"Girard fuses literary, psychological, and anthropological texts in order to view the activity of mimesis. This includes the phenomena of scapegoating, victimage, and sacrifice. They, in turn, serve as starting points for a breathtakingly daring and encompassing theory of the origins of human culture. In an era of interdisciplinary studies, this volume stands alone."--"Choice."

This book argues that play offered Hamlet, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Robert Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne a way to live within the contradictions and conflicts of late Renaissance life by providing a new stance for the self. Grounding its argument in recent theories of play and in a historical analysis that sees the seventeenth century as a point of crisis in the formation of the western self, the author demonstrates how play helped mediate this crisis and how central texts of the period enact this mediation.

After almost two hundred years of relative obscurity mimesis finds itself again in the limelight of Western theoretical discourse. In the Anglo-American tradition, mimesis or 'imitation' regained some prominence, at the turn of the century, through S.H. Butcher's translation of and introduction to Aristotle's Poetics, and , in the thirties, through the work of the Chicago school, also centered around Aristotle. More recently, mimesis looms large in the work of Auerbach, Burke and Frye. But it is only in the past decade or so, with the publication in France of the work of Barthes, Derrida, Girard, Genette, and some of their collaborators, that mimesis has again become an object of heated controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. The present collection is designed not only to bring fresh points of view to the current debate, by drawing in other theoretical developments beside the Anglo-American and the French, but also to explain why mimesis has so stubbornly haunted our civilization.

In Shakespearean Cultures, René Girard’s ideas on violence and the sacred inform an innovative analysis of contemporary Latin America. Castro Rocha proposes a new theoretical framework based upon the “poetics of emulation” and offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding the asymmetries of the modern world. Shakespearean cultures are those whose self-perception originates in the gaze of a hegemonic Other. The poetics of emulation is a strategy developed in situations of asymmetrical power relations. This strategy encompasses an array of procedures employed by artists, intellectuals, and writers situated at the less-favored side of such exchanges, whether they be cultural, political, or economic in nature. The framework developed in this book yields thought-provoking readings of canonical authors such as William Shakespeare, Gustave Flaubert, and Joseph Conrad. At the same time, it favors the insertion of Latin American authors into the comparative scope of world literature, and stages an unprecedented dialogue among European, North American, and Latin American readers of René Girard’s work.