Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now

New ideas for teaching contemporary social justice through Shakespeare and Renaissance literature

• Describes innovative and portable teaching methods informed by recent scholarship in early modern literature, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy
• Offers strategies for effective teaching and advocacy amidst the growing cultural and economic complexities of higher education
• Demonstrates the relevance of historical literary study to contemporary cultural conversations, especially those about social justice
• Historicizes the malicious "whitening" of Shakespeare and European culture, recognizing instead multiple, multicultural, accessible Shakespeares
• Presents Shakespeare's plays as a common corpus of great value to democratic conversations in widely divergent contexts
• Gives educators language for promoting the virtue of humanistic inquiry and when higher education is on the defensive

This book is for teachers who want to heighten the intellectual impact of their courses by using their classrooms as a creative space for social formation and action. Its twenty-one chapters provide diverse perspectives on Shakespeare and early modern literature that engage innovation, collaboration, and forward-looking practices. They model ways of mobilizing justice with early modern texts and claim the intellectual benefits of integrating social justice into courses. The book reconceives the relationship between students and Renaissance literature in ways that enable them - and us - to move from classroom discussions to real-life applications.

Hillary Eklund is Provost Distinguished Professor, Associate Professor of English, and Chair of the department at Loyola University New Orleans. She is the author of Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies (Ashgate, 2015) and the editor of Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science (Duquesne University Press, 2017). She has essays published or forthcoming in journals such as Shakespeare Studies, SEL, and Criticism, and in essay collections on a variety of topics from Shakespeare and Spenser to the environmental humanities. Her book in progress investigates the representations, uses, and controversies surrounding wetlands in the early modern period.

Wendy Beth Hyman is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. She is author of the Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford UP, 2019), and editor of The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Ashgate 2011). She has published essays on early modern mechanical birds, insect poetry and early modern microscopy, the inner lives of Renaissance machines, physics and metaphysics in early modern lyric, metaphoricity and science, jacquemarts and Jack Falstaff, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, and the pedagogy of book history. Professor Hyman is at work on a second monograph, attending to the relationships among mimesis, myth, and other kinds of literary fictions in Shakespearean and Spenserian romance.