Naslov
Ophelia Antigonized: A Pre-Raphaelite Hamlet for Industrial Modernity

Autori
Jukić, Tatjana

Izvornik
Working Papers for American Studies (1849-6180) 4 (2020); 5-44

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, članak, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
industrial modernity ; Hamlet ; Ophelia ; realism ; the Pre-Raphaelites ; Antigone

Sažetak
Understanding modernity seems to be inflected in the narrative conditions of Hamlet: Hamlet may be to modernity what the story of Oedipus is to psychoanalysis, a specimen story in which the intellectual constitution of modernity is decided. In this essay I analyze how industrial modernity finds its articulation in Hamlet, especially in the positions where Hamlet is claimed for realism ; realism is taken to mean not a poetics so much as an apparatus instrumental to negotiating the modern condition in the nineteenth century. With a focus on John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–2), I discuss how Ophelia replaces Hamlet as a figure where realism is negotiated in Victorian modernity, also as a figure where modern psychopolitics, with its investment in mourning, finds its foothold in the world of the Industrial Revolution. Lastly, I argue that Ophelia may be where the unresolved narrative conditions of Antigone are retained in Hamlet, along with the political concerns implicit to Antigone’s mourning.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija, Povijest umjetnosti

POVEZANOST RADA