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Shakespeare's Dialectic of Hope
From the Political to the Utopian

£22.99

  • Author: Hugh Grady, Arcadia University, Pennsylvania
  • Date Published: July 2024
  • availability: Available
  • format: Paperback
  • isbn: 9781009107754

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  • Closely examining the relationship between the political and the utopian in five major plays from different phases of Shakespeare's career, Hugh Grady shows the dialectical link between the earlier political dramas and the late plays or tragicomedies. Reading Julius Caesar and Macbeth from the tragic period alongside The Winter's Tale and Tempest from the utopian end of Shakespeare's career, with Antony and Cleopatra acting as a transition, Grady reveals how, in the late plays, Shakespeare introduces a transformative element of hope while never losing a sharp awareness of suffering and death. The plays presciently confront dilemmas of an emerging modernity, diagnosing and indicting instrumental politics and capitalism as largely disastrous developments leading to an empty world devoid of meaning and community. Grady persuasively argues that the utopian vision is a specific dialectical response to these fears and a necessity in worlds of injustice, madness and death.

    • Makes concrete the dialectical connection between Shakespeare's earlier political dramas (histories and most tragedies) with the late plays or tragicomedies which concluded his career
    • Demonstrates how the political and the aesthetic-utopian work not only as binary opposites but instantiate a dialectical process in which one develops a counter-concept that completes and fulfils the other
    • Reveals how five of Shakespeare's most important plays – Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest – presciently confront dilemmas of an emerging modernity, enabling new and surprising symbioses between political and aesthetic critical concepts
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    Reviews & endorsements

    'In this stunningly lucid, philosophically astute, and endlessly revealing study, Hugh Grady enlists the utopian and the aesthetic as necessary correctives to any reductively political reading of Shakespeare. This book should be required reading for anyone interested in the evolving meanings of Shakespeare's plays and the legacies of political criticism.' Julia Reinhard Lupton, The University of California, Irvine

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    Product details

    • Date Published: July 2024
    • format: Paperback
    • isbn: 9781009107754
    • length: 257 pages
    • dimensions: 229 x 152 mm
    • weight: 0.378kg
    • availability: Available
  • Table of Contents

    Part I. Shakespeare and the Political:
    1. Julius Caesar and reified power: the end of Shakespeare's Machiavellian moment
    2. Macbeth: a tragedy of force
    3. Baroque aesthetics and witches in Macbeth
    Part II. Shakespeare and the Aesthetic-Utopian:
    4. From the political to the aesthetic-utopian in Antony and Cleopatra
    5. Tyranny, imagination, and the aesthetic-utopian in The Winter's Tale
    6. The political, the aesthetic, and the utopian in The Tempest: enchantment in a disenchanted world.

  • Author

    Hugh Grady, Arcadia University, Pennsylvania
    Hugh Grady is Professor Emeritus at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, where he specialized in Shakespeare, early modern English literature, and critical theory. He has authored numerous articles and several books on Shakespeare, including The Modernist Shakespeare (1991), Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Montaigne (2002), and Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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