Karen Newman
Essaying Shakespeare
Essaying Shakespeare, as its title suggests, is a collection of essays about Shakespeare.
To” essay” means both to try or attempt, and to put to the test. Written and published over the past 25 years, during an intensely productive period for Shakespeare studies, these essays “try” or “test” major approaches to Shakespeare and literary studies more generally.
Psychoanalysis, new historicism, gender studies, post-structuralism, cultural studies, critical race theory, the history of sexuality, English nationalism and colonial expansion, visual culture, print culture, and the appropriation of and globalization of Shakespeare all echo through the volume. Not only do the essays collected here illustrate recent topics and critical approaches, they are also in conversation with the work of many scholars writing on Shakespeare. And they also engage major thinkers of the twentieth century including Adorno, Derrida, Foucault, Freud, and Marx, among others.
My work is concerned particularly with social exchange and the circulation of people and objects in the Renaissance, which has recently come to be called the “early modern period.” In short, Essaying Shakespeare provides an overview of recent work on perhaps the most famous of world writers and signals directions for the future of Shakespeare scholarship and performance.
Editor: Erind Pajo
Essaying Shakespeare
Karen Newman Essaying Shakespeare University of Minnesota Press 232 pages, 9 x 6 inches ISBN 978 0816655892 ISBN 978 0816655908
Available here →August 24, 2009
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Karen Newman
Karen Newman is Professor of English at New York University. She has written widely on Shakespeare and Renaissance letters and culture and is the author of several books including Shakespeare’s Rhetoric of Comic Character (Methuen, 1985), Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991), Fetal Positions, Individualism, Science, Visuality (Stanford, 1996), Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton, 2007) and Essaying Shakespeare (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Before coming to NYU, she was University Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Brown University. She has also taught at Williams College, The Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University. Her current research on cultural translation aims to historicize contemporary claims about the globalization of culture.
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