A neglected work
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I came to this book via Nuttall's posthumously-published "Shakespeare the Thinker", which his colleagues expected to be remembered as Nuttall's seminal work. That book is terrific, and I was left wanting to read more from him on the Bard.
I bore you with the backstory because Nuttall's last book was not a simple summary of a career's work. In fact his other books are tremendously interesting also, and may even invite many revisits.
"The New Mimesis" is essentially about the representation of reality in Shakespeare, and particularly how the figures of Falstaff, King Hal and Hamlet are rendered as profoundly human.
Nuttall's interest is more than a simple affinity for Shakespeare, but clearly comes of fascination with how individuals are represented in storytelling. His own critical work is an example of just such storytelling in a way - it is profoundly (I use the word again) empathetic, and concerned with the just or accurate representation of the emotional and philosophical depths that can be found in both the artist and his subject-matter. In this sense, Nuttall's is a work displaying great moral and spiritual interest, without any implication of there being religious needs underlying that.
I also recommend "The Alternative Trinity" and "Overheard by God", which do deal with - on the surface at the least - religious subjects: God's relationship with his Son in the eyes of a number of English poets; and an exploration of what prayer means as a narrative of the relationship between the supplicant and his God. But they are also terrific studies of how their subjects explore their worlds religiously, spiritually and philosophically, and what all that tells about the storytelling preoccupations of these artists.
He does bang on about the New Historicism again, which discussion is difficult to relate to if one is not a reader of New Historicist material; but that said, Nuttall is passionately engaged with the failures of interpretation and representation in New Historicism, and as such one shouldn't be put off by unfamiliarity.
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