Books by Harold Skulsky

Fusing the methods of comparative literature, intellectual history, and philosophical analysis, Skulsky explores a motif that has fascinated storytellers since antiquity: the miraculous transformation of a character into a plant, an animal, or a different human being. The thesis of the study is that the fantasy of metamorphosis challenges the narrator and his audience to confront certain basic anxieties about the human condition.

With an eye toward Shakespeare's inherited resources for articulating anxieties rooted in philosophical doubt, Skulsky shows that in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Othello the drama of doubt in search of an exit gives its own kind of urgency to the more familiar Shakespearean drama of action and motive.

A searching contribution to the study of what gurative language is and how it works, this book is a guide to the sophisticated and powerful artistry of the seventeenth-century English poets who have come to be known by the misleading name of "Metaphysicals."