The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0426  Tuesday, 22 July 2008

From:       Hardy M. Cook <
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Date:       Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Subject:    Top 10 Books on Shakespeare From the 90s

FROM: The Guardian Online
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/aug/10/bestbooks.classics>

Professor Jean E Howard's Top 10 Books on Shakespeare From the 90s
Thursday August 10, 2000

Professor Jean E Howard teaches early modern literature at Columbia University, 
USA. She is president of the Shakespeare Association of America and co-editor of 
Marxist Shakespeares. Her previous publications include Engendering a Nation: A 
Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories and The Stage and Social 
Struggle in Early Modern England.

1. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays by 
Janet Adelman
Smart feminist psychoanalytic readings of the Bard's most canonised plays.

2. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame by Gail Paster
Penetrating and often hilarious account of how early modern conceptions of the 
body differ from our own. Chapters focus on bodily products such as blood, 
breast milk and urine.

3. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus 
by Margreta de Grazia
Sophisticated account of how 18th-century editors constructed our modern 
understanding of Shakespeare's canon and his status as a literary giant.

4. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities by Jonathan Goldberg
Theoretically dazzling inquiry into early modern sexual categories and 
practices. Stinging critique of the heterosexism that has dogged much modern 
Shakespeare criticism.

5. Shakespeare Among the Moderns by Richard Halpern
Incisive Marxist analysis of how Shakespeare was read and used by major figures 
of British modernism.

6. Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England by Kim Hall
Groundbreaking inquiry into the discourses of race in the early modern period.

7. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England by Richard Helgerson
Prize-winning book showing how early modern texts, including Shakespeare's, 
helped create the idea of England as a modern nation rather than a feudal kingdom.

8. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama by Karen Newman
Theoretically astute and historically grounded inquiry into the languages and 
social practices that constructed early modern ideas of the feminine.

9. Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context by Patricia Parker
Dazzling work about Shakespeare's language, showing how politics is played out 
at the level of rhetoric.

10. Shakespeare Without Women by Dympna Callaghan
Trenchant analysis of the gap between Shakespeare's representations of women and 
people from different ethnic backgrounds and the reality of all-male, and 
probably all-white, acting troupes.

This article was first published on Thursday August 10, 2000.
It was last updated at 14:55 on July 22, 2008.

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