Shakespeare's Serial Returns in Complex TV
Description
This book examines how Shakespeare's plays resurface in current complex TV series. Its four case studies bring together The Tempest and the science fiction-Western Westworld, King Lear and the satirical dynastic drama of Succession, Hamlet and the legal thriller Black Earth Rising , as well as Coriolanus and the political thriller Homeland . The comparative readings ask what new insights the twenty-first-century remediations may grant us into Shakespeare's texts and, vice versa, how Shakespearean returns help us understand topical concerns negotiated in the series, such as artificial intelligence, the safeguarding of democracy, terrorism, and postcolonial justice. This study also proposes that the dramaturgical seriality typical of complex TV allows insights into the seriality Shakespeare employed in structuring his plays. Discussing a broad spectrum of adaptational constellations and establishing key characteristics of the new adaptational aggregate of serial Shakespeare, it seeks to initiate a dialogue between Shakespeare studies, adaptation studies, and TV studies.
Reviews / Votes
"Globally recognizable TV shows including Homeland , Westworld and Succession are opened to new meanings and aesthetic depths in Christina Wald's Shakespeare's Serial Returns in Complex TV . Demonstrating how Shakespearean stories, motifs and characters inform serial TV storytelling, Wald prompts us to understand these shows as a form of adaptation in which they look back to Shakespeare - to look anew. Wald teaches us how to watch closely through detailed analyses that subtly interweave serial TV and its Shakespearean companions, in turn illuminating these respective modes of story-making as well as their curious similarities. Original in conception, and identifying Shakespeare's recurrent presence in modern TV culture, this book will appeal to students and scholars of TV studies, Shakespeare, and adaptation." (Stephen O'Neill, Associate Professor at Maynooth University, Ireland)
"As Christina Wald reminds us, succession, reiteration, and return are central themes in Shakespeare, who also plays significantly with bounded form and seriality. She equally shows how Shakespeare's plays get illuminatingly replayed in a range of television series which define Anglophone popular culture at its best in our time. Open-minded, thoughtful, and original." (Ewan Fernie, Director of the Everything to Everybody Project and Professor at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK)
"Shakespeare's Serial Returns in Complex TV offers a trenchant and sophisticated account of Shakespeare's relevance to our own historical moment while providing arrestingly new insights into Shakespeare's texts themselves. Lucid and theoretically astute, this study breaks new ground. It will be essential reading for anyone who wants to know what Shakespeare means in our time- and where to find him." (Dympna Callaghan, Professor at Syracuse University, USA)
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Person
Christina Wald is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Konstanz, Germany. She is the author of
The Reformation of Romance: The Eucharist, Disguise, and Foreign Fashion in Early Modern Prose Fiction
(2014) and
Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama
(2007). She has edited
Medieval Shakespeare
(2012) and co-edited
The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern
(2011).
Content
1. Introduction.- 2. Coriolanus and Homeland: The Return of the Soldier.- 3. The Tempest and Westworld: The Return of the Dead.- 4. King Lear and Succession: The Return of the Predecessor.- 5. Hamlet and Black Earth Rising: Returns to the Roots.- 6. Conclusion.-