First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This in-depth collection of essays traces the changing reception of Shakespeare over the past four hundred years, during which time Shakespeare has variously been seen as the last great exponent of pre-modern Western culture, a crucial inaugurator of modernity, and a prophet of postmodernity. This fresh look at Shakespeare's plays is an important contribution to the revival of the idea of 'modernity' and how we periodise ourselves, and Shakespeare, at the beginning of a new millennium.

In Modernism and Cultural Conflict, Ann Ardis questions commonly held views of the radical nature of literary modernism. She positions the coterie of writers centred around Pound, Eliot and Joyce as one among a number of groups in Britain intent on redefining the cultural work of literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Ardis emphasizes the ways in which modernists secured their cultural centrality, she documents their support of mainstream attitudes toward science, their retreat from a supposed valuing of scandalous sexuality in the wake of Oscar Wilde's trials in 1895, and the conservative cultural and sexual politics masked by their radical formalist poetics. She recovers key instances of opposition to modernist self-fashioning in British socialism and feminism of the period. Ardis goes on to consider how literary modernism's rise to aesthetic prominence paved the way for the institutionalization of English studies through the devaluation of other aesthetic practices.

Though the relationship of modernist writers and artists to mass-marketplaces and popular cultural forms is often understood as one of ambivalence if not antagonism, Modernism and the Marketplace redirects this established line of inquiry, considering the practical and conceptual interfaces between literary practice and dominant economic institutions and ideas.

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The kinship between modernism and close reading has long between taken for granted. But for that reason, it has also gone unexamined. As the archives, timeframes, and cultural contexts of global modernist studies proliferate, the field's rapport with close reading no longer appears self-evident or guaranteed—even though for countless students studying literary modernism still invariably means studying close reading. This authoritative collection of essays illuminates close reading's conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical genealogies as a means of examining its enduring potential. David James brings together a cast of world-renowned scholars to offer an account of some of the things we might otherwise know, and need to know, about the history of modernist theories of reading, before then providing a sense of how the futures for critical reading look different in light of the multiple ways in which modernism has been close read. Modernism and Close Reading responds to a contemporary climate of unprecedented reconstitution for the field: it takes stock of close reading's methodological possibilities in the wake of modernist studies' geographical, literary-historical, and interdisciplinary expansions; and it shows how the political, ethical, and aesthetic consequences of attending to matters of form complicate ideological preconceptions about the practice of formalism itself. By reassessing the intellectual commitments and institutional conditions that have shaped modernism in criticism as well as in the classroom, we are able to ask new questions about close reading that resonate across literary and cultural studies. Invigorating that critical venture, this volume enriches our vocabulary for addressing close reading's perpetual development and diversification.

A concentrated study of the relationships between modernism and transformative left utopianism, this volume provides an introduction to Marx and Marxism for modernists, and an introduction to modernism for Marxists. Its guiding hypothesis is that Marx's writing absorbed the lessons of artistic and cultural modernity as much as his legacy concretely shaped modernism across multiple media.

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 postivism in modern universities.

Spiritualism is often dismissed by literary critics and historians as merely a Victorian fad. Helen Sword demonstrates that it continued to flourish well into the twentieth century and seeks to explain why. Literary modernism, she maintains, is replete with ghosts and spirits. In Ghostwriting Modernism she explores spiritualism's striking persistence and what she calls "the vexed relationship between mediumistic discourse and modernist literary aesthetics."Sword begins with a brief historical review of popular spiritualism's roots in nineteenth-century literary culture. In subsequent chapters, she discusses the forms of mediumship most closely allied with writing, the forms of writing most closely allied with mediumship, and the thematic and aesthetic alliances between popular spiritualism and modernist literature. Finally, she accounts for the recent proliferation of a spiritualist-influenced vocabulary (ghostliness, hauntings, the uncanny) in the works of historians, sociologists, philosophers, and especially literary critics and theorists.Documenting the hitherto unexplored relationship between spiritualism and modern authors (some credulous, some skeptical), Sword offers compelling readings of works by James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H.D., James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. Even as modernists mock spiritualism's ludicrous lingo and deride its metaphysical excesses, she finds, they are intrigued and attracted by its ontological shiftiness, its blurring of the traditional divide between high culture and low culture, and its self-serving tendency to favor form over content (medium, so to speak, over message). Like modernism itself, Sword asserts, spiritualism embraces rather than eschews paradox, providing an ideological space where conservative beliefs can coexist with radical, even iconoclastic, thought and action.

Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and countries, Thomas Mann and Shakespeare is the first book-length study to explore the always fascinating, if sometimes disturbing, connections between Shakespeare and Mann. It establishes startling resonances between the central works of these two authors, pairing, for instance, Der Zauberberg with The Tempest, Der Tod in Venedig with The Merchant of Venice, Tonio Kröger with Othello and Love's Labour's Lost with Doktor Faustus. Showing how the conjunction of Shakespeare and Mann affords new, alternative perspectives on fundamental issues such as modernity, irony, art, desire, authorship and religion, Thomas Mann and Shakespeare challenges the increasingly walled-in specialism of literary topics and periodization and demonstrates the scope for new ways of reading in literary studies.