Since the nineteenth century, it has become customary to designate four of Shakespeare’s late plays – Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest – as “romances.” In this course we will discuss these plays and ask why the critical tradition has decided to mark these plays as generically distinct from the rest of the Shakespearean canon. In the course of our inquiry we will also read plays like King Lear and The Merchant of Venice that have not been designated romances though they seem to possess some characteristic features of the genre. Throughout the term, we will attend to the kinds of cultural work that the genre of romance performs generally and to the ways that Shakespeare makes use of the genre specifically. Topics of discussion will include the ideological functions of genre; the relation of history to form; the intersection of ethics and economics; the representation of gender; the aesthetics of power; and the politics of nostalgia. In the course of our discussions, we will engage with early modern and modern theories of genre, reading figures ranging from Aristotle, Sidney, and Guarini to Derrida, Moretti, and Jameson. |
