Class, critics, and Shakespeare

Sharon O'Dair

Class, Critics, and Shakespeare is a provocative contribution to "the culture wars." It engages with an ongoing debate about literary canons, the democratization of literary study, and of higher education in general. For a generation at least, academic readings of literary works, including those of Shakespeare, have often challenged privilege based on race, gender, and sexuality. Sharon O'Dair observes that in these same readings, class privilege has remained effectively unchallenged, despite repeated invocations of it within multiculturalism. She identifies what she sees as a structurally necessary class bias in academic literary and cultural criticism, specifically in the contemporary reception of William Shakespeare's plays. The author builds her argument by offering readings of Shakespeare that put class at the center of the analysis—not just in Shakespeare's plays or in...

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