Professor Jean E Howard teaches early modern literature at Columbia University, USA. She is president of the Shakespeare Association of America and co-editor of Marxist Shakespeares. Her previous publications include Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories and The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England.
Buy Engendering a Nation at Amazon.co.uk
1. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays by Janet Adelman
Smart feminist psychoanalytic readings of the Bard's most canonised plays.
2. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame by Gail Paster
Penetrating and often hilarious account of how early modern conceptions of the body differ from our own. Chapters focus on bodily products such as blood, breast milk and urine.
3. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus by Margreta de Grazia
Sophisticated account of how 18th-century editors constructed our modern understanding of Shakespeare's canon and his status as a literary giant.
4. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities by Jonathan Goldberg
Theoretically dazzling inquiry into early modern sexual categories and practices. Stinging critique of the heterosexism that has dogged much modern Shakespeare criticism.
5. Shakespeare Among the Moderns by Richard Halpern
Incisive Marxist analysis of how Shakespeare was read and used by major figures of British modernism.
6. Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England by Kim Hall
Groundbreaking inquiry into the discourses of race in the early modern period.
7. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England by Richard Helgerson
Prize-winning book showing how early modern texts, including Shakespeare's, helped create the idea of England as a modern nation rather than a feudal kingdom.
8. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama by Karen Newman
Theoretically astute and historically grounded inquiry into the languages and social practices that constructed early modern ideas of the feminine.
9. Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context by Patricia Parker
Dazzling work about Shakespeare's language, showing how politics is played out at the level of rhetoric.
10. Shakespeare Without Women by Dympna Callaghan
Trenchant analysis of the gap between Shakespeare's representations of women and people from different ethnic backgrounds and the reality of all-male, and probably all-white, acting troupes.
