Kiernan Ryan – författare

'The most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world' Percy Bysshe ShelleyShakespeare's bleak and brutal tragedy begins when an ageing king, seeking a successor, rejects the young daughter who loves him and misplaces his trust in her malevolent sisters. In return they strip him of his power and condemn him to a wretched wasteland of horror and insanity. Set in a pitiless universe, King Lear is a towering, elemental masterpiece of fierce poetry and vast imaginative scope.Used and Recommended by the National TheatreGeneral Editor Stanley WellsEdited by George HunterIntroduction by Kiernan Ryan

Looks at the diversity of the latest feminist, post-structuralist and new historicist accounts of "King Lear". The contributors include Stephen Greenblatt, Terry Eagleton, Annabel Patterson and Jonathan Goldberg.

In this groundbreaking book one of the most original and compelling voices in contemporary Shakespeare criticism undertakes a detailed study of the ten extraordinary comedies Shakespeare wrote during his first decade as a dramatist: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night.Through close readings of these plays Kiernan Ryan reveals Shakespeare's deepening disenchantment with his world and his dream of that world transfigured. Ryan engages with each comedy as a unique work of dramatic and poetic art, with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges, paying special attention to its language and form. As the haunting vision shared by the plays emerges from Ryan's acute analysis of each of them, the book transforms our understanding and appreciation of Shakespearean comedy.Written in a lively, accessible style, Shakespeare's Comedies is essential reading not only for students and teachers, but also for anyone keen to consider these plays from a fresh perspective.

In this groundbreaking book one of the most original and compelling voices in contemporary Shakespeare criticism undertakes a detailed study of the ten extraordinary comedies Shakespeare wrote during his first decade as a dramatist: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night.Through close readings of these plays Kiernan Ryan reveals Shakespeare's deepening disenchantment with his world and his dream of that world transfigured. Ryan engages with each comedy as a unique work of dramatic and poetic art, with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges, paying special attention to its language and form. As the haunting vision shared by the plays emerges from Ryan's acute analysis of each of them, the book transforms our understanding and appreciation of Shakespearean comedy.Written in a lively, accessible style, Shakespeare's Comedies is essential reading not only for students and teachers, but also for anyone keen to consider these plays from a fresh perspective.

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism have become two of the most powerful and appealing movements in modern criticism. Their conquest of Renaissance studies has escalated into global colonialisation of English and American literary history. A wealth of innovative work has emerged on everything from the "Canterbury Tales" to the "Cantos", bringing intense theoretical controversy in its wake. This reader pulls the diversity and polemical vigour of this new critical constellation into focus for the first time. The introduction identifies the distinctive concerns of both approaches, unpacks their theoretical assumptions and clarifies their chief points of convergence and antagonism. It offers a sympathetic but skeptical perspective on Cultural Materialism and New Historicism, highlighting their blind spots as well as applauding their insights, and searching out the points where they seem poised to move beyond the limits of their own methodologies. The selection itself unfolds in three stages. The first group of essays locates the intellectual sources of both movements in figures such as Foucault, Geertz, Althusser, Williams and Derrida.The second mounts a theoretical debate between prominent exponents and opponents of both kinds of criticism, including Stephen Greenblatt, Catherine Belsey, Alan Sinfield and Majorie Levinson. The final group carries the debate forward through a wide range of critical readings, which illustrate the practical impact of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, on the novels, plays and poems of authors from Aeschylus to Ezra Pound. The Reader concludes with a bibliography of criticism which has applied these approaches to medieval literature, Shakespeare and the Renaissance, 18th century studies, the Romantic period, 19th century literature, early 20th century writing and the American literary tradition.

This text is concerned with Shakespeare's four romances written during his final period of writing - "The Winter's Tale", "Pericles", "Cymbeline" and "The Tempest". It focuses on how the advent of theory has transformed our perception of Shakespearean romance.

This is the first collection of criticism on Shakespeare's romances to register the impact of modern literary theory on interpretations of these plays. Kiernan Ryan brings together the most important recent essays on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, the greatest of the `last plays', staging a dynamic debate between feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and new historicist views of the masterpieces Shakespeare wrote at the close of his career.The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is at stake in the choice of a particular critical approach. It allows the student to compare the strengths and limitations of a deconstructive and a feminist reading of the same romance, or to test the plausibility of one psychoanalytic angle on the last plays against another. The headnotes that preface the essays highlight their distinctive slants on Shakespearean romance, unpack the theoretical assumptions that steer their interpretations, and throw into relief the key points at which their authors collide or converge.The editor's introduction places the essays in the context of twentieth-century criticism of the last plays and makes a powerful case for a fundamental reappraisal of Shakespearean romance. The comprehensive, fully annotated bibliography provides an unrivalled guide to further reading on all four plays.

Through close readings of a wide range of plays and poems, Kiernan Ryan's compelling polemic sets out to reclaim the idea of Shakespeare's timeless universality from reactionary and radical critics alike. Its argument is driven throughout by the belief that at this moment in history the need to recognise and activate the revolutionary potential of Shakespeare's drama is more urgent than ever.The volume has been shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English 2016 Prize for the best critical study in the field of Literatures in the English Language.

This ground-breaking book reveals the prophetic, revolutionary vision that drives Shakespeare’s tragedies, tracing its unbroken development from its beginnings in the Henry VI plays and Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, right through to his last, Coriolanus. The four full-length studies at the heart of the book focus in depth on Shakespeare’s four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespearean Tragedy engages with each of these titanic masterpieces as a singular, complete work of dramatic art with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges, but with the same unmistakably Shakespearean tragic vision at its core. Through compelling new readings of the plays, grounded in close analysis of their language and form, Kiernan Ryan shows how Shakespeare dramatizes the tragic realities of his world from the standpoint of the transfigured future that our world still awaits.