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"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.
This title offers a comprehensive critical analysis of the most
important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors and directors.
This volume focuses on Shakespeare's reception by the major modern
critics. "Great Shakespeareans" offers a systematic account of
those figures who have had the greatest influence on the
interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of
Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume,
leading scholars assess the contribution of G. Wilson Knight,
William Empson, C.L. Barber and Jan Kott to the afterlife and
reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial
contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the
figure covered and of the figure on the understanding,
interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of
their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an
account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with
other figures or works within the same field.
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.
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.
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
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