Shakespearean Aesthetics

FAIN: FT-52477-04

Hugh Hartridge Grady
Arcadia University (Glenside, PA 19038-3215)

"Shakespearean Aesthetics" is a book-length study of Shakespeare's prescient representation of aesthetic ideas in a context of emerging modernity, exploring ideas of Shakespeare's day and our own, especially Frankfurt School concepts. It analyzes one comedy and four tragedies, plays probing the aesthetically central themes of sexuality and mortality within settings in which flourish characteristics we associate with modernity: free-flowing subjectivity and identity crises, challenges to tradition and traditional identities, autotelic or Machiavellian power, and aestheticized deaths whose dramatic power is unconnected to Christian salvation.