The Modernist Shakespeare Critical Texts in a Material World [Paperback]

Every epoch recreates its classical icons--and for literary culture no icon is more central or 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. In this critical study, Grady charts the construction of Shakespeare as a twentieth-century text, redirecting new historicist methods to an investigation of the social roots of contemporary Shakespeare criticism. Beginning with the formation of professionalism as an ideology in the Victorian Age, this theoretically-informed study describes widespread attempts to save the values of the cultural tradition, in reformulated Modernist guise, from the threat of professionalist positivism in modern universities.

Stimulating....A lively, ambitious monograph that illuminates the personalities, the critical methods, and the institutional forces that produced modern knowledge of Shakespeare....His book both summarizes and enlivens modern and post-modern debates about how best to study and teach Shakespeare. --Renaissance Quarterly

A key text for historicizing the ways almost all of us were taught to think about Shakespeare. --Studies in English Literature

[Grady] has mapped out a useful reference guide to the history of SHakespearean paradigms and the 'professionals' who produced them. Recommended for all academic libraries servicing the field. --Choice