Books by Harry Berger

This collection contains 14 essays, written from the late 1970's to the present, making available for the full scope of Berger's unique approach to ethical discourses in Shakespeare's plays.

Figures of a Changing World develops an account of culture change that is based on the distinction between the two rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy. These figures are applied both to the large-scale interpretation of tensions in culture change and to the micro-interpretation of tensions within particular texts.

Considers Richard III and the four plays of Shakespeare's Henriad - Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V. This book explores the effect of this linguistic mischief on the representation of all the Henriad's major figures.

This is a study of male fantasy, representation anxiety, and narratorial authority in two 16th-century books, Baldassare Castiglione's "Il libro del Cortegiano" (1528) and "Giovanni Della Casas Galateo" (1558).

This lavishly illustrated reading of the structure and meaning of portraiture asks what happens when portraits are interpreted as imitations or likenesses not only of individuals but also of their acts of posing. Includes 84 illustrations, 40 in color.

The Perils of Uglytown develops a new concept, structural misanthropology, and traces its operation first in the dialogues of Plato and then in the work of humanists, playwrights, and painters of the Renaissance in Italy, England, and the Netherlands.

A study of seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting

A study of the theory and practice of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits, this title offers an account of the genre's comic and ironic features, which it treats as comments on the social context of portrait sitters who are husbands and householders as well as members of civic and proto-military organizations.

In Situated Utterances Berger designs an analytical model of New Criticism, shows how it was dismantled after the Second World War, and demonstrates practice in studies of specific works. The scope of the practice is broadened to the connection between cultural representations and institutional change. Plato's dialogues are also covered.

Discusses embarrassment not merely as a condition but as a weapon and as the wound the weapon inflicts