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Title: Shakespeare's Universal Wolf: Postmodernist Studies in Early Modern Reification
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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
List Price: $282.00
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| Shakespeare's Universal Wolf: Postmodernist Studies in Early Modern Reification by Oxford University Press, USA Balanced, Readable, Well-Researched | | Grady's introduction excellently puts modernism in perspective in two ways. He shows its complexity, and then outlines some of its real continuities with postmodernism and pre-modern conceptions. He nevertheless finds good reasons for putting modernism in brackets so as to remind us that the first time modernism was challenged was 400 years ago when it began, before it became traditionalized. As a postmodernist with an acute sense of postmodernism's own limitations, he finds Shakespeare a valuable source for better understanding the postmodern critique of modernism. This theoretical framework is presented with freshness, and it is essential to understanding his project. At the same time, his readings of his chosen plays do not require so much theoretical background. Grady's research shows that many of his points about characterizations, plots, and so on, are quite similar to points that have come before (and before this generation of critics). Grady provides one of the stronger readings of Troilus and Cressida that I have seen, accounting for a large number of details and providing helpful glosses unmentioned in most other readings. Grady's prose is heavy, but not too dense to be unreadable. Rather the book calls for an assiduous reading that will not feel tedious. Still one wonders whether, as in so much prose of its kind nowadays, more clarity might have been possible. | | Shakespeare's Universal Wolf: Postmodernist Studies in Early Modern Reification by Oxford University Press, USA Product Description | | In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare's image of "an universal wolf" of appetite, power, and will represented and critiqued the emerging systems of modernity: mercantile capitalism, Machiavellian politics, and value-free rationality. Rereading Troilus, Othello, King Lear, and As You Like It, Grady finds many parallels between Shakespeare's criticism and that of such critics as Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Foucault, among others. In particular, Grady points to Shakespeare's keen interest in the twentieth-century concept of "reification," where social systems spin out of control, operating under their own autonomous logic, beyond the reach of the society which had created them. |
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