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COPYRIGHT 2005 Modern Humanities Research Association
Shakespeare Minus 'Theory'. By TOM MCALINDON. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. 2004. xii+210 pp. 45 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-7546-3981-9.
Bawdy and Soul: A Revaluation of Shakespeare's Sonnets. By FRANK ERIK POINTNER. Heidelberg: Winter. 2003. 226 pp. ISBN 3-8253-1504-5.
Shakepeare Minus 'Theory' is very largely a collection of previously published essays and, as with all such collections, particularly given the increasing availability of journals on-line, the general and bald question of 'why republish?' raises itself. For McAlindon, the answer is a clear one: these essays are gathered together the better to present his challenge to what he sees as the current radical yet hegemonic orthodoxy in criticism of English Renaissance literature, an orthodoxy constituted in the main of the work of New Historicist and Cultural Materialist critics of the 1980s and 1990s. That challenge is necessary for reasons beyond the personal; McAlindon does a good job of avoiding giving the impression that he is simply a disappointed traditionalist, raging against his tribe's loss of power. He is, as he is happy to declare, a traditional liberal humanist but he takes pride in that label not because it identifies his critical position but rather because it identifies the principles he wishes to demonstrate in...
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