Hamlet in His Modern Guises

Welsh, Alexander

ISBN 10: 0691050937 / ISBN 13: 9780691050935

Published by Princeton University Press, 2001

About this Item

Unread book in perfect condition.

Seller Inventory # 400910

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Hamlet in His Modern Guises
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691050937
• ISBN 13: 9780691050935
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Alexander Welsh is the Emily Sanford Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of Freud's Wishful Dream Book, The Hero of the Waverley Novels: With New Essays on Scott, and Reflections on the Hero as Quixote (all Princeton), as well as books on Dickens and George Eliot.