| This survey of political criticism of early modern drama, particularly Shakespeare's, covers a period of approximately twenty years, from the mid 1970s to the present. Under the rubric of poststructuralism, political critics of early modern drama--cultural materialists, new historicists, feminist and gender critics--employ the methods of deconstructive analysis while maintaining a general interest in the workings of political power and cultural structures. Each of the chapters narrates the ascension of political criticism by isolating exemplary, founding texts and chronicling the scholarship of the primary critics for each critical school within a larger discussion of its theoretical foundations.; Chapters I and II focus respectively on cultural materialism and new historicism. Joining Marxist theories of economic and social relations with structuralist theories of language signification, cultural materialists like Jonathan Dollimore claim that literary texts are products of their culture at the same time that they are producers of cultural, or ideological, forces. New historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt rely on the theories of Michel Foucault and Clifford Geertz and likewise place the literary text in a greater network of cultural signs, but here, non-literary texts circulate along with their literary counterparts.; Chapter III traces the development of feminism in early modern studies from 1975, when critics began identifying and historicizing the roles of women in Shakespearean drama, to 1991, when feminist criticism began to give way to gender studies. What began as a fundamental interest in the woman's part on the early modern stage has become a bona fide field of theoretical inquiry most notably informed by Foucault and later by Judith Butler. The fourth chapter, focusing on gender studies, essentially picks up where feminist criticism of early modern drama begins to unravel. Like other political critics, gender critics like Valerie Traub look to literary texts, often alongside non-literary ones, to expand the categories by which we try to identify social roles and by which we try to reconstitute and understand early modern culture. The dissertation ends with a brief discussion of the role of political criticism in literary studies. |
