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The Culture of Violence

Essays on Tragedy and History

’Culture’ and ’violence’ have always been regarded as antithetical terms. In The Culture of Violence, Francis Barker takes a different view.

Central to his argument is the contention that, contrary to post-Enlightenment humanist, liberal and conservative thought, ’culture’ does not necessarily stand in opposition to political inequality and social injustice, but may be complicit with the oppressive exercise of power.

The book focuses on Shakespearean tragedy and on the historicism and culturalism of much present-day cultural theory. Barker’s analysis moves dialectically backwards and forwards between these two moments in order to illuminate aspects of early modern culture, and to critique the ways in which the complicity between culture and violence has been occluded. Rejecting the tendency of both modernism and post-modernism to homogenise historical time, Barker argues for a genuinely new, ’diacritical’ understanding of the violence of history.

265 pages | 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 | © 1993

Culture Studies

Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements
Part One - Signs of Invasion
1. The Information of the Absolute
2. Nietzsche’s Cattle
Part Two - Violence and Interpretation
1. In the Wars of Truth
2. A Wilderness of Tigers
Part Three - Traces
1. Tragedy and the Ends of History
Bibliography
Index

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