At the end of the 16th century, scholars and intellectuals were seen as Faustian magicians, dangerous and sexy. By the 19th century, they were perceived as dusty and dried up, "dead from the waist down", as Browning so wickedly put it. In this study, a literary critic explores the various ways we have thought about scholars and scholarship through the ages. A.D. Nuttall focuses on three people, two real and one fictitious: the classical scholar Isaac Casaubon who lived from 1559 to 1614; Mark Pattison, 19th-century rector at Oxford; and Mr Casaubon in George Eliot's "Middlemarch". The three are intricately related, for Pattison was seen by many as the model for Eliot's Mr Casaubon and he was also the author of the best book on Isaac Casaubon. Nuttall offers a penetrating interpretation of "Middlemarch" and then describes how Pattison recorded his own introverted intellectual life and self-lacerating depression. He presents Isaac Casaubon, on the other hand, as a fulfilled scholar who personifies the ideal of detailed, unspectacular truth-telling, often imperilled in our own culture. Nuttall concludes with a meditation on morality, sexuality and the true virtues of scholarship.

Product Description: In pursuit of a powerful, common-sense argument about realism, renowned scholar A. D. Nuttall discusses English eighteenth-century and French neo-classical conceptions of realism, and considers Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and both parts of King Henry IV as a prolonged feat of mimesis, with particular emphasis on Shakespeare’s perception of society and culture as subject to historical change...read more

In pursuit of a powerful, common-sense argument about realism, renowned scholar A. D. Nuttall discusses English eighteenth-century and French neo-classical conceptions of realism, and considers Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and both parts of King Henry IV as a prolonged feat of mimesis, with particular emphasis on Shakespeare’s perception of society and culture as subject to historical change. Shakespeare is chosen as the great example of realism because he addresses not only the stable characteristics but also the flux of things, and he is thus seen as a perceiver of that flux and not a mere specimen. An acknowledged classic of literary studies, A New Mimesis is reissued here with a new preface by the author.

Offers a critical analysis of the themes, ideas, and preoccupations exemplified in the body of Shakespeare's work, including the nature of motive, cause, personal identity and relation, the status of imagination, ethics and subjectivity, and language andits capacity to communicate.

Product Description: This series offers fresh insights to Shakespeare with: -- In-depth book-length treatments of the plays and poems-- New perspectives on existing critical approaches

Product Description: Why does tragedy give pleasure? Why do people who are neither wicked nor depraved enjoy watching plays about suffering and death? Is it because we see horrific matter controlled by majestic art? Or because tragedy actually reaches out to the dark side of human nature? Nuttall's wide-ranging, lively, and engaging book offers a new answer to this perennial question...read more