Dryden and Shakespeare in Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger: Contrasting Emblems of Nature, Empire, and Communion.
Barry Unsworth's 1992 historical fiction novel Sacred Hunger explores the eighteenth-century slave trade while meditating upon utopian societies through an imagined community of shipwrecked enslaved people and sailors. Previous postcolonial and intertextual readings have considered connections with...
| Publicado en: | Modern Philology Vol. 119; no. 2; pp. 276 - 299 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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University of Chicago Press
2021
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=153206838&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 153206838 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00268232 MPH jtl: Modern Philology issn: 00268232 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: 2021 vid: 119 iid: 2 pid: 415 pub: University of Chicago Press artinfo: ui: 153206838 10.1086/716349 ppf: 276 ppct: 23 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P size: 158KB tig: atl: Dryden and Shakespeare in Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger: Contrasting Emblems of Nature, Empire, and Communion. aug: au: Hulse, Mark C. affil: University of Alabama su: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 Unsworth, Barry, 1930-2012 Sacred Hunger (Book) Historical fiction Lord's Supper sug: subj: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 Unsworth, Barry, 1930-2012 Sacred Hunger (Book) Historical fiction Lord's Supper ab: Barry Unsworth's 1992 historical fiction novel Sacred Hunger explores the eighteenth-century slave trade while meditating upon utopian societies through an imagined community of shipwrecked enslaved people and sailors. Previous postcolonial and intertextual readings have considered connections with Shakespeare's The Tempest , as well as its Restoration adaptation by John Dryden, The Enchanted Island. I argue that additional content from both plays informs the narrative's ethos and characterization. Specifically, Caliban's role is reinvented several times within the novel to subvert divisions of colonizers and colonized into predictable categories, with nature instead overruling nurture for many character attributes. At the same time, Dryden's lessening of human agency in The Tempest reflects his underlying confidence in a divine political order, which Unsworth seizes upon as illustrative of his eighteenth-century characters' conceptions of the world. Even the book's title represents an overlooked allusion to Dryden's landmark Aeneid translation that helps explain Erasmus Kemp's unsentimental actions as a function of this imperial ethos. Finally, the novel performs something akin to an ecocritical reading of these intertexts, finding, especially in Dryden, a pronounced alienation from the natural world and its bounties. The title Sacred Hunger conceals a deeper argument about the link between food and religion, expressed via the recurring trope of the communion ceremony. This discovery sheds new light on scenes of feasting within the novel, while also helping explain the story's framing device and Unsworth's deeper speculations about religion, anthropology, and the attainability of utopian states. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Modern Philology is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Modern Philology holder: University of Chicago Press dt: @attributes: year: 2021 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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