The Modernist Shakespeare

This is a major study of the history of Shakespeare criticism in the modern era.

Every epoch recreates its classic icons - and for literary culture none is more central nor more protean than Shakespeare. Even though finding the authentic Shakespeare has been a goal of scholarship since the eighteenth century, he has always been constructed as a contemporary author. Hugh Grady charts the construction of Shakespeare as a twentieth-century Modernist text by redirecting 'new historicist' methods to an investigation of the social roots of contemporary Shakespeare crticism itself. Beginning with the formation of professionalism as an ideology in the Victorian age, this much praised study describes the widespread attempts to save the values of the culturalist tradition, in reformulated 'Modernist' guise, from the threat of professionalist positivism in modernized universites. The tension between professionalism and culturalism gave rise to the Modernist Shakespeare of G. Wilson Knight, E. M. W. Tillyard, and American and British New Critics, and still conditions the postmodernist Shakespearean criticism of contemporary feminists, deconstrcutros, and 'new historicists'.

From reviews of the hardback:

'I enjoyed every word of The Modernist Shakespeare . . . The arguments it provokes are important ones, and it compels a rethinking of many critical assumptions in broader fields than just Shakespearian criticism.' Notes and Queries

'a fluently meticulous history that comprehensively succeeds in justifying the three working assumptions Grady identifies . . . carefully nuanced, and theoretically incisive' Review of English Studies