Shakespeare's Universal Wolf

Shakespeare's Universal Wolf PDF Author: Hugh Grady
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198130048
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
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 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 confronts 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'.

Shakespeare's Universal Wolf

Shakespeare's Universal Wolf PDF Author: Hugh Grady
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198130048
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
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 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 confronts 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'.

Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne

Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne PDF Author: Hugh Grady
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199257607
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
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.

Love, history and emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare

Love, history and emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare PDF Author: Andrew James Johnston
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1784996173
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores medieval and early modern Troilus-texts from Chaucer to Shakespeare. The contributions show how medieval and early modern fictions of Troy use love and other emotions as a means of approaching the problem of tradition. As these texts reflect on their own traditionality, they highlight both the affective nature of temporality and the role of affect in scrutinising tradition itself. Focusing on a specific textual lineage that bridges the conventional period boundaries, the collection participates in an exchange between medievalists and early modernists that seeks to generate a dialogic encounter between the periods with the aim of further dismantling the rigid notions of chronology and periodisation that have kept medieval and early modern scholarship apart.

Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare

Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare PDF Author: Christopher Pye
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810142198
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The turn to political concerns in Renaissance studies, beginning in the 1980s, was dictated by forms of cultural materialism that staked their claims against the aesthetic dimension of the work. Recently, however, the more robustly political conception of the aesthetic formulated by theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Jacques Rancière has revitalized literary analysis generally and early modern studies in particular. For these theorists, aesthetics forms the crucial link between politics and the most fundamental phenomenological organization of the world, what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible.” Taking up this expansive conception of aesthetics, Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare suggests that the political stakes of the literary work—and Shakespeare’s work in particular—extend from the most intimate dimensions of affective response to the problem of the grounds of political society. The approaches to aesthetic thought included in this volume explore the intersections between the literary work and the full range of concerns animating the field today: political philosophy, affect theory, and ecocritical analysis of environs and habitus.

Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing

Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing PDF Author: Bryan Jay Wolf
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226905044
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
"The result is a Vermeer we have not seen before: a painter whose serene spaces and calm subjects incorporate within themselves, however obliquely, the world's troubles. Vermeer abandons what his predecessors had labored so carefully to achieve: legible spaces, a world of moral clarity defined by the pressure of a hand against a table or the scatter of light across a bare wall. Instead Vermeer complicated Dutch domestic art and invented what has puzzled and captivated his admirers ever since: the odd daubs of white pigment, dancing across the plane of the canvas; patches of blurred surface, contradicting the painting's illusionism without explanation; and the querulous silence that endows his women with secrets they dare not reveal.".

The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism

The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism PDF Author: Evelyn Gajowski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350093238
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism is a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on critical approaches to Shakespeare by an international team of leading scholars. It contains chapters on 20 specific critical practices, each grounded in analysis of a Shakespeare play. These practices range from foundational approaches including character studies, close reading and genre studies, through those that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that challenged the preconceptions on which traditional liberal humanism is based, including feminism, cultural materialism and new historicism. Perspectives drawn from postcolonial, queer studies and critical race studies, besides more recent critical practices including presentism, ecofeminism and cognitive ethology all receive detailed treatment. In addition to its coverage of distinct critical approaches, the handbook contains various sections that provide non-specialists with practical help: an A–Z glossary of key terms and concepts, a chronology of major publications and events, an introduction to resources for study of the field and a substantial annotated bibliography.

Shakespeare's Dialectic of Hope

Shakespeare's Dialectic of Hope PDF Author: Hugh Grady
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009098098
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Shakespeare was fascinated by power throughout his career but also understood its dangers and limits. Utopian visions were his solution.

Shakespeare and Appropriation

Shakespeare and Appropriation PDF Author: Christy Desmet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134622619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The vitality of our culture is still often measured by the status Shakespeare has within it. Contemporary readers and writers continue to exploit Shakespeare's cultural afterlife in a vivid and creative way. This fascinating collection of original essays shows how writers' efforts to imitate, contradict, compete with, and reproduce Shakespeare keep him in the cultural conversation. The essays: * analyze the methods and motives of Shakespearean appropriation * investigate theoretically the return of the repressed author in discussions of Shakespeare's cultural function * put into dialogue theoretical and literary responses to Shakespeare's cultural authority * analyze works ranging from nineteenth century to the present, and genres ranging from poetry and the novel to Disney movies.

Shylock Play

Shylock Play PDF Author: Julia Pascal
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849437874
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
When Warsaw Ghetto-escapee Sarah visits the Venice Ghetto she happens to witness a group of actors staging a dress rehearsal of The Merchant of Venice, upon this chance encounter Sarah is confronted by the terrible story of 'The Jew' which touches her own life. Through this emotive and provocative play Julia Pascal re-works Shakespeare's controversial text, transposing the fervent theme of anti-Semitism raised by the bard, playing it out in a contemporary setting.Challenging the portrayal of 'The Jew' that for many years has dominated society's attitudes towards the Jewish people, Pascal ambitiously places her own text within Shakespeare's classic, producing a thoroughly thought-provoking and original work.

Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama

Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama PDF Author: David Hawkes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350247065
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Money, magic and the theatre were powerful forces in early modern England. Money was acquiring an independent, efficacious agency, as the growth of usury allowed financial signs to reproduce without human intervention. Magic was coming to seem Satanic, as the manipulation of magical signs to performative purposes was criminalized in the great 'witch craze.' And the commercial, public theatre was emerging – to great controversy – as the perfect medium to display, analyse and evaluate the newly autonomous power of representation in its financial, magical and aesthetic forms. Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama is especially timely in the current era of financial deregulation and derivatives, which are just as mysterious and occult in their operations as the germinal finance of 16th-century London. Chapters examine the convergence of money and magic in a wide range of early modern drama, from the anonymous Mankind through Christopher Marlowe to Ben Jonson, concentrating on such plays as The Alchemist, The New Inn and The Staple of News. Several focus on Shakespeare, whose analysis of the relations between finance, witchcraft and theatricality is particularly acute in Timon of Athens, The Comedy of Errors, Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale.