<i>The Merchant of Venice</i>and the Demise of Hospitality

Fitzpatrick, Joan

doi:10.1080/17450918.2021.1987508

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Shylock has a classical reputation of being a villain: vicious, controversial, problematic, paradoxical, manipulative, and vindictive (Fischer 2022;Fitzpatrick 2022). The name thus personifies anyone exhibiting these attributes while intending to lend money at high interest and hoping to collect more from desperate borrowers.…”

Section: Ponzi Schemes As Shylocksmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ponzi Schemes as Africa's Twenty-First-Century Shylocks: Complicities in Femi Osofisan's Love's Unlike Lading: A Comedy from Shakespeare and Fires Burn and Die Hard

Agunbiade,

Enongene

2023

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This article equates the antics of Shakespeare's Shylock with Ponzi schemes in contemporary Africa. Given the paucity of literary works on Ponzi schemes, it focuses on Nigeria to invoke a correspondence between usury and Ponzi schemes, using the former as a metaphor philosophically to account for the latter. Its discoveries afford an intertextual critique of Nigerian author Femi Osofisan's Love's Unlike Lading , its prototype, Merchant of Venice , and Fires Burn and Die Hard . With the background of New Historicism and intertextual theories, this study reconceptualizes Shakespeare's Shylock as Ponzi schemes, which are economic wolves in the dress of a humanitarian lamb, as they take more than a pound of flesh from investors who are effectively complicit in their own predicaments. It signals a place for literature in the quest for authorities and cybersecurity professionals to rid Africa and cyberspace of get-rich-quick schemes.

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Section: Ponzi Schemes As Shylocksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both Shakespeare in Merchant and Osofisan in Love's present a metaphor to show how codes of hospitality have been violated in a world where hospitality is no longer a charitable act but a snare (Fitzpatrick 2022). The onus is on African literary artists to convince the African masses about these connections.…”

Section: Ponzi Schemes As Shylocksmentioning

confidence: 99%