Kent Cartwright Upcoming Book for Oxford University Press

Professor Emeritus Kent Cartwright’s book-in-progress, “Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment,” has been put under contract by Oxford University Press.

The book is expected July 2020. Kent Cartwright's field of study is medieval and Renaissance literature, especially late medieval and sixteenth-century drama, Shakespeare, and sixteenth-century of literature.

Cartwright has been especially interested in questions of how and to what effect literature moves us, an interest that leads to questions as much formal as historical. His first book Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response [1991] explores the various devices and techniques, including those of “engagement” and “detachment,” employed by Shakespeare to elicit emotional and intellectual responses from audiences. Cartwright's second book, Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (1999), studies the hundred years of drama before Shakespeare, analyzing the transformation of an allegorical, didactic, and religious drama at the beginning of the period into a theater at the end of the century criticized as emotional, fantasy-arousing, and even immoral.