Dislocating the End: Climax, Closure and the Invention of Genre

Dislocating the End examines how two concepts – catastrophe and typology – have reconceived the notion of ending. This innovation in ending has in turn gone hand in hand with innovation in genre. Focusing on Shakespeare’s King Lear, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and Gershom Scholem’s theory of catastrophe, this book shows the implications of displaced endings for tragedy, novel, and historiography.