The Conversational Enlightenment : The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought

This book provides a sustained, formalist reading of the multiple body parts that litter the dialogue and action of Shakespeare’s history plays, including Henry V, Richard III, Richard II, King John and Henry IV. With a starting point in literary critical analyses of these dislocated bodies, the book tracks Shakespeare’s relentless pursuit of a specific political question: how does human flesh, blood and bone relate to sovereignty? Griffiths advances our understanding of how human bodies are captured by — and escape — the grip of political systems.