This book investigates Shakespeare's King Lear and its originative
power in modern literature with specific attention to the early work of
English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and to the American writer
James Agee and photographer Walker Evans's 1941 collaboration, Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men. It examines how these later readers return to
the play to interrogate emphatically the question of the relations
between literature and politics in modernity and to initiate in this way
their own creative trajectories. King Lear opens up a literary genealogy
or history of successors, at the heart and origin of which, the author
claims, is a crisis of sovereignty. The tragedy famously begins with the
title character's decision to give up his throne and divide the kingdom
prior to his demise. In bringing to light the assumptions behind this
logic, and in dramatizing its disastrous consequences, the play performs
an implicit analysis and critique of sovereignty as the guiding
principle of political life and gestures, beyond sovereignty, towards
the possibility of a new aesthetic and political future.
The question of the relations between literature and politics does not
only open up immanently or internally within King Lear, this book
argues, but is also that which occasions a literary history of readers
who return to the play as to an originary locus for dealing with a
problem. Among such successors are Wordsworth in the 1790s after the
French Revolution and Agee and Evans during the Depression in the 1930s,
whose engagements with Lear, this book argues, were crucial to their
development of new artistic means towards creating a democratic
literature. In bringing British Romanticism and American modernism into
contact with their literary political origins in Shakespeare, this book
offers an original way of thinking literary history and a new approach
to the question of the relations between literature and politics in
modernity. In its interdisciplinary and cross-period scope, it will
appeal to students and scholars of Shakespeare, Romanticism, modernism,
literary theory, as well as literature and photography.
