This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear

(Hardback)

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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. From providential apocalypticism to climate change, this ground-breaking ecocritical study traces the performance history of the storm scene in King Lear to explore our shifting, fraught and deeply ideological relationship with stormy weather across time. This Contentious Storm offers a new ecocritical reading of Shakespeares classic play, illustrating how the storm has been read as a sign of the providential, cosmological, meteorological, psychological, neurological, emotional, political, sublime, maternal, feminine, heroic and chaotic at different points in history. The big ecocritical history charted here reveals the unstable significance of the weather and mobilises details of the plays dramatic narrative to figure the weather as a force within self, society and planet.

Reviews

This Contentious Storm does beautiful work of interweaving literary ecocriticism, theatre history, contemporary ecological theory, and historical and philosophical approaches to meteorology and performance ... [Hamilton] skilfully integrates rigorous research and good-humouredly conceals the labour that makes the work such joy to read. This Contentious Storm is a bright exemplar of what theatre and performance can contribute to interdisciplinary environmental humanities conversations, breaching literary and performance-based approaches. It will soon be impossible to think of theatre history and ecology together without reference to this book. * Studies in Theatre and Performance *
The Contentious Storm provides a wonderfully fresh, sane and lucid view of King Lear in conception, context, and performance. Jennifer Mae Hamilton makes the famous storm scene a touchstone that reveals the power and the flaws of ecocritical, political, and post-structuralist perspectives over the centuries. Her judgements, based in scrupulous research, are wisely measured, and her writing has an unassuming clarity and unforced grace that is all too rare in high-level scholarship. * Robert N. Watson, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles, USA *
Seeing our moral universe in the naked king in the storm has long been a staple of critical responses to King Lear. By reconsidering the storm through new lenses, from posthuman ecocriticism to the intellectual history of meteorology to several centuries of theatrical practice, Jennifer Mae Hamilton demonstrates that the mad kings wrestling with the art of our necessities retains the ability to speak to our reason and our needs in this era of ecological crisis. * Steve Mentz, Professor of English, St. John's University, New York, USA *

Author Bio

Jennifer Mae Hamilton is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, funded by The Seed Box: A MISTRA+FORMAS Environmental Humanities Collaboratory, Linkping University, Sweden. She also lectures in ecocriticism at New York University, Sydney