Every Turn of the Wheel: Circular Time and Cordelia’s Revolt: from William Shakespeare to the British Enlightenment
Journal Title: English Studies at NBU - Year 2017, Vol 3, Issue 1
Abstract
This article argues that William Shakespeare’s King Lear anticipates core political dynamics of the English Civil War (1641-49), and philosophical tenets of the British Enlightenment in John Locke and David Hume. It analyzes three principle and competing paradigms of public authority in King Lear: theodicy, nature, and the autonomy of thought. The play is historically contextualized within the 16th century. King Lear, moreover, portends revolutionary new thought patterns: the centerless universe of modern astronomy, and human embeddedness in fluid nature without fixed identity. Three variants on the concept of “nothing” – existential, social, and philosophical - interweave the cosmic and political threads, based on a circular temporality. Shakespeare’s character, Cordelia, affirms the everyday over the cosmic, and the sociological over the metaphysical. King Lear depicts a profound moral trans-valuation in early modern history, whose shifting temporal horizons remain central also to contemporary politics.
Authors and Affiliations
Tadd Graham Fernée
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP370174
- DOI 10.33919/esnbu.17.1.1
- Views 105
- Downloads 0
Editor's Note
Editor's Note - English Studies at NBU, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2018
Where Google fails
The paper presents ongoing research in contrastive corpus linguistics with envisaged applications in machine translation (MT) and with focus on Google Translate (GT) performance in English-Bulgarian translation. Structur...
Teachers' perception of the differences in the reading profiles of students with dyslexia and the role of dyslexia assessment for an appropriate choice of teaching strategy
The paper discusses how literacy teachers approach the differences in the reading profiles of their students with dyslexia, and the value of an available diagnosis of dyslexia in their choosing the most appropriate teach...
Coherence: Implications for teaching writing
The paper presents the results of a study consisting of three text-based analyses of groups of student argumentative essays written on the same topic. The aim was to identify text-based features of coherence in L1 and L2...
The graduation paper in Translation Studies: Nuances of critical thinking
Critical thinking skills play a vital role in a knowledge society and have a direct influence on the quality of teaching and learning. We aim at highlighting the way in which the graduation paper in Translation Studies c...