Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics

by Grady, Hugh

• ISBN13: 9781107404205
• ISBN10: 1107404207
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-04-19
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: impure aesthetics

A Shakespearean Aesthetic: Into the Woods outside Athens

A Midsummer Night's Dream - eros and the aesthetic

Modernity, usury, and art in Timon of Athens

The Aesthetics of Death and Mourning

Hamlet as mourning play

Beautiful death in Romeo and Juliet

Conclusion: the critical present

Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.