critical Edition, Revels Companion Library; Shakespeare and the Language of Food: A Dictionary, Continuum/Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries; and Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays (Routledge, formerly Ashgate, 2007).
