English Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Social Control, Shakespeare - Plays, History, & Criticism, English Drama - 16th-17th Century - Elizabethan & Jacobean Eras - S

Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse

Name: Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse
Author: Arthur Lindley
ISBN: 9780874135886

by Arthur Lindley

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Overview

This book constructs a paradigm for the operation of subversive comedy - what Arthur Lindley, the author, calls the Augustinian carnivalesque - by examining some of the major texts of Ricardian and Elizabethan literature. By identifying some common characteristics of these works, Lindley argues that they must be seen in terms of a continuous, fundamentally Augustinian, Christian culture that is marked by a pervasive anti-heroic comedy that interrogates the official secular order and the role-based social identities that comprise it. Underlying this is a common attitude of Christian skepticism and a common use of carnivalesque demystification of power. In this pattern of continuity, concern with subjectivity, the mysteries of the self, and the tension between inward consciousness and outward role long antedates, say, Hamlet. Subjection, in other words, is not an Elizabethan (or Shakespearean) invention, but a constant concern of Augustinian literature going back to Confessions.