Ebook: Shakespeare in Hindsight: Counterfactual Thinking and Shakespearean Tragedy

A novel methodology designed to make Shakespeare, and his tragedies in particular, more accessible to students and scholars alike

Why one more ‘approach’ to reading Shakespeare? One reason is because whatever previous approaches say about tragedy in particular, none of them help us to feel tragedy. Or, rather, they subordinate tragedy to something else — to considerations of class, race, or gender. Thus, where these other approaches attempt to explain tragedy away, the aim of Amir Khan’s counterfactual criticism of Shakespeare’s tragedies, including Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello is to help us to feel tragedy first and foremost — and hence, to perceive it better.

• Provides a way past historicist methods in Shakespearean scholarship
• Transform less the way Shakespeare’s tragedies are read and more the way they are perceived
• Introduces the promise of, while modeling ways to exercise, counterfactual scholarship in literary studies