Shakespeare's Universal Wolf Postmodernist Studies in Early Modern Reification

by Grady, Hugh

• ISBN13: 9780198130048
• ISBN10: 019813004X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-12-05
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

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 oftenparallels 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 andCressida 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 designatessocial 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 Horkheimerand Adorno call 'instrumental reason'.

Author Biography

Hugh Grady is Associate Professor of English at Beaver College in Glenside, Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Introduction: A Postmodernist Shakespeare: the Current Critical Context	p. 1
'An Universal Wolf': Reification in Early and Late Modernity	p. 26
'Mad Idolatry': Commodification and Reification in Troilus and Cressida	p. 58
Othello and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Instrumental Reason, Will, and Subjectivity	p. 95
What Comes of Nothing: Reification and the Plebeian in King Lear	p. 137
Reification and Utopia in as You like It: Desire and Textuality in the Green World	p. 181
Conclusion: Shakespeare and the Postmodern Condition	p. 213
Bibliography	p. 225
Index	p. 237
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