{"product_id":"b0848tjkgv","title":"Theater Of Envy: William Shakespeare","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn this ground-breaking work, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics turns to the major figure in English literature, William Shakespeare, and proposes a dramatic new reading of nearly all his plays and poems. The key to A Theater of Envy is Girard's novel reinterpretation of mimesis. For Girard, people desire objects not for their intrinsic value, but because they are desired by someone else - we mime or imitate their desires. This envy - or mimetic desire - he sees as one of the foundations of the human condition.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBringing such proocative and iconoclastic insights to bear on Shakespeare, Girard reveals the previously overlooked coherence of problem plays like Troilus and Cressida, and makes a convincing argument for elevating A Midsummer Night's Dream from the status of a chaotic comedy to a masterpiece. The book abounds with novel and provocative interpretations: Shakespeare becomes a prophet of modern advertising, and the threat of nuclear disaster is read in the light of Hamlet. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is a brief, but brilliant aside in which an entirely new perspective is brought to the chapter on Joyce's Ulysses in which Stephen Dedalus gives a lecture on Shakespeare. In Girard's view only Joyce, perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century novelists, comes close to understanding the greatest of Renaissance playwrights.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThroughout this impressively sustained reading of Shakespeare, Girard's prose is sophisticated, but contemporary, and accessible to the general reader.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"ANT","offers":[{"title":"Ebook","offer_id":52828493119704,"sku":"YSL43613","price":15.59,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0835\/3356\/2072\/files\/A1qXMS75N4L._SY1500.jpg?v=1793178535","url":"https:\/\/www.bookmebay.com\/products\/b0848tjkgv","provider":"BookMebay","version":"1.0","type":"link"}