Shakespeare Studies Today: Romanticism Lost

Pechter gives a shrewd and generally sympathetic account of materialist criticism, ranging from a focus on the history of the book to the social practices of performance, and he shows how these efforts aim to move beyond mystification of a solitary sovereign genius by shifting attention to the elusive and chimerical quality of early modern texts and the collective and demotic nature of early modern theater. [...]he concludes his book with an ambivalent tribute to Harold Bloom's elegiac bardolatry inspired by Bloom's own deep regard for the Romantics.