Terence Hawkes: 8 books

'Mr Hawkes is a good critic, oriented towards history of ideas. He operates on the formula that Shakespeare was interested in the available distinctions between discursive and intuitive reason, and disliked a growing tendency for the first to be thought of as manly and the second effeminate. One sees...

Shakespeare in the Present is a stunning collection of essays by Terence Hawkes, which engage with, explain, and explore 'presentism'. Presentism is a critical manoeuvre which uses relevant aspects of the contemporary as a crucial trigger for its investigations. It deliberately begins with the material...

First published in 1986. This collection of essays focuses on the ways in which our society 'processes' Shakespeare and the purposes for which this seems to be done. The case is made by examining the work of four highly influential critics: A C Bradley, Walter Raleigh, T S Eliot and John Dover...

First published in 1973, this book is about Shakespeare, language and drama. The first part introduces some common ideas of anthropology and linguistics into an area where they serve as a base for the discussion of usually literary matters. It attempts to link language to our experience of speech...

First published in 1972, this work examines the complex concept of metaphor. It defines the term by placing the various key ideas about the nature of metaphor in their literary and social context, and in doing so, it traces the developing history of the concept. This account has considerable range,...

We traditionally assume that the `meaning' of each of Shakespeares plays is bequeathed to it by the Bard. It is as if, to the information which used to be given in theatrical programmes, `Cigarettes by Abdullah, Costumes by Motley, Music by Mendelssohn', we should add `Meaning by Shakespeare'. These...

Published in 1977 as the first volume in the New Accents series, Structuralism and Semiotics made crucial debates in critical theory accessible to those with no prior knowledge of the field. Since then a generation of readers has used the book as an entry not only into structuralism and semiotics,...

This book should be of interest to students and teachers of literature and literary theory.