Shakespeare and Disgust

Bradley J. Irish

"Drawing on both historical analysis and theories from the modern affective sciences, Shakespeare and Disgust argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the 'gatekeeper emotion', disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools - poetic images, thematic considerations and narrative possibilities - to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders. Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays (Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Othello and Hamlet) and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors (Food Disgust, Disease Disgust, Body Envelope Disgust, Racial Disgust and Sex Disgust.) Disgust, the book argues, is one of the central engines of human behaviour - and it must, somewhat surprisingly, be seen as a centrepiece of Shakespeare's affective universe"--

Introduction1. What is Disgust?2. Titus Andronicus: The Spectacle of Disgust3. Food Disgust4. Timon of Athens: The Cycles of Disgust5. Disease Disgust6. Coriolanus: The Circuit of Disgust7. Body Envelope Disgust8. Othello: The Disgusting Outsider9. Racial Disgust10. Hamlet: Death and Disgust11. Sex DisgustConclusionNotesIndex