UID:
edocfu_9959156140002883
Format:
1 online resource (304 p.) :
,
5 halftones
ISBN:
9781501725487
Content:
Modernist writers, critics, and artists sparked a fresh and distinctive interpretation of Shakespeare's plays which has proved remarkably tenacious, as Richard Halpern explains in this lively and provocative book. The preoccupations of such high modernists as T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce set the tone for the critical reception of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. Halpern contends their habits of thought continue to dominate postmodern schools of criticism that claim to have broken with the modernist legacy.Halpern addresses such topics as imperialism and modernism's cult of the primitive, the rise of mass culture, modernist anti-semitism, and the aesthetic of the machine. His discussion considers figures as diverse as Orson Welles and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Shakespeare critics including Northrop Frye, Cleanth Brooks, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Cavell.Shakespeare's works have been subjected to a continuing process of historical reinterpretation in which every new era has imposed its own cultural and ideological presuppositions on the plays. The most enduring contribution of modernism, Halpern suggests, has been the juxtaposition of an awareness of historical distance and a mapping of Shakespeare's plays onto the present. Using modernist themes and approaches, he constructs new readings of four Shakespeare plays.
Note:
Frontmatter --
,
Contents --
,
Acknowledgments /
,
Introduction: On Historical Allegory --
,
1. Shakespeare in the Tropics: From High Modernism to New Historicism --
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2. That Shakespeherian Mob: Mass Culture and the Literary Public Sphere --
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3. Modernist in the Middle: The Centrality of Northrop Frye --
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4. The Jewish Question: Shakespeare and Anti-Semitism --
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5. Hamletmachines --
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Index
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In English.
Language:
English
DOI:
10.7591/9781501725487
URL:
https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501725487
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