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Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Robin Headlam Wells
Affiliation:
Roehampton University, London
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Summary

Renaissance humanists believed that if you want to build a just society you must begin with the facts of human nature. This book argues that the idea of a universal human nature was as important to Shakespeare as it was to every other Renaissance writer. In doing so it questions the central, defining principle of postmodern Shakespeare criticism. By ‘postmodern’ I mean criticism that's informed by what is generally termed ‘Theory’ (either spelt with a capital letter, or enclosed by inverted commas, or both, to distinguish it from the literary theory that existed before Barthes, Derrida and other French thinkers began to dominate Anglo-American criticism in the late 1960s). There are of course significant differences between Cultural Materialism and New Historicism, and between different kinds of feminism; where necessary I'll try to make these differences clear. But since anti-essentialism – the belief that there is no such thing as a universal essence of human nature – is a core principle shared by most versions of ‘Theoretically’-informed criticism (but not by liberal feminism), I thought it best to avoid repetition of awkward lists of titles of critical schools by using the general term ‘postmodern’ when writing about critics who claim that Shakespeare was an anti-essentialist. However, with the exception of chapter 9, where I consider Althusser and Foucault and the strange history of anti-essentialism, I've tried to keep discussion of ‘Theory’ to a minimum.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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  • Preface
  • Robin Headlam Wells, Roehampton University, London
  • Book: Shakespeare's Humanism
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483622.001
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  • Preface
  • Robin Headlam Wells, Roehampton University, London
  • Book: Shakespeare's Humanism
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483622.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Preface
  • Robin Headlam Wells, Roehampton University, London
  • Book: Shakespeare's Humanism
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483622.001
Available formats
×