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Print Price: $27.50

Format:
Hardback
176 pp.
135 mm x 216 mm

ISBN-13:
9780192846723

Publication date:
September 2022

Imprint: OUP UK

King Lear

Shakespeare's Dark Consolations

Arthur W. Frank

Series : My Reading

A book on the experience of reading Shakespeare's 'dark plays'.

As part of the My Reading series, King Lear is a personal meditation on a great literary work. Arthur Frank brings a career of studying illness experience and suffering to consider how King Lear can aid people whose lives need help. Reading King Lear leads Frank to both an encounter with his own old age and a source of consolation-companionship--in his future. This book does not try to minimize vulnerabilities, but it shows what is fully human, and thus shared, in suffering. The book introduces readers to King Lear, and it invites those who know the play to a new consideration for its ability to affect people's lives.

Readership : General, Graduate, Postgraduate, Research, Scholarly: Students studying King Lear will be guided through the play, scene by scene. Browsers in theatre bookshops will find a book that offers a personal connection to one of Shakespeare's greatest plays. The other audience divides between people reading as a form of self-care, and care professionals who seek to use narrative in their practice. The book could find course adoption in both literature and health humanities or medical humanities.

Prologue: A Tale of Two Families
Vulnerable Reading
The Unravelling
The Refuge of Second Selves
The Lost, the Mad, and the Image of Horror
Reconciliations
Living With an Unpromised End
How King Lear Helps
Tragic Sharing
Coda: In Place of the Jig

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Arthur Frank received his doctorate in sociology from Yale in 1975 and spent his career teaching at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. After his retirement in 2013, he taught in Norway; throughout his career he has lectured internationally and held visiting professorships in Australia and England. His work has focused on the experience of serious illness, beginning with his memoir, At the Will of the Body and his most cited work, The Wounded Storyteller. His most recent book was Letting Stories Breathe (Chicago, 2010). He is an elected member of the Royal Society of Canada and recipient of the Career Achievement Award from the Canadian Bioethics Society.

Making Sense - Margot Northey
Shakespeare's Originality - John Kerrigan
Shakespeare and London - Edited by Duncan Salkeld
Shakespeare's First Folio - Emma Smith

Special Features

A personal meditation on King Lear that considers how the play both reflects and relieves human suffering
Provides scene by scene guidance and describes character development to make King Lear accessible to new readers
An introduction to vulnerable reading as a way of teaching literature to healthcare students and practitioners