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This innovative collection explores uses of Shakespeare in a wide variety of 21st century contexts, including business manuals, non-literary scholarship, database aggregation, social media, gaming, and creative criticism. Essays in this volume demonstrate that users' critical and creative uses of the dramatist's works position contemporary issues of race, power, identity, and authority in new networks that redefine Shakespeare and reconceptualize the ways in which he is processed in both scholarly and popular culture. While The Shakespeare User contributes to the burgeoning corpus of critical works on digital and Internet Shakespeares, this volume looks beyond the study of Shakespeare artifacts to the system of use and users that constitute the Shakespeare network. This reticular understanding of Shakespeare use expands scholarly forays into non-academic practices, digital discourse communities, and creative critical works manifest via YouTube, Twitter, blogs, databases, websites, and popular fiction.
List of contents
1 Introduction: The Shakespeare User.- 2 South of Elsinore: Actions that A Man Might Play.- 3 Beyond The Tempest: Language, Legitimacy, and La Frontera.- 4 Young Turks or Corporate Clones? Cognitive Capitalism and the (Young) User in the Shakespearean Attention Economy.- 5 Circum-Global Transmission of Value: Leveraging Henry V's Cultural Inheritance.- 6 Shakespeare Fanboys and Fangirls and the Work of Play.- 7 Theorizing User Agency in YouTube Shakespeare.- 8 The Haunted Network: Shakespeare's Digital Ghost.- 9 Shakespeare and Disciplinarity.- 10 Who, or What, is a Shakespeare User?.- 11 Shakespeare and the Undead.
About the author
Valerie M. Fazel teaches at Arizona State University. Her work on Shakespeare and digital media has been published in Borrowers and Lenders and Shakespeare (with Louise Geddes).
Louise Geddes is Assistant Professor of English at Adelphi University. She is the author of Appropriating Shakespeare: A Cultural History of Pyramus and Thisbe (2017). Her work has appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin, MaRDiE, Interdisciplinary Studies,and ShakespeareSurvey.
Summary
This innovative collection explores uses of Shakespeare in a wide variety of 21st century contexts, including business manuals, non-literary scholarship, database aggregation, social media, gaming, and creative criticism. Essays in this volume demonstrate that users’ critical and creative uses of the dramatist’s works position contemporary issues of race, power, identity, and authority in new networks that redefine Shakespeare and reconceptualize the ways in which he is processed in both scholarly and popular culture. While The Shakespeare User contributes to the burgeoning corpus of critical works on digital and Internet Shakespeares, this volume looks beyond the study of Shakespeare artifacts to the system of use and users that constitute the Shakespeare network. This reticular understanding of Shakespeare use expands scholarly forays into non-academic practices, digital discourse communities, and creative critical works manifest via YouTube, Twitter, blogs, databases, websites, and popular fiction.
