Books by Hugh (Arcadia University Grady

This study charts how Shakespeare's early fascination with power developed into the profoundly optimistic utopian visions suffusing his later tragicomedies. Hugh Grady shows how five of Shakespeare's most important plays presciently confront dilemmas of an emerging modernity, diagnosing and indicting instrumental politics and capitalism.

This book provides a new appreciation of the writing of John Donne by studying it through Walter Benjamin's concept of baroque allegory. Close readings of works including The Songs and Sonnets and The Anniversaries through this lens illuminate John Donne's poetry and develop new directions in Donne studies.

This book explores ideas about art implicit in Shakespeare's plays and defines specific Shakespearean aesthetic practices in his use of desire, death and mourning as resources for art. It argues that such 'impure aesthetics' can revitalize the political impulses of the new historicism while creating a new aesthetic dimension in discussion of Shakespeare.