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Bolingbroke and Coriolanus each set in motion a ‘war machine’ with the respective results that have been pointed out. Other characters, also victims of abusive banishment, do not take part in such a dynamic of riposte; rather, they find another way of expressing their feelings of injustice, trying to sublimate their temptation to be revenged. Sometimes violence does erupt, but it is channelled away
Bolingbroke’s and Coriolanus’ respective illegal returns are effective because they come with armed forces that are unexpected and, as such, convey the impression of having what Deleuze and Guattari, in their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, term a ‘war machine’. In A Thousand Plateaus , they explore several oppositions, such as ‘smooth space’ versus ‘striated space’, ‘game of
Dante Beyond Influence provides the first systematic inquiry into the formation of the British critical and scholarly discourse on Dante in the late nineteenth century (1865–1921). Overcoming the primacy of literary influence and intertextuality, it instead historicises and conceptualises the hermeneutic turn in British reception history as the product of major transformations in Victorian intellectual, social and publishing history.
The volume unpacks the phenomenology of Victorian dantismo through the analysis of five case studies and the material examination of a newly discovered body of manuscript and print sources. Extending over a sixty-year long period, the book retraces the sophistication of the Victorian modes of readerly and writerly engagement with Dantean textuality. It charts its outward expression as a public criticism circulating in prominent nineteenth-century periodicals and elucidates its wider popularisation (and commodification) through Victorian mass-publishing. It ultimately brings forth the mechanism that led to the specialisation of the scholarly discourse and the academisation of Dante studies in traditional and extramural universities. Drawing on the new disciplines of book history and history of reading, the author provides unprecedented insight into the private intellectual life and public work of Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, William E. Gladstone, and introduces a significant cohort of Dante critics, scholars and learned societies hitherto passed unnoticed.
As it recaptures a long-neglected moment in Dante’s reception history, this path-breaking book illuminates the wider socio-cultural and economic impact that the Victorian hermeneutic turn had in advancing women’s access to literary and scholarly professions, educational reform and discipline formation.
This book analyses three Shakespearean plays that mainly deal with abusive forms of banishment: King Richard II, Coriolanus and King Lear. These plays present with particular clarity the mechanism of the banishment proclamation and its consequences, that is, the dynamic of exclusion and its repercussions. Those repercussions may entail breaking the ban to come back illegally and seek revenge; devising strategies of deviation, such as disguise and change of identity; or resorting to mental subterfuges as a means of refuge. They may also lead to entropy – exhaustion, letting go or heartbreak. Each in its own way, they invite us to reflect upon the complex articulation between banishment and abuse of power, upon the strategies of resistance and displacement employed to shun or endure the painful experience of ‘deterritorialisation’; they put into play the dialectics of allegiance and disobedience, of fearlessly speaking and silencing, of endurance and exhaustion; they question both the legitimacy of power and the limits of human resistance. This study draws on French scholars in Shakespearean studies, and also on contemporary French historians, theorists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, essayists and philosophers, who can help us read Shakespeare’s plays in our time. It thus takes into account some of the works of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Gaston Bachelard, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Boris Cyrulnik and Emmanuel Housset. The hope is that their respective intellectual approaches will shed specific kinds of light on Shakespeare’s plays and initiate a fruitful dialogue with Anglo-Saxon criticism.
, because Bolingbroke’s and Coriolanus’ respective illegal returns are very swift and efficient, thanks to their armed forces (whether they are merely deterrent or fully in action), which evoke what Deleuze and Guattari term a ‘war machine’. On stage, the effect of speed, and even acceleration, is created by the spatio-temporal ellipsis of exile. None of the two plays presents us with what is expected from banishment, that is, ‘a
. Though they are officially, though unjustly, banished, some characters (Bolingbroke in King Richard II , Coriolanus) will not passively endure; once abroad, they initiate a dynamics of frontal counterattack and illegally return with a Deleuzian ‘war machine’. For this illegal return to succeed, expedient alliance must prevail over national loyalty, and the rebellious banished person appeals to mercenaries or turns mercenary himself, gives free
case, for Plowman the only natural way of living. When it came to his own choice, Plowman felt that, as he had supported the war machine by fighting, his only option was just as obviously to fight against it by ‘getting into prison for peace’. Despite a trial and appeal, Plowman was sent a call-up notice at the start of July 1918 and became tangled in a web of bureaucracy between the two government departments of Registration and Appeals. He was in danger of being sent to prison as a deserter and not as a conscientious objector, which moved Plowman to comment on the
deterritorialising potential of the parrhesiast will materialise and turn effective with a ‘war machine’. In King Lear , Cordelia refuses to play her father’s rhetorical game of flattery; she also points to the hypocrisy of her sisters, who claim that they can ‘love’ their father ‘all’ (1.1.98). There is no such exclusiveness for Cordelia, as she fearlessly tells her father, ‘Haply when I
lives’. 8 So much for the search for an ‘essence’ of ‘personality’. One further extension of this might be the proposition developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their chapter on ‘The War Machine’ in A Thousand Plateaus (1988), and the necessity of conceiving ‘the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State apparatus constitutes the form of
in some horrific way thus more psychologically healthy? It is just this kind of hypothesis with which Daniel Pick has taken issue. He says in his introduction to War Machine that ‘the writers I discuss are men, and often men for whom war evidently raises troubling questions of sexuality and gender, even though, at the same time, war is frequently said to resolve them’.78 He asks critics to be wary of attributing a healing, relieving, power to war. In some respects this healing does occur, and does so in Ford’s wartime character of Christopher Tietjens. As explored