"Marxist Shakespeares" uses the rich analytic resources of the Marxist tradition to look at Shakespeare's plays afresh. The essays collected here reveal the continuing power of Marxist thought to address many issues including:
* the relationship of texts to social class
* the historical construction of the aesthetic
* the utopian dimensions of literary production.
This book offers new insights into the historical conditions within which Shakespeare's representations of class and gender emerged, and into Shakespeare's role in the global culture industry stretching from Hollywood to the Globe Theatre.
"Marxist Shakespeares" will be a vital resource for students of Shakespeare as it examines Marx's own readings of Shakespeare, Derrida's engagement with Marx, and the importance of Bourdieu, Bataille, Negri, and Alice Clark with a continuing tradition of Marxist thought.

While Adolf Hitler was seizing power in Germany, Adrien Arcand was laying the foundations in Quebec for his Parti national social chretien. The Blue Shirts, as its members were called, wore a military uniform and prominently displayed the swastika. Arcand saw Jewish conspiracy wherever he turned and his views resonated with his followers who, like him, sought a scapegoat for all the ills eroding society. Even after his imprisonment during the Second World War, the fanatical Adrien Arcand continued his correspondence with those on the frontlines of anti-semitism. Until his death in 1967, he pursued his campaign of propaganda against communists and Jews. Hugues Theoret describes a dark period in Quebec's ideological history using an objective approach and careful, rigorous research in this book, which won the 2015 Canada Prize (Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences).

Marxist Shakespeares uses the rich analytic resources of the Marxist tradition to look at Shakespeare's plays afresh. The book offers new insights into the historical conditions within which Shakespeare's representations of class and gender emerged, and into Shakespeare's role in the global culture industry stretching from Hollywood to the Globe Theatre. A vital resource for students of Shakespeare which includes Marx's own readings of Shakespeare, Derrida on Marx, and also Bourdieu, Bataillle, Negri and Alice Clark.

On December 6, 1989, a man walked into the engineering school Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and, declaring "I hate feminists," killed fourteen young women. "I Hate Feminists!", originally published in French in 2009, examines the collective memory that emerged in the immediate aftermath and years following the massacre as Canadians struggled to make sense of this tragic event and understand the motivations of the killer. Exploring stories and editorials in Montreal and Toronto newspapers, texts distributed within anti-feminist "masculinist" networks, discourses about memorials in major Canadian cities and the film Polytechnique, which was released on the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, Melissa Blais argues that feminist analyses and the killer's own statements have been set aside in favour of interpretations that absolve the killer of responsibility or even shift that blame onto women and feminists. In the end, Blais contends, the collective memory that has been constructed through various media has functioned not as a testament to violence against women but as a catalyst for anti-feminist discourse.