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Newstok, Scott L., ed. 2007. Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare. West Lafayette, Indiana: parlor press. $65.00 hc. $32.00 sc. Iv + 308 pp.

Article Excerpt
In Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare, Scott Newstok brings together all of the late Kenneth Burke's surprisingly voluminous Shakespearean criticism, including an appendix of references to Shakespeare in Burke's major works and, perhaps most excitingly, Burke's previously unpublished, extensive notes on Macbeth and Troilus and Cressida. Yet, as Newstock's clear and well-informed introduction suggests, given Burke's critical strategies and temperament, the volume and depth of Burke's lifetime of work on Shakespeare should not surprise us. Newstok understands Burke rightly as Aristotelean at his critical core, as an analyst of a given text "seeking a deeper structural rationale for its development" (xviii). And he offers a list with definitional commentary of "some crucial concepts that play a generative role in Burke's Shakespearean criticism" (xix). A cursory glance at these terms would show even a newcomer to Burke's work just how deeply Burke thought about texts, and how deeply rhetorical...

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