Shakespeare's universal wolf
Subtitle: studies in early modern reification
By: Hugh Grady.
Publisher: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 241
Subjects: Shakespeare, William, -- 1564-1616 -- Political and social views.; Shakespeare, William, -- 1564-1616.; Shakespeare, William, -- 1564-1616.; Shakespeare, William, -- 1564-1616.; Shakespeare, William, -- 1564-1616.; Literature and society -- England -- History -- 16th century.; Literature and society -- England -- History -- 17th century.; Alienation (Social psychology) in literature.; Civilization, Modern, in literature.; Social problems in literature.; Postmodernism (Literature); Historical materialism.
Description: 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 often parallels that of critics of modernity from our own Postmodernist era. Thus the broad analysis of modernity produced by Marx, Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault, and others can serve to illuminate Shakespeare's own depiction of an emerging modernity - a depiction epitomized by the image in Troilus and Cressida 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 designates social systems created by human societies but which confront 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 Horkheimer and Adorno call 'instrumental reason'.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [225]-236) and index.