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Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism. Ed. Joseph M. Ortiz.

This book collects thirteen essays, including the editor’s Introduction, all engaging and informative, some wonderfully suggestive in ways bound to generate new thought. Though never mentioned, Jerome McGann’s Romantic Ideology (1983) presides over the production. McGann argued that the value the Romantics put on imaginative transcendence, located especially in the achievements of Shakespearean genius, constituted a self-deluding mystification, and that instead of reproducing these values from within, we should subject them to a detached if not hostile skepticism. Little of McGann’s polemic is evident in Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism, perhaps because his argument has itself become more the default view than its displacement; but the consequence of his position, a felt need to extend critical interest beyond the limits of the standard account, is central to the endeavor here. As Ortiz’s Introduction puts it, “This book does not aim to diminish” the “claim that the idolization of Shakespearean imagination profoundly informs Romantic” values, but the “idea that there are many Shakespeares in the nineteenth century productively complicates” our understanding. Instead of treating “the Shakespearean corpus” as “the embodiment of an individual, coherent mind,” the contributors describe how various constituencies omitted from or downplayed in the bardolatrous story (women, theatrical practitioners, gothic novelists, et al.) made use of a malleable Shakespeare for their own purposes.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37307/j.1866-5381.2014.02.17
Lizenz: ESV-Lizenz
ISSN: 1866-5381
Ausgabe / Jahr: 2 / 2014
Veröffentlicht: 2014-11-19
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Dokument Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism. Ed. Joseph M. Ortiz.