The Storm at Sea

Political Aesthetics in the Time of Shakespeare

Christopher Pye

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780823265053
  9780823265046
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823265060
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Storm at Sea: Political Aesthetics in the Time of Shakespeare counters a tradition of cultural analysis that judges considerations of aesthetic autonomy in the early modern context to be either anachronistic or an index of political disengagement. Pye argues that for a post-theocratic era in which the mise-en-forme of the social domain itself was for the first time at stake, the problem of the aesthetic lay at the very core of the political; it is precisely through its engagement with the question of aesthetic autonomy that early modern works most profoundly explore their relation to matters of law, state, sovereignty, and political subjectivity.

Pye establishes the significance of a "creationist" political aesthetic—at once a discrete historical category and a phenomenon that troubles our familiar forms of historical accounting—and suggests that the fate of such an aesthetic is intimately bound up with the emergence of modern conceptions of the political sphere.

The Storm at Sea moves historically from Leonardo da Vinci to Thomas Hobbes; it focuses on Shakespeare and English drama, with chapters on Hamlet, Othello, A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, as well as sustained readings of As You Like It, King Lear, Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Engaging political thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, Claude Lefort, and Roberto Esposito, The Storm at Sea will be of interest to political theorists as well as to students of literary and visual theory.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Half Title
• Introduction
• 1. Early Modern Political Aesthetics
• 2. Leonardo’s Hand: Mimesis, Sexuality, and the Polis
• 3. Shakespeare Distracted: Political Aesthetics from Spanish Tragedy to Hamlet
• 4. “To throw out our eyes for brave Othello”
• 5. Aesthetics and Absolutism in The Winter’s Tale
• 6. The Beating Mind: The Tempest in History
• 7. Hobbes and the Hydrophobes: The Fate of the Aesthetic in the Time of the State
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index