{"title":"William F Zak","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"tragedy-of-antony-and-cleopatra-book-william-f-zak-9781498510363","title":"The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra","description":"This revaluation of Shakespeare’s most seductive tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, allies itself with neither George Bernard Shaw and Philo’s Roman judgment of the lovers as “strumpet and fool”—premised on the idle sensuality and feckless self-regard ever evident in the regal pair—nor with the many at the opposite critical pole who have found themselves swept up, to some extent at least, in the “grand illusion” of the lovers themselves as peerless figures transcending the very deaths to which Caesar’s heartless predation drives them. Nor does it seek some middle way, settling into a comfortable agnosticism that claims the poet’s view of the pair remains too ambiguous to resolve. Instead, by mining a wealth of metaphoric cross-references and ironical, mirroring figurations provided by the tragedy’s subsidiary characterizations, this new analysis argues that Shakespeare’s assessment of the lovers is in fact unambiguous: Antony and Cleopatra unknowingly settle for functioning merely as two more of the play’s eunuchs fanning the flames of their self-destructive passions for one another when they could have realized the new heaven and new earth Antony promised his queen had their “intercourse” with one another been more vigorously complete. Not alone their deaths, but their entire experience is this play is but a search for “easy ways to die” rather than the quest is should have been to live more richly yet and generate new life beyond their respective notorieties as separate individuals to be celebrated.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49732739170577,"sku":"NGR9781498510363","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52148805632273,"sku":"NLS9781498510363","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1498510361.jpg?v=1750989626"},{"product_id":"robert-frost-s-visionary-gift-book-william-f-zak-9781793638298","title":"Robert Frost's Visionary Gift","description":"A revaluation of Frost's major lyrics, Robert Frost's Visionary Gift: Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply makes a case for Frost as America's preeminent philosophical poet. William F. Zak provides groundbreaking analysis to well over one hundred of Frost's lyrics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52410099958033,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52410100449553,"sku":"NLS9781793638298","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781793638298.jpg?v=1759399787"},{"product_id":"mirror-for-lovers-book-william-f-zak-9780739175101","title":"A Mirror for Lovers","description":"A Mirror for Lovers: Shake-speare's Sonnets as Curious Perspective, by William F. Zak, seeks to identify in Shake-speare'e sonnet sequence the structural and thematic features of the satirical tradition born in Plato's Symposium. Through this study, Zak traces the power of an idea to endure, re-animate, and enrich itself through time: Plato's discrimination of the true nature of love in The Symposium. Born anew in its medieval reincarnations (The Romance of the Rose, The Vita Nuova, and The Canzoniere of Petrarch), the tradition begun in Plato's Symposium was then resuscitated in the Elizabethan sonnet sequence revival, most notably in Shake-speare's Sonnets. With extended examination of all the texts in the Q manuscript, A Mirror for Lovers makes a case for the mutually illuminating relationship among the sonnets to the fair young man and the dark lady, A Lover's Complaint, and the mysterious dedication that until now have never received attention as an integral symbolic matrix of meaning.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52424584102161,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52424584593681,"sku":"NLS9780739175101","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780739175101.jpg?v=1759152404"},{"product_id":"robert-frosts-visionary-gift-book-william-f-zak-9781793638311","title":"Robert Frost’s Visionary Gift","description":"In Robert Frost’s Visionary Gift: Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply, William F. Zak provides groundbreaking analysis of well over one hundred of Frost’s lyrics, considering each poem as an interrelated portion of the poet’s overarching “constellation of intention.” Beyond biography, this book offers extended, close readings of Frost’s oeuvre, building its case incrementally from deftly examined particulars.   Zak discusses how the pastoral mode Frost adopts is no depleted, homespun idiom retreating from modernism’s complexities, but a self-conscious determination to assume the prophetic mantle from his predecessors (Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau). Frost’s version of pastoral represents no escape from life’s stresses, but the most constructive and life-sustaining means to address life’s struggles “head on”—in both sense of that last phrase’”.  This book makes a case for Frost as America’s preeminent philosophical poet. The unfortunate effect of Frost’s early detractors’ claim that he was merely an ironic and equivocal anecdotalist has for too long relegated his work to the second tier of the modernist poetic pantheon. This study, by contrast, supports Robert Graves’ claim for Frost as the “first American poet who could be honestly reckoned a master poet by world standards.”","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52595497500945,"sku":"NLS9781793638311","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52755030769937,"sku":"NIN9781793638311","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781793638311.jpg?v=1761071196"},{"product_id":"hamlet-s-problematic-revenge-book-william-f-zak-9781498518086","title":"Hamlet's Problematic Revenge","description":"Amidst a wealth of previously unremarked figurative mirrorings, as well as much of the seemingly digressive material in Hamlet within Shakespearean studies, Hamlet's Problematic Revenge brings to light a new interpretation of the tragic problem in the play.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52657417879825,"sku":"NLS9781498518086","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781498518086.jpg?v=1762228639"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-william-f-zak.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}