"O'me alone?": Aristotle and the failure of autarky in Shakespeare's Coriolanus

This thesis offers an Aristotelian reading of <em>Coriolanus, </em>with the goal of assessing the viability of individual self-sufficiency.<em></em> As political and moral treatises, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics are valuable intertexts through which Shakespeare's more imaginative work may be analyzed. I draw on representations of self-sufficiency in both texts in order to consider two larger questions: whether total isolation is practicable, or even possible; and, on the other side, whether social and political expression are 'merely' desirable parts of life, or rather necessary for survival. I explore <em>Coriolanus</em>'s<em> </em>dialectic of dependence and self-sufficiency through three recurring themes that appear in both texts: family, food and the body, and divinity.