Shakespeare and the American Nation

Abstract

The combination of Shakespeare and American Studies has recently proven to be fertile ground for scholarly inquiry. In Shakespeare and the American Nation, Kim C. Sturgess shows that the subject has not yet been exhausted. Following the work of Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Michael D. Bristol's Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990), Sturgess's intriguing book examines how nationalistic appropriations of Shakespeare accorded him the status of a hero in American culture in a climate of strong anti-British sentiment.