Abstract
Abstract This book examines Shakespeare’s poetry as a case study for the mutually formative relationship between desire and recollection. Through a series of close readings that are both historically situated and informed by recent theory, the book traces how the speaker of the poems strives for a more agential relationship to his own memory by treating recollection as a form of narrative. Drawing together insights from cognitive science, the early modern memory arts, and psychoanalysis, the book connects the Sonnets to the larger Renaissance project of conceiving memory as a faculty to be developed and managed through self-discipline and through rhetoric. In doing so, The Pleasures of Memory in Shakespeare’s Sonnets reveals how early modern thought predicted many theories that have emerged in contemporary neuroscientific and psychoanalytic understandings of the self and its pursuit of pleasure. The Sonnets emerge as a collection that contemplates the affective dimensions and conceptual overlaps that bind anticipation to retrospection in the pursuit of erotic pleasure. The book showcases Shakespeare’s most beloved sonnets as well as less familiar ones, and also discusses contemporary adaptations of the poems. The book further brings the Sonnets into the present by engaging with contemporary treatments of pleasure and memory by authors such as C. P. Cavafy, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Michael Ondaatje. This volume will appeal to students and scholars working on Shakespeare’s poetry as well as to a broader audience of readers interested in affect studies, memory studies, and sexuality studies.
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call