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.

"Presentist Shakespeares "constitutes the first extended exposition and exploration of the principles and the practice of presentism. Although an emphasis on history or historical context has been very important in recent Shakespeare scholarship, no critic is able to make direct contact with a past uncontaminated by their own contemporary concerns. By the same token, all experience of the present is moulded by the past. "Presentism," as elaborated in this volume, takes account of the never-ending dialogue between past and present, scrupulously seeking out salient aspects of the present as a crucial trigger for its investigations and arguing that an intrusive, shaping awareness of ourselves deserves our closest attention.
The distinguished team of contributors to this volume demonstrate the way in which presentist readings make possible a fuller engagement with the ironies generated by our inescapable involvement in time. These ironies, the contributors argue, are a fruitful, necessary and inescapable aspect of any text's being, which also function as agents of change, flowing unstoppably back into the events of the past, coloring how we perceive them, modifying our sense of what they signify. In respect of Shakespeare, they point to shades of implication suddenly available here and now within the wide range of plays examined, subtly challenging, changing and adding to our sense of what they are able to tell us. Perhaps, it is suggested, they offer the only effective purchase on these texts that we are able to make.
Presentist criticism is an open-ended and on-going project, located at a particularly interesting and demanding juncture in modern Shakespeare studies. Its boundariesremain to be defined. It is envisaged, however, that the new essays of this collection will establish a landmark: one which reflects, develops and even rejoices in this indeterminacy.

"Presentist Shakespeares "constitutes the first extended exposition and exploration of the principles and the practice of presentism. Although an emphasis on history or historical context has been very important in recent Shakespeare scholarship, no critic is able to make direct contact with a past uncontaminated by their own contemporary concerns. By the same token, all experience of the present is moulded by the past. "Presentism," as elaborated in this volume, takes account of the never-ending dialogue between past and present, scrupulously seeking out salient aspects of the present as a crucial trigger for its investigations and arguing that an intrusive, shaping awareness of ourselves deserves our closest attention.
The distinguished team of contributors to this volume demonstrate the way in which presentist readings make possible a fuller engagement with the ironies generated by our inescapable involvement in time. These ironies, the contributors argue, are a fruitful, necessary and inescapable aspect of any text's being, which also function as agents of change, flowing unstoppably back into the events of the past, coloring how we perceive them, modifying our sense of what they signify. In respect of Shakespeare, they point to shades of implication suddenly available here and now within the wide range of plays examined, subtly challenging, changing and adding to our sense of what they are able to tell us. Perhaps, it is suggested, they offer the only effective purchase on these texts that we are able to make.
Presentist criticism is an open-ended and on-going project, located at a particularly interesting and demanding juncture in modern Shakespeare studies. Its boundariesremain to be defined. It is envisaged, however, that the new essays of this collection will establish a landmark: one which reflects, develops and even rejoices in this indeterminacy.

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.

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.

John Donne has been one of the most controversial poets in the history of English literature, his complexity and intellectualism provoking both praise and censure. In this major re-assessment of Donne's poetry, Hugh Grady argues that his work can be newly appreciated in our own era through Walter Benjamin's theory of baroque allegory. Providing close readings of The Anniversaries, The Songs and Sonnets, and selected other lyrics, this study reveals Donne as being immersed in the aesthetic of fragmentation that define both the baroque and the postmodernist aesthetics of today. Synthesizing cultural criticism and formalist analysis, Grady illuminates Donne afresh as a great poet for our own historical moment.

Closely examining the relationship between the political and the utopian in five major plays from different phases of Shakespeare's career, Hugh Grady shows the dialectical link between the earlier political dramas and the late plays or tragicomedies. Reading Julius Caesar and Macbeth from the tragic period alongside The Winter's Tale and Tempest from the utopian end of Shakespeare's career, with Antony and Cleopatra acting as a transition, Grady reveals how, in the late plays, Shakespeare introduces a transformative element of hope while never losing a sharp awareness of suffering and death. The plays presciently confront dilemmas of an emerging modernity, diagnosing and indicting instrumental politics and capitalism as largely disastrous developments leading to an empty world devoid of meaning and community. Grady persuasively argues that the utopian vision is a specific dialectical response to these fears and a necessity in worlds of injustice, madness and death.

This book was first published in 2009. Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics explores ideas about art implicit in Shakespeare's plays and defines specific Shakespearean aesthetic practices in his use of desire, death and mourning as resources for art. Hugh Grady draws on a tradition of aesthetic theorists who understand art as always formed in a specific historical moment but as also distanced from its context through its form and Utopian projections. Grady sees A Midsummer Night's Dream, Timon of Athens, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet as displaying these qualities, showing aesthetic theory's usefulness for close readings of the plays. The book argues that such social-minded 'impure aesthetics' can revitalize the political impulses of the new historicism while opening up a new aesthetic dimension in the current discussion of Shakespeare.

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. Thus the broad analysis of modernity produced by Marx, Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault, and others can serve to illuminate Shakespeare's own depiction of an emerging modernity - a depiction epitomized by the image in Troilus and Cressida of 'an universal wolf' of appetite, power, and will. The readings of Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King Lear, and As You Like It in Shakespeare's Universal Wolf demonstrate Shakespeare's keen interest in what twentieth-century theory has called 'reification' - a term which designates social systems created by human societies but which confront those societies as operating beyond human control, according to an autonomous 'systems' logic - in nascent mercantile capitalism, in power-oriented Machiavellian politics, and in the scientistic, value-free rationality which Horkheimer and Adorno call 'instrumental reason'.

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 Grady charts 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 much praised study describes the widespread attempts to save the values of the culturalist tradition, in reformulated 'Modernist' guise, from the threat of professionalist positivism in modernized universites. The tension between professionalism and culturalism gave rise to the Modernist Shakespeare of G. Wilson Knight, E. M. W. Tillyard, and American and British New Critics, and still conditions the postmodernist Shakespearean criticism of contemporary feminists, deconstrcutros, and 'new historicists'. From reviews of the hardback: 'I enjoyed every word of The Modernist Shakespeare . . . The arguments it provokes are important ones, and it compels a rethinking of many critical assumptions in broader fields than just Shakespearian criticism.' Notes and Queries 'a fluently meticulous history that comprehensively succeeds in justifying the three working assumptions Grady identifies . . . carefully nuanced, and theoretically incisive' Review of English Studies

This book was first published in 2009. Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics explores ideas about art implicit in Shakespeare's plays and defines specific Shakespearean aesthetic practices in his use of desire, death and mourning as resources for art. Hugh Grady draws on a tradition of aesthetic theorists who understand art as always formed in a specific historical moment but as also distanced from its context through its form and Utopian projections. Grady sees A Midsummer Night's Dream, Timon of Athens, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet as displaying these qualities, showing aesthetic theory's usefulness for close readings of the plays. The book argues that such social-minded 'impure aesthetics' can revitalize the political impulses of the new historicism while opening up a new aesthetic dimension in the current discussion of Shakespeare.