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Featuring an outstanding list of contributors, this collection of readings adopt a new approach to Shakespeare by focusing on the principles of ‘presentism’ – a critical movement that takes account of the continual dialogue between past and present.
This in-depth collection of essays traces the changing reception of Shakespeare over the past four hundred years, during which time Shakespeare has variously been seen as the last great exponent of pre-modern Western culture, a crucial inaugurator of modernity, and a prophet of postmodernity. This fresh look at Shakespeare's plays is an important contribution to the revival of the idea of 'modernity' and how we periodise ourselves, and Shakespeare, at the beginning of a new millennium.
Shakespeare was neither a Royalist defender of order and hierarchy nor a consistently radical champion of social equality, but rather simultaneously radical and conservative as a critic of emerging forms of modernity. Hugh Grady argues that Shakespeare's social criticism in fact often parallels that of critics of modernity from our own Postmodernist era, that the broad analysis of modernity produced by Marx, Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault, and others can serve as a productive enabling representation and critique of the emerging modernity represented by the image in Troilus and Cressida of `an universal wolf' of appetite, power, and will. The readings of Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King L...
This groundbreaking work, first published in 2005, reveals exactly how Shakespeare was influenced by contemporary strands in political thought that were critical of the English crown and constitution. Shakespeare has often been seen as a conservative political thinker characterised by an over-riding fear of the 'mob'. Hadfield argues instead that Shakespeare's writing emerged out of an intellectual milieu fascinated by republican ideas. From the 1590s onwards, he explored republican themes in his poetry and plays: political assassination, elected government, alternative constitutions, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the problem of power without responsibility. Beginning with Shakespeare's apocalyptic representation of civil war in the Henry VI plays, Hadfield provides a series of powerful new readings of Shakespeare and his time. For anyone interested in Shakespeare and Renaissance culture, this book is required reading.
This is a major study of the history of Shakespeare criticism in the modern era.Every epoch recreates its classic icons - and for literary culture none is more central nor more protean than Shakespeare. Even though finding the authentic Shakespeare has been a goal of scholarship since the eighteenth century, he has always been constructed as a contemporary author. Hugh Gradycharts the construction of Shakespeare as a twentieth-century Modernist text by redirecting 'new historicist' methods to an investigation of the social roots of contemporary Shakespeare crticism itself. Beginning with the formation of professionalism as an ideology in the Victorian age, this muchpraised study describes th...
This book examines Shakespeare's plays and defines specific Shakespearean aesthetic practices in his use of desire, death and mourning.
The four plays of Shakespeare's Henriad and the slightly later Hamlet brilliantly explore interconnections between political power and interior subjectivity as productions of the newly emerging constellation we call modernity. Hugh Grady argues that for Shakespeare subjectivity was a critical, negative mode of resistance to power--not, as many recent critics have asserted, its abettor.
The Transformations of Tragedy: Christian Influences from Early Modern to Modern explores the influence of Christian theology and culture upon the development of post-classical Western tragedy. The volume is divided into three parts: early modern, modern, and contemporary. This series of essays by established and emergent scholars offers a sustained study of Christianity’s creative influence upon experimental forms of Western tragic drama. Both early modern and modern tragedy emerged within periods of remarkable upheaval in Church history, yet Christianity’s diverse influence upon tragedy has too often been either ignored or denounced by major tragic theorists. This book contends instead that the history of tragedy cannot be sufficiently theorised without fully registering the impact of Christianity in transition towards modernity.
Essays on English Renaissance culture make a major contribution to the debate on historical method.
This book explores the methodologies and assumptions governing answers to the question 'what did Shakespeare actually write?'