Shakespeare's Universal Wolf Postmodernist Studies in Early Modern Reification [Hardcover]

InTroilus and Cressida, Shakespeare's image of an universal wolf of appetite, power, and will represented and critiqued the emerging systems of modernity: mercantile capitalism, Machiavellian politics, and value-free rationality. RereadingTroilus,Othello,King Lear, andAs You Like It, Grady finds many parallels between Shakespeare's criticism and that of such critics as Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Foucault, among others. In particular, Grady points to Shakespeare's keen interest in the twentieth-century concept of reification, where social systems spin out of control, operating under their own autonomous logic, beyond the reach of the society which had created them.

Grady's exegesis of these master texts is nuanced, sensitive and very rewarding... --Studies in English Literature