Paul Cantor

Paul A. Cantor (born 1945) is an American literary and media critic. He is currently the Clifton Waller Barrett Professor at the University of Virginia.

As a young man Cantor attended Ludwig von Mises' seminars in New York City. He went on to study English literature at Harvard (A.B., 1966, Ph.D., 1971), where he studied with Harvey Mansfield. Cantor has taught for many years at the University of Virginia, where he is the Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English.

Cantor has written on a wide range of subjects, including Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson,Jane Austen,Romanticism,Oscar Wilde,H. G. Wells,Leo Strauss,Samuel Beckett, Salman Rushdie,New Historicism,Austrian economics, postcolonial novels, contemporary popular culture, and relations between culture and commerce.

Shakespeare criticism

Cantor has published extensively on Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (1974), a revision of his doctoral thesis, he analyzes Shakespeare's Roman plays and contrasts the austere, republican mentality of Coriolanus with the bibulous and erotic energies of Antony and Cleopatra. In Shakespeare: Hamlet (1989), he depicts Hamlet as man torn between pagan and Christian conceptions of heroism. In his articles on Macbeth, he analyzes "the Scottish play" using similar polarities.