Deliver Us from Evil
Essays on Symbolic Engagement in Early Drama
Clifford Davidson(Author)
AMS Press
Published on 30. June 2004
Book
Hardback
204 pages
978-0-404-64167-2 (ISBN)
Description
The focus of this book is on the reality of evil for medieval and Renaissance dramatists and their audiences. What propels the work beyond similar critiques is the author's insistence that evil is not an outmoded feature of past societies, but an active ingredient of contemporary life. Davidson fast forwards from distant times once described as ""calamitous"" to a century of far more violence and atrocity - our own twentieth and its overflow. While drawing on Kant to illuminate the kinds of evil portrayed in early drama through Marlowe and Shakespeare, Davidson refers to contemporary events that scream for an adjective for which there is no better - evil. In passing, he faults the Nietzsche-Foucault line for contributing to the trivializing of evil in postmodern times. In a survey that ranges from Greek drama and the Church Fathers through De Sade, Dostoyevsky, Beckett, and Ingmar Bergman, Davidson drives to his conclusion that ""an important function of drama has always been to bring a realization of evil into our consciousness and indeed, through giving symbolic form to it, to make us feel its power as a demonic force in human lives.
More details
Series
Edition
illustrated Edition
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
illustrations
ISBN-13
978-0-404-64167-2 (9780404641672)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Content
Preface; 1. Polemical Introduction: Evil In Play; 2. The Lord's Prayer, The Seven Deadly Sins, And Playing Against Evil; 3. Temptation, Fall, And Resistance; 4. Emperor, King, And Saint; 5. ""Let Not The Pit Shut Her Mouth Upon Me""; 6. The Individual, The Community, And The Threat Of Evil; 7. Authority, Conflict, And War; Conclusion; Index