Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics

by Hugh Grady

• ISBN13: 9780521514750
• ISBN10: 0521514754
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-09-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Introduction: impure aesthetics	p. 1
A Shakespearean Aesthetic: Into the Woods Outside Athens	p. 45
A Midsummer Night's Dream- eros and the aesthetic	p. 47
Modernity, usury, and art in Timon of Athens	p. 90
The Aesthetics of Death and Mourning	p. 131
Hamlet as mourning-play	p. 133
The aesthetics of the trauerspiel	p. 133
Hamlet as Trauerspiel	p. 154
Post-script: Hamlet, subjectivity, and aesthetics	p. 187
Beautiful death in Romeo and Juliet	p. 193
Conclusion: the critical present	p. 225
Bibliography	p. 240
Index	p. 257
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