Description:
Shakespeare and the Political: Elizabethan Politics and Asian Exigencies is a collection of essays which show how selected Shakespearean plays and later adaptations engage with the political situations of the Elizabethan period as well as contemporary Asian societies. The various interpretations of the original plays focus on the institutions of family and honour, patriarchy, kingship and dynasty, and the emergent ideologies of the nation and cosmopolitanism, adopting a variety of approaches like historicism, presentism, psychoanalysis, feminism and close reading.
The volume also looks at Shakespearean adaptations in Asia - Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese and Indian. Using Douglas Lanier's concept of the 'rhizomatic' approach, it seeks to examine how Asian Shakespearean adaptations, films and stage performances, appropriate and reproduce originals often 'unfaithfully' in different social and temporal contexts to produce independent works of art.
Brief description: Rita Banerjee is a research scholar affiliated to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. She was formerly Associate Professor of English Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She specialized in early modern British drama and has published articles, book chapters, and a monograph in early modern literature and related areas. Her current research interests include travel narratives, early modern literature, historiography, 19th- and 20th -century Bengali literature and culture, women's writings, and Rabindranath Tagore. She has recently published India in Early Modern English Travel Narratives: Protestantism, Enlightenment, and Toleration and an edited collection, Cultural Histories of India: Subaltern Spaces, Peripheral Genres, and Alternate Historiography.