Fragmentation of the Proper Name and the Crisis of Degree: Deconstructing King Lear Sudies in English and American Literature

This book is a rich interpretation of a rich text, providing a twenty-first century reading of a timeless masterpiece, and, in so doing, it points to the relationship of death and desire as a playing both with body and language. The book confronts readers with the ineluctable patterns which language and time inscribe within the open/closed Shakespearean space: Degree, division, and diversity as the focal points. Emphasis upon the corporeality of the human body links this study's textual interpretation with the corpus of the literary canon, itself seen as a body divided by performance and differed by reading. It prevails over the damaging engagement with the deconstructed text and dominates the conflictual tendencies of the reconstructed drama.