Citizen-saints : Shakespeare and political theology
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Bibliographic Information
Citizen-saints : Shakespeare and political theology
University of Chicago Press, 2005
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-269) and index
HTTP:URL=http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0421/2004018510.html Information=Table of contents
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
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: pbk ISBN 9780226143521
Description
Who is a citizen? What is a person? Who is my neighbor? These fundamental questions about group membership and social formation have been posed repeatedly in political and religious discourses. Citizen-Saint uses keys works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton to examine the aims, limits, and legacies of classic and modern citizenship in Western literature. Turning to the potent idea of political theology to recover the strange mix of political and religious thinking during the Renaissance, Julia Reinhard Lupton unveils the figure of the citizensaint, who represents at once divine messenger and civil servant, both norm and exception. Embodied by such diverse personages as Antigone, Paul, Barabbas, Shylock, Othello, Caliban, Isabella, and Samson, the citizen-saint is a sacrificial figure: a model of moral and aesthetic extremity that inspires new regimes of citizenship with his or her traumatic passage into the public sphere. And these scenes of civic entry ultimately dramatize the literature of citizenship in both its evident impasses and its enduring potential.
- Volume
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ISBN 9780226496696
Description
Turning to the potent idea of political theology to recover the strange mix of political and religious thinking during the Renaissance, this bracing study reveals in the works of Shakespeare and his sources the figure of the citizensaint, who represents at once divine messenger and civil servant, both norm and exception. Embodied by such diverse personages as Antigone, Paul, Barabbas, Shylock, Othello, Caliban, Isabella, and Samson, the citizen-saint is a sacrificial figure: a model of moral and aesthetic extremity who inspires new regimes of citizenship with his or her death and martyrdom. Among the many questions Julia Reinhard Lupton attempts to answer under the rubric of the citizen-saint are: how did states of emergency, acts of sovereign exception, and Messianic anticipations lead to new forms of religious and political law? What styles of universality were implied by the abject state of the pure creature, at sea in a creation abandoned by its creator? And how did circumcision operate as both a marker of ethnicity and a means of conversion and civic naturalization?
Written with clarity and grace, Citizen-Saints will be of enormous interest to students of English literature, religion, and early modern culture.
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