Family Dramas
Intimacy, Power and Systems in Shakespeare's Tragedies
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:30th Nov '18
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£130.00(9781138335769)
Most of Shakespeare’s tragedies have a family drama at their heart. This book brings these relationships to life, offering a radical new perspective on the tragic heroes and their dilemmas. Family Dramas:Intimacy, Power and Systems in Shakespeare's Tragedies focusses on the interactions and dialogues between people on stage, linking their intimate emotional worlds to wider social and political contexts.
Since family relationships absorb and enact social ideologies, their conflicts often expose the conflicts that all ideologies contain. The complexities, contradictions and ambiguities of Shakespeare’s portrayals of individuals and their relationships are brought to life, while wider power structures and social discourses are shown to reach into the heart of intimate relationships and personal identity. Surveying relevant literature from Shakespeare studies, the book introduces the ideas behind the family systems approach to literary criticism. Explorations of gender relationships feature particularly strongly in the analysis since it is within gender that intimacy and power most compellingly intersect and frequently collide.
For Shakespeare lovers and psychotherapists alike, this application of systemic theory opens a new perspective on familiar literary territory.
"This book is a feast for family therapists and Shakespeare lovers alike. How pleasurable to see systemic ideas reflected in different light as Gwyn Daniel puts them to use in her lively reading of Shakespeare’s plays. And how pleasurable to appreciate, yet again, across time and culture and contexts, the drama and complexity of human relating and the beauty of Shakespeare." --Carmel Flaskas, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Australia
"Gwyn Daniel is a phenomenally astute and sensitive reader of people and relationships; she is also a phenomenally astute and sensitive reader of Shakespeare’s plays. This book combines her skills in family therapy and in Shakespeare. The result is a fresh reading of major plays, with new insights in every chapter. It is a book that also displays acute theatrical sensitivity: what we see on stage is characters performing relationally. The Shakespeare lover, the therapist, and the theatre-goer will find much to treasure in this valuable book. Gwyn Daniel distils her immense knowledge and her close reading of Shakespeare into precise observations that consistently offer perceptive articulations of social systems and family relations." --Laurie Maguire, Professor of Shakespeare, University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow, Magdalen College
ISBN: 9781138335776
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 453g
312 pages