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Informationen zum Autor Gordon McMullan is Reader in English at King's College London. Klappentext The idea of 'late style' claims that, in their last few years, certain great artists, writers or composers enter a rejuvenated phase of serene, abstract, archaic or childlike creativity, a phenomenon held to result from the proximity of death. Gordon McMullan reads late style not as a transhistorical phenomenon but as a critical construct, taking Shakespeare as his exemplar. He maps the development of the idea of 'late Shakespeare' from the late eighteenth century to the present, showing the mismatch between what he calls the 'discourse of lateness' and the actual conditions of production and of authorship in early modern theatre. The book offers the first full critique of the idea of late style, which will be of interest not only to literature specialists but also to art historians and musicologists and to anyone curious about the relationship of creativity to old age and death. Zusammenfassung This book is an account of the ways in which we have come to understand Shakespeare's final plays as an instance of the idea of 'late style'. It will be of interest to literature specialists! musicologists and art historians! and anyone curious about the relationship of creativity to death. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction; 1. Shakespeare and the idea of late writing; 2. The Shakespearean caesura: genre, chronology, style; 3. The invention of late Shakespeare: subjectivism and its discontents; 4. Last words / late plays: the possibility and impossibility of late Shakespeare in early modern culture and theatre; 5. How old is 'late'?: late Shakespeare, old age, King Lear; 6. The Tempest and the uses of late Shakespeare in the theatre: Gielgud, Rylance, Prospero.
