Shakespeare and Modernism

Original and accessible, this book studies Shakespeare across a range of cultural practices in early twentieth-century England including the theatre and literary criticism. DiPietro considers how various writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Edward Gordon Craig and Harley Granville-Barker engaged with the cultural traditions of Shakespeare.

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Artists and writers in early twentieth-century England engaged in a variety of ways with the cultural traditions of Shakespeare as a means of defining and relating what they understood to be their own unique historical experience. In Shakespeare and Modernism, Cary DiPietro expands upon the established studies of this field by uncovering the connections and contexts that unite a broad range of cultural practices, from theatrical and book production, including that of Edward Gordon Craig and Harley Granville-Barker, to literary constructions of Shakespeare by high modernists such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Important contexts for the discussion include Marxist aesthetic theory contemporary with the period, the Nietzschean and Freudian contexts of English modernism and early twentieth-century feminism. An original and accessible study, this book will appeal to students and scholars of both Shakespeare and modernism alike.