Scholarly


King Lear and the Naked Truth

Duke University Press
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Taking King Lear as its central text, this book seriously questions the critical assumptions of much of today’s most fashionable Shakespeare scholarship. Charting a new course beyond both New Historicist and deconstructionist critics, it suggests a theory of language and interpretation that provides essential historical and linguistic contexts for the key terms and concepts of the play. Opening the play up to the implications of these contexts and this interpretive theory, the book reveals much about Lear, English Reformation religious culture, and the state of contemporary criticism.

"An exciting, thoughtful, and challenging book.  Kronenfeld makes a strong case for the traditional Christian moral framework of King Lear, contra the various 'radical Shakespears' of current criticism.  She also offers a subtle and powerful model of historical change."   —   Debora Shuger, University of California, Los Angeles.  

"... King Lear and the Naked Truth is richly researched, deeply learned, and largely achieves what it sets out to do. This is an important study from which all readers will learn."   —   Ronald Knowles,  Renaissance Quarterly

“[A] learned, intelligent, and interesting book. . . . [A] wide-ranging knowledge of Renaissance religious and political commentary and of current criticism is made available in a lucid and persuasive argument.”   —   Edward Pechter, Journal of English and Germanic Philology