Mark Thornton Burnett

Jennifer Flaherty

Deborah Uman

"The collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital shaming. Violence against women. Sexual bullying. Racial slurs and injustice. These are just some of the issues faced by young adults and confronted in Liberating Shakespeare. Exploring how adaptations of Shakespeare's plays can be used to empower young audiences by addressing issues of oppression, trauma and resistance, this collection showcases a wide variety of approaches to understanding, adapting and teaching Shakespeare. In the past 25 years, the number of Shakespeare adaptations targeting adolescent audiences has grown significantly. This book explores YA novels based on Shakespeare's plays, teen films such as 10 Things I Hate about You and Romeo + Juliet, video games such as Elsinore and the Life is Strange series, and many other adaptations that have invited young audiences to see themselves in Shakespeare's characters. It also looks at more recent digital adaptations, produced by and for young people, which reimagine Shakespeare's plays as first-person video diaries. These creative works use Shakespeare to address some of the most pressing questions in contemporary culture - exploring themes of violence, race relations and intersectionality. The chapters in this collection consider whether the representations of characters and situations in YA Shakespeare can function as empowering models for students and how these works might be used as companion texts within educational settings. It argues that YA Shakespeare represents the diverse concerns of today's youth and should be taken seriously as art that speaks to the complexities of a broken world and offers moments of hope for an uncertain future"--

Deborah Uman

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