This Contentious Storm An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear [Hardcover]

From providential apocalypticism to climate change, this ground-breaking ecocritical study traces the performance history of the storm scene inKing Learto explore our shifting, fraught and deeply ideological relationship with stormy weather across time.

This Contentious Stormoffers a new ecocritical reading of Shakespeare's classic play, illustrating how the storm has been read as a sign of the providential, cosmological, meteorological, psychological, neurological, emotional, political, sublime, maternal, feminine, heroic and chaotic at different points in history. The big ecocritical history charted here reveals the unstable significance of the weather and mobilises details of the play's dramatic narrative to figure the weather as a force within self, society and planet.

Jennifer Mae Hamiltonis a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, funded by The Seed Box: A MISTRA+FORMAS Environmental Humanities Collaboratory, Link?ping University, Sweden. She also lectures in ecocriticism at New York University, Sydney

Prologue: The Plot

Introduction:The Case forKing Lear

Part 1 - Ecocriticism

Chapter 1: Meteorological Reading

Chapter 2: 'What is the cause of thunder?': The Storm's Three Ambiguities

Chapter 3: Cataclysmic Shame: Three Views of Lear's Mortal Body in the Storm

Part 2  Performance History
Chapter 4: Ecocritical Big History

Chapter 5: The Spectacular Jacobean Theatre

Chapter 6: Storms of Fortune: Industrial Technology and Nahum Tate,
c.1680-c.1900

Chapter 7: Lear's Head: The Rise of the Psychological Metaphor, 1908-1955.

Chapter 8: Towards the Flood, 1962-2016