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About this book
Lear's Other Shadow: A Cultural History of Queen Lear offers a deep cultural analysis of the figure of Queen Lear, who shadows and eventually sometimes overshadows her royal husband across the nearly one-thousand-year life of this archetypal tale. What appears to be a deliberate strategy of suppression, even erasure in Shakespeare's King Lear later inspired dozens of stage, page, and cinematic remakes and adaptations in which this figure is revived or remembered, often pointedly so. From Jacob Gordin's Yiddish-language Miriele Efros (1898), through edgy stage remakes such as Gordon Bottomley's King Lear's Wife (1915) and the Women's Theatre Group's Lear's Daughters (1987), to novelized retellings from Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991) to Preti Taneja's We That Are Young (2018) and J. R. Thorp's Learwife (2021), and even the television series Empire (2015–2020) and Succession (2018–2023), Queen Lear regularly emerges from her shadowy origins to challenge how we understand the ancient King Leir/King Lear story. These and many other examples reveal fascinating patterns of adaptation and reinterpretation that Lear's Other Shadow identifies and analyzes for the first time, showing how and why Queen Lear is at the center of this ancient story, whether she is heard from or not.
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Lear’s Other Shadow by Thomas G. Olsen in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Publisher
University of Delaware PressYear
2025Print ISBN
9781644533550, 9781644533567eBook ISBN
9781644533574Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- A Brief Note on Texts and Terminology
- Introduction: Toward a Cultural History of Queen Lear
- 1 The King Leir Legend before Shakespeare
- 2 Queen Lear in King Lear
- 3 King Lear’s Other Shadow: Staging the Absent Queen
- 4 Fire Us Forth on Fox TV: The Queen on Screen
- 5 Reviving Queen Lear in Modern Fiction
- Conclusion: The Quality of Nothing
- Appendix: Works Briefly Mentioned in Main Text
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author