Gothic Revisitations of Hamlet: Ian McEwan's Nutshell.

The paper looks at a recent example of rewriting Shakespeare's Hamlet by a British author who has gained celebrity in the 1970s and 1980s with his macabre plots, which distill the gothic tradition in a contemporary, politically and socially sensitive environment. Ian McEwan's Nutshell (2016) shows, after more than a decade in which the typical dark mode of the author has "mellowed", a return to the typical sexual and psychological gothic that made his plots controversial in the years of his literary debut. Reading Nutshell as a response to Shakespeare's proto-gothic atmosphere and mindframe, the paper discusses how McEwan's signature - claustrophobia, the unemotional narration of taboo subjects, horror and suspense - adapts an appropriation of Shakespeare's tragedy to the contemporary readers' skeptically critical expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]