Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity
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This volume brings together virtually all of the published shorter critical work of John O’Meara, gathered from over 30 years of production. What emerges is an extensive, uniquely challenging interpretation of the evolution of (for the most part) English literary history, from Shakespeare’s time to our own.
O’Meara’s work ranges widely, moving into his three areas in suggestively concentric fashion, and with that raising the issue of how these areas can be bridged. His main subject is Shakespeare, and many individual insights are offered especially on Shakespeare’s great tragedies and his late plays, but O’Meara’s concern with the many different forms the Goddess takes, at different times and in different circumstances, runs through his work like a golden thread, while the confining boundaries of a sceptical modernity are also scrupulously limned. His consideration of how Western authors have continually sought an otherworldly justification of their experience finally fills out this richly layered, broadly conceived oeuvre.
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“O’Meara’s work is the perfect supplement to [Ted] Hughes’s “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being”, shedding further illumination into those areas where Hughes’s penetrating lens finally appears to dim. [This work] shines utterly clear light on the path of understanding we may re-win with regard to myth, forcing the reader to face the incredible starkness of the prospect we face—and the lack of options—ever closing in—and also giving the reader the necessary clues to follow, particularly Barfield, Shakespeare and Rudolf Steiner.”
—Richard Ramsbotham, author of Who Wrote Bacon? William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and James I“Very interesting stuff. Particularly where you parallel the break through the tragic dead end to the transcendental-redemptive solution--that I follow from “Macbeth” through “Lear” to the last plays--with the Steinerian view of the same progress.”
—Ted Hughes on Othello’s Sacrifice, Letter to John O’Meara, 21 November, 1996, in the Ted Hughes Archives, Emory University, Atlanta, GeorgiaThis volume brings together virtually all of the published shorter critical work of John O’Meara, gathered from over 30 years of production. What emerges is an extensive, uniquely challenging interpretation of the evolution of, for the most part, English literary history, from Shakespeare’s time to our own.
“excellent Shakespearean explorations…The idea of Lutheran depravity without Lutheran grace or Lutheran-Calvinist justification is very strong and original…”
—Anthony Gash, author of The Substance of Shadows: Shakespeare’s Dialogue with Plato“O’Meara sets out to demonstrate... the essential fact that “full encounter with human depravity” was[/is] a necessary step in the attaining of true [otherworldly] Imagination.”
—Eric Philips-Oxford, on The New School of the Imagination from the Sektion fur Schone Wissenschaften, the Goetheanum, Newsletter, Issue No. 3, Winter/Spring 2008-2009.About the Author
Born in Montreal, Canada, John O’Meara received his Ph.D in 1986 from the University of East Anglia. He taught for over 20 years in the English departments of the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa.