Overview

What early modern and Shakespeare studies have to offer contemporary thinking about the future What do early modern and Shakespeare studies have to offer contemporary thinking about the future? Joining a series of urgent conversations about “the future” as an object of analysis and theorization in early modern history, art history, literature, science, theology, and law, Histories of the Future addresses this question directly. This volume brings together essays that draw on early modern modes of “thinking ahead” to reconsider the ways in which the teaching and reading of Shakespeare help shape how one imagines the future from the vantage point of today. By stressing the importance of understanding how future-oriented thinking in the past informs perceptions of possibility in the present—with special attention to contemporary issues of climate change, economic inequality, race and indigeneity, queer lives, physical and mental health crises, academic precarity, conditions of scholarly labor, and the ongoing disastrous effects of settler colonialism—Histories of the Future contributes to a rich and expanding field of scholarship on temporality in pre- and early modern literatures and cultures. In the process, it also engages with key insights of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory in reexamining historical issues ranging from the imagined inevitability of progress or apocalypse to fraught conditions of succession, chronology, catastrophe, influence, prophecy, and risk. With essays by J. K. Barret, Urvashi Chakravarty, Drew Daniel, John Garrison, Margreta de Grazia, Jean E. Howard, Jeffrey Masten, Marissa Nicosia, Vimala Pasupathi, Kathryn Vomero Santos, and Scott Manning Stevens, Histories of the Future explores the possibilities and limits of early modern futures for “thinking ahead” today.

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9781512825282

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Reviews

"""Histories of the Future uses our precarious moment to rethink the textual past both as an end in itself and for what past texts can illuminate about what is to come. The result is an incredibly well-conceived, urgently needed volume that is both thought-provoking and methodologically capacious, and intellectually probing yet topical. Shakespeareans need this book now."" * Wendy Beth Hyman, Oberlin College * ""This timely intervention into current debates surrounding historicism and presentism aims to critique ‘methodologies of pastness,’ to point out the ideologies that underpin them, and to critique discourses of futurity that curtail possible futures for others."" * Sujata Iyengar, author of Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color and Race in Early Modern England *"

Author Information

Carla Mazzio is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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