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5 Remembering King Lear in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres
CAROLINE CAKEBREAD
I A Thousand Acres as Shakespearean re-vision
At the 1996 World Shakespeare Congress in Los Angeles, American author Jane Smiley described her 1991 novel, A Thousand Acres, as a contemporary rewriting of King Lear that attempts “to communicate the ways in which I found conventional readings of King Lear frustrating and wrong” (Smiley 1998:42).1 In Los Angeles, Smiley talked about her experiences as a student learning about Shakespeare’s tragedy for the first time:
Beginning with my first readings of the play in high school and continuing through college and graduate school, I had been cool to both Cordelia and Lear. While I understood and accepted how I should feel about them, he struck me as the sort of person, from beginning to end, that you would want to stay away from— selfish, demanding, humorless, self-pitying.… My acceptance of his tragedy was pro-forma, the response of a good girl and a good student. I didn’t like Cordelia either. She seemed ungenerous and cold, a stickler for truth at the beginning, a stickler for form at the end.
(42–43)
A reaction against traditional readings of King Lear, Smiley’s novel
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