Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction

This book analyses the ways contemporary fiction writers draw on Shakespeare - the man, his work and his cultural legacy.

Andrew James Hartley (Edited by)

9781107171725, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 November 2017

276 pages, 1 table
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.9 cm, 0.54 kg

How do writers of contemporary fiction incorporate Shakespeare - the man, his work and his cultural legacy? This collection brings together some of the leading voices in the scholarship of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation to examine the ways in which writers have used literary culture's most prominent historical figure to their own ends since the year 2000. The essays consider the representation of the man himself, the rethinking of his stories - often in pointed defiance of the original - and explorations of the plays radically repositioned in time and space. In the process the collection reveals which versions of Shakespeare are most current in contemporary culture and education, even as they remake them in the terms of the present, often exploiting the new notions of genre, of publishing technologies, and of political identity which have evolved so drastically since the turn of the last century.

Introduction: 'reason not the need!' Andrew James Hartley
1. Hamlet the Dane: 'tell my story' Graham Holderness
2. Shakespeare found and lost Rebecca Bushnell
3. Shakespeare's novel life: speech, text and dialogue in recent Shakespearean fictions Ken Jacobsen
4. The school of (The) Night Circus: performing Shakespeare arcana in novel forms Regina Buccola
5. 'A delicate and tender prince': Hamlet and millenial boyhood M. Tyler Sasser
6. 'How many daughters had Lady Macbeth?' Jennifer Flaherty
7. Engaging Ophelia in early twenty-first-century young adult fiction Emily Detmer-Goebel
8. Criminal adaptations: gender, genre, and Shakespearean young adult literature Erica Hateley
9. A man with a map: the millennial Macbeth Lisa Hopkins
10. Shakespeare and the post-millennial cancer novel Sujata Iyengar
11. Posthuman Tempests in the twenty-first century Christy Desmet
12. Stratford-upon-web: Shakespeare in twenty-first century fanfiction Michelle K. Yost
13. The paranormal Bard: Shakespeare is/as undead Laurie E. Osborne
14. The Hogarth Shakespeare series: redeeming Shakespeare's literariness Douglas M. Lanier.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG]