Looking for Hamlet

Front Cover
St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2007 M12 10 - 256 pages

A mysterious, melancholic, brooding Hamlet has gripped and fascinated four hundred years' of readers, trying to "find" and know him as he searches for and avenges his father's name. Setting itself apart from the usual discussions about Hamlet, Hunt here demonstrates that Hamlet is much more than we take him to be. Much more than the sum of his parts--more than just tragic, sexy youth and more than just vain cruelty--Hamlet is a reflection of our own aspirations and neuroses. Looking for Hamlet investigates our many searches for Hamlet, from their origins in Danish mythology through the complex problems of early printed texts, through the centuries of shifting interpretations of the young prince to our own time when Hamlet is more compelling and perplexing than ever before. Hunt presents Hamlet as a sort of missing person, the idealized being inside oneself. This search for the missing Hamlet, Hunt argues, reveals a present absence readers pursue as a means of finding and identifying ourselves.

 

Contents

One The Prehistory of Hamlet
13
Two The Three Hamlets
31
Relocating Reality in Hamlet
71
Four Dead Son Hamlet
85
Five Contrarians at the Gate
93
A Brief History of Grief
105
Hamlet and Melancholy
115
Eight Hamlet among the Moderns
129
Nine Postmodern Hamlet
165
Ten Looking for Hamlet
199
Bibliographic Essay
209
Index
223
Copyright

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About the author (2007)

Marvin W. Hunt earned his Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1987. He has written widely in Tudor-Stuart literature including Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Shakespeare. A member of the Modern Language Association, the Shakespeare Association of America, and the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, Professor Hunt has been twice a fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. He has also written widely for popular audiences on subjects ranging from African-American history to baseball. For the past decade he has taught Shakespeare at North Carolina State University. His travel stories on The Bahamas and many book reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The North Carolina Literary Review, The Atlanta Journal/Constitution, and The New York Times.

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