Shakespeare and the Poetics and Politics of Relevance

Four years on from George Floyd's murder, this volume asks if and how Shakespeare might be relevant--whether in performance, in the classroom, or in scholarship--to the pressing issues of social and climate justice. This question, however, is accompanied by the acute and uncomfortable recognition that there have been other consequences to the awakening of the world since Floyd's death, including the call to cancel Shakespeare altogether. This volume, however, is not an apology for Shakespeare but rather an engagement with him. From the perspective of the scholars who contribute here, questions about Shakespeare in our current context are not only deeply enmeshed with issues about his historical, geographical, and performance context and its attendant alterity, but crucially also to the specifically literary forms and structures with which he worked. Even as these essays resist the idea of a "timeless," universalist Shakespeare, they insist upon the "poetics," the creative framework, the specifically literary dimensions of the plays that cannot be reduced to any paraphrasable content. These are precisely the features that facilitate and enable the "relevance" of Shakespeare's works even across the chasm of the centuries since he composed them.

Author: Dympna Callaghan
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 11/10/2024
Series: Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500-1700
Pages: 267
Weight: 1.01lbs
Size: 8.51h x 6.29w x 0.83d
ISBN: 9783031668975
2024 Edition