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Overview
Participants in the current debate about the literary canon generally separate the established literary order—of which Shakespeare is the most visible icon—from the emergent minority literatures.
In this challenging study, Peter Erickson insists on bringing the two realms together. He asks: what impact does a revision of the literary canon have on Shakespeare's status?
Part One of his book is about Shakespeare on women.
In analyses of several Shakespearean works, Erickson discusses Shakespeare's ambivalence about women as a reflection of male anxiety about the cultural authority of Queen Elizabeth. Part Two is about (contemporary) women on Shakespeare. Erickson discusses Adrienne Rich's revision of the very concept of canon and discusses how several African-American women writers (in particular Maya Angelou and Gloria Naylor) have reflected on the ambivalent status of Shakespeare in their worlds.
Erickson here offers a model for multicultural literary criticism and a new conceptual framework with which to discuss issues of identity politics. Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves makes an important contribution to the national debate about educational policy in the humanities.
Synopsis
Participants in the current debate about the literary canon generally separate the established literary order—of which Shakespeare is the most visible icon—from the emergent minority literatures.
In this challenging study, Peter Erickson insists on bringing the two realms together. He asks: what impact does a revision of the literary canon have on Shakespeare's status?
Part One of his book is about Shakespeare on women.
In analyses of several Shakespearean works, Erickson discusses Shakespeare's ambivalence about women as a reflection of male anxiety about the cultural authority of Queen Elizabeth. Part Two is about (contemporary) women on Shakespeare. Erickson discusses Adrienne Rich's revision of the very concept of canon and discusses how several African-American women writers (in particular Maya Angelou and Gloria Naylor) have reflected on the ambivalent status of Shakespeare in their worlds.
Erickson here offers a model for multicultural literary criticism and a new conceptual framework with which to discuss issues of identity politics. Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves makes an important contribution to the national debate about educational policy in the humanities.
Library Journal
Erickson, who is both a Shakespearean and a feminist scholar, makes a lucid, informative, and challenging contribution to the current debate between traditionalists and advocates of minority literature regarding the literary canon. First, he examines Shakespeare's representations of women in the Renaissance cultural context: the tensions generated by having a female monarch in a patriarchal society. Erickson fruitfully analyzes Venus and Adonis , The Rape of Lucrece , All's Well That Ends Well , and Hamlet from this perspective, then examines the reception of Shakespeare in the work of black female novelists Gloria Naylor and Maya Angelou and poet and critic Adrienne Rich. These writers, indebted to Shakespeare but not overawed by him, seek to reevaluate his portrayal of women from their own standpoint. According to their view, Shakespeare is not the center of the literary and moral universe, but a writer limited, like all others, by his time and place. For informed readers.-- Bryan Aubrey, Fairfield, Ia.