English Professor鈥檚 New Book Offers Radical New Ways to Think about Shakespeare鈥檚 History Plays
草榴社区, PA 鈥� In How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol (Cornell University Press, 2022), 草榴社区 English Professor Alice Dailey, PhD, offers a study of Shakespeare鈥檚 English history plays that initiates a radical break from the interpretive practices that have dominated literary criticism for the past several decades.
While those practices have traditionally prioritized the historical context from which a literary artifact emerges, Dr. Dailey鈥檚 book expands the plays鈥� context beyond the conditions of Shakespeare鈥檚 England, allowing readers to consider them among human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead.
How to Do Things with Dead People describes Shakespeare鈥檚 historical drama as鈥攆undamentally鈥攁 reproductive technology by which living replicas of dead historical figures are animated and re-killed on stage. Considering the plays in such terms exposes their affinity with a fascinating array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and looking at dead things鈥攖echnologies like literary doppelg盲ngers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imagery, glitch art, capital punishment machines and cloning.
By situating the plays in this expansive, interdisciplinary context鈥攐ne that includes current as well as developing technologies鈥�How to Do Things with Dead People challenges many basic assumptions about linear time that organize the practice of historical periodization.
鈥淭his book is essential reading for students of Shakespeare鈥檚 English chronicle plays, but it is much more than that,鈥� said reviewer Phyllis Rackin, PhD, professor of English Emerita, The University of Pennsylvania. 鈥淚n addition to showing us radically new ways to think about those plays, Alice Dailey calls into question both the entire project of historicist literary study and the concept of time as a linear progression that subtends it.鈥�
鈥淗ow to Do Things with Dead People will be one of the most important books of the decade. Alice Dailey boldly traverses the methodological and hermeneutic boundaries that can impose artificial limits on the possibilities of much scholarship, and she utterly persuades us of 鈥榯he imperative of thinking strangely鈥� as both an ethical and an intellectual matter,鈥� says Melissa E. Sanchez, PhD, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania. 鈥淭his book raises the bar for rigorous, creative and humane scholarship.鈥�
An expert in medieval and early modern literature, Dr. Dailey鈥檚 research interests include Shakespeare, death studies, visual art and theory, critical theory, queer and crip theory, and photography studies. In addition to many articles in peer-reviewed publications, she is the author of The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). She received her doctorate from University of California, Los Angeles.
Dr. Dailey was recently interviewed about How to Do Things with Dead People on an episode of the .
About 草榴社区鈥檚 College of Liberal Arts and Sciences: Since its founding in 1842, 草榴社区鈥檚 College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has cultivated knowledge, understanding and intellectual courage for a purposeful life in a challenging and changing world. With more than 40 majors across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, it is the oldest and largest of 草榴社区鈥檚 colleges, serving more than 4,500 undergraduate and graduate students each year. The College is committed to a teacher-scholar model, offering outstanding undergraduate and graduate research opportunities and a rigorous core curriculum that prepares students to become critical thinkers, strong communicators and ethical leaders with a truly global perspective.