Eyal Poleg
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197266717
- eISBN:
- 9780191916045
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266717.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
This book examines the production and use of Bibles in late medieval and early modern England. The analysis of hundreds of biblical manuscripts and prints reveals how scribes, printers, readers, and ...
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This book examines the production and use of Bibles in late medieval and early modern England. The analysis of hundreds of biblical manuscripts and prints reveals how scribes, printers, readers, and patrons have reacted to religious and political turmoil. Looking at the modification of biblical manuscripts, or the changes introduced into subsequent printed editions, reveals the ways in which commerce and devotions joined to shape biblical access. The book explores the period from c.1200 to 1553, which saw the advent of moveable-type print as well as the Reformation. The book’s long-view places both technological and religious transformation in a new perspective. The book progresses chronologically, starting with the mass-produced innovative Late Medieval Bible, which has often been linked to the emerging universities and book-trade of the thirteenth century. The second chapter explores Wycliffite Bibles, arguing against their common affiliation with groups outside Church orthodoxy. Rather, it demonstrates how surviving manuscripts are linked to licit worship, performed in smaller monastic houses, by nuns and devout lay women and men. The third chapter explores the creation and use of the first Bible printed in England as evidence for the uncertain course of reform at the end of Henry VIII’s reign. Henry VIII’s Great Bible is studied in the following chapter. Rather than a monument to reform, a careful analysis of its materiality and use reveals it to have been a mostly useless book. The final chapter presents the short reign of Edward VI as a period of rapid transformation in Bible and worship, when some of the innovations introduced more than three hundred years earlier began, for the first time, to make sense.Less
This book examines the production and use of Bibles in late medieval and early modern England. The analysis of hundreds of biblical manuscripts and prints reveals how scribes, printers, readers, and patrons have reacted to religious and political turmoil. Looking at the modification of biblical manuscripts, or the changes introduced into subsequent printed editions, reveals the ways in which commerce and devotions joined to shape biblical access. The book explores the period from c.1200 to 1553, which saw the advent of moveable-type print as well as the Reformation. The book’s long-view places both technological and religious transformation in a new perspective. The book progresses chronologically, starting with the mass-produced innovative Late Medieval Bible, which has often been linked to the emerging universities and book-trade of the thirteenth century. The second chapter explores Wycliffite Bibles, arguing against their common affiliation with groups outside Church orthodoxy. Rather, it demonstrates how surviving manuscripts are linked to licit worship, performed in smaller monastic houses, by nuns and devout lay women and men. The third chapter explores the creation and use of the first Bible printed in England as evidence for the uncertain course of reform at the end of Henry VIII’s reign. Henry VIII’s Great Bible is studied in the following chapter. Rather than a monument to reform, a careful analysis of its materiality and use reveals it to have been a mostly useless book. The final chapter presents the short reign of Edward VI as a period of rapid transformation in Bible and worship, when some of the innovations introduced more than three hundred years earlier began, for the first time, to make sense.
Jay Satterfield
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496812308
- eISBN:
- 9781496812346
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496812308.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
The chapter discusses William Faulkner’s relationship to Random House from the merger of Smith & Haas with Random House in 1936 to just before he won the Nobel Prize. The first half of this period ...
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The chapter discusses William Faulkner’s relationship to Random House from the merger of Smith & Haas with Random House in 1936 to just before he won the Nobel Prize. The first half of this period was a prolific time in Faulkner’s career but the second half was a phase of low productivity and artistic struggle. When Faulkner came to Random House in 1936, he had the potential to bring new prestige to the relatively young Random House imprint. But the energetic young publishers he had joined had much to offer Faulkner as well. The chapter discusses the skillful and timely marketing strategies Random House employed to re-establish the “Faulkner” brand—a brand that would later help to cement Faulkner’s place in the American Literary canon.Less
The chapter discusses William Faulkner’s relationship to Random House from the merger of Smith & Haas with Random House in 1936 to just before he won the Nobel Prize. The first half of this period was a prolific time in Faulkner’s career but the second half was a phase of low productivity and artistic struggle. When Faulkner came to Random House in 1936, he had the potential to bring new prestige to the relatively young Random House imprint. But the energetic young publishers he had joined had much to offer Faulkner as well. The chapter discusses the skillful and timely marketing strategies Random House employed to re-establish the “Faulkner” brand—a brand that would later help to cement Faulkner’s place in the American Literary canon.
Clare Pettitt
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198830429
- eISBN:
- 9780191894688
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198830429.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
‘Scott Unbound’ shows how thinking about print in the 1820s and 1830s in a disaggregated, messy and material way, and seeing it as part of a new media world of performance, text, and image, can help ...
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‘Scott Unbound’ shows how thinking about print in the 1820s and 1830s in a disaggregated, messy and material way, and seeing it as part of a new media world of performance, text, and image, can help us to think differently about the immense cross-class popularity of Walter Scott’s work. Right from the start, Scott’s powerful Romantic presence as the literary author of books rested on ‘Scott’ as a multimedia phenomenon. Taking the nineteenth-century print serial seriously challenges assumptions about what a ‘book’ might be. By unbinding Scott’s work, this chapter disperses his texts and restores them to their original promiscuous sociability. The Romantic idea of the author is complicated through the remediations of the multi-genre productions of ‘The Magician of the North’ (a.k.a. Walter Scott), and the phenomenon of ‘Scott’ in the early nineteenth century is produced by the generative possibilities of the serial more than has been previously recognized.Less
‘Scott Unbound’ shows how thinking about print in the 1820s and 1830s in a disaggregated, messy and material way, and seeing it as part of a new media world of performance, text, and image, can help us to think differently about the immense cross-class popularity of Walter Scott’s work. Right from the start, Scott’s powerful Romantic presence as the literary author of books rested on ‘Scott’ as a multimedia phenomenon. Taking the nineteenth-century print serial seriously challenges assumptions about what a ‘book’ might be. By unbinding Scott’s work, this chapter disperses his texts and restores them to their original promiscuous sociability. The Romantic idea of the author is complicated through the remediations of the multi-genre productions of ‘The Magician of the North’ (a.k.a. Walter Scott), and the phenomenon of ‘Scott’ in the early nineteenth century is produced by the generative possibilities of the serial more than has been previously recognized.
Lise Jaillant
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474417242
- eISBN:
- 9781474434560
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474417242.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The introduction summarises recent scholarship on (1) literary modernism in the marketplace; (2) book history and print culture studies, including the study of publishers’ series. The guiding thread ...
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The introduction summarises recent scholarship on (1) literary modernism in the marketplace; (2) book history and print culture studies, including the study of publishers’ series. The guiding thread of the argument developed in the book is introduced here: that European publishers’ series made modernist texts available to a mainstream readership – including many non-English native speakers in Continental Europe and elsewhere.Less
The introduction summarises recent scholarship on (1) literary modernism in the marketplace; (2) book history and print culture studies, including the study of publishers’ series. The guiding thread of the argument developed in the book is introduced here: that European publishers’ series made modernist texts available to a mainstream readership – including many non-English native speakers in Continental Europe and elsewhere.
Peter J. Kalliney
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199977970
- eISBN:
- 9780199346189
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199977970.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral to the formation of both modernism and postcolonial writing. ...
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Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral to the formation of both modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s, such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers--including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o--actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antagonists. Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, TS Eliot's notion of impersonality could help to recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black, colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice endemic to the colonial system. This strategic collaboration did not last forever, but it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial literature.Less
Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral to the formation of both modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s, such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers--including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o--actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antagonists. Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, TS Eliot's notion of impersonality could help to recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black, colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice endemic to the colonial system. This strategic collaboration did not last forever, but it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial literature.
Lisa Brooks
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780300196733
- eISBN:
- 9780300231113
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300196733.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Native American Studies
This chapter recovers the history of the Harvard Indian College and highlights the multiple cultural, literary, and oral traditions that intersected in colonial Cambridge, Massachusetts. It includes ...
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This chapter recovers the history of the Harvard Indian College and highlights the multiple cultural, literary, and oral traditions that intersected in colonial Cambridge, Massachusetts. It includes analysis of the missionary schools in which Wawaus, or James Printer, a young Nipmuc scholar, and his Wampanoag, Patucket, and Nipmuc peers were trained alongside English students. Native scholars were trained in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew literatures and participated in the production of the first bilingual works of American literature, including the “John Eliot” bible, printed at the Harvard Indian College, where the first printing press in the colonies was housed. This chapter includes an extensive interpretation of the Latin address of Caleb Cheeshateaumuck, the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. The Harvard Indian College provides a necessary foundation for understanding the complex role of “praying Indians,” or members of Indigenous mission communities, as scribes and scouts during King Philip’s War. The chapter demonstrates that Indigenous scholars were not merely students who received, or were subjected to, colonial education but became significant contributors to a multilingual American literary tradition.Less
This chapter recovers the history of the Harvard Indian College and highlights the multiple cultural, literary, and oral traditions that intersected in colonial Cambridge, Massachusetts. It includes analysis of the missionary schools in which Wawaus, or James Printer, a young Nipmuc scholar, and his Wampanoag, Patucket, and Nipmuc peers were trained alongside English students. Native scholars were trained in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew literatures and participated in the production of the first bilingual works of American literature, including the “John Eliot” bible, printed at the Harvard Indian College, where the first printing press in the colonies was housed. This chapter includes an extensive interpretation of the Latin address of Caleb Cheeshateaumuck, the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. The Harvard Indian College provides a necessary foundation for understanding the complex role of “praying Indians,” or members of Indigenous mission communities, as scribes and scouts during King Philip’s War. The chapter demonstrates that Indigenous scholars were not merely students who received, or were subjected to, colonial education but became significant contributors to a multilingual American literary tradition.
Melissa Dickson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474443647
- eISBN:
- 9781474477055
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474443647.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter focuses on acts of reading, and on the nature and circumstances of childhood encounters with the Arabian Nights in Britain, both as a collection of narratives and as a series of objects ...
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This chapter focuses on acts of reading, and on the nature and circumstances of childhood encounters with the Arabian Nights in Britain, both as a collection of narratives and as a series of objects such as books, pictures, and toy theatres. Despite their association with the innocent joys of childhood throughout the nineteenth century, the tales of the Arabian Nights were neither written nor designed for children. It was their abiding attraction to children that led to their designation as children’s literature, and also to their continued use as metaphors for adult fantasies and constructions of childhood. As the time and space of childhood were increasingly associated with the time and space of these Oriental tales, the Arabian Nights came to operate not only as a souvenir of childhood, but as metonymic of childhood itself: exciting, unpredictable, and culturally and temporally other.Less
This chapter focuses on acts of reading, and on the nature and circumstances of childhood encounters with the Arabian Nights in Britain, both as a collection of narratives and as a series of objects such as books, pictures, and toy theatres. Despite their association with the innocent joys of childhood throughout the nineteenth century, the tales of the Arabian Nights were neither written nor designed for children. It was their abiding attraction to children that led to their designation as children’s literature, and also to their continued use as metaphors for adult fantasies and constructions of childhood. As the time and space of childhood were increasingly associated with the time and space of these Oriental tales, the Arabian Nights came to operate not only as a souvenir of childhood, but as metonymic of childhood itself: exciting, unpredictable, and culturally and temporally other.
Gail Low
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780199609932
- eISBN:
- 9780191869761
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199609932.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter discusses Book History. Drawing on the disciplinary fields of ‘analytical bibliography’ and influenced by work in Annales social history, Book History takes as its subject the cultural ...
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This chapter discusses Book History. Drawing on the disciplinary fields of ‘analytical bibliography’ and influenced by work in Annales social history, Book History takes as its subject the cultural history and the sociology of print, and also the impact of print on the ‘thought and behaviour of mankind’ from the Gutenberg press to the present day. As books make the complicated journey from the idea to print in all its variant forms, the connections between publishing, cultural, educational, and literary institutions—and the individuals involved in these—are crucial to understanding how they emerge in print, how they are used, how they circulate, and what they mean. The chapter thus addresses the following areas of importance to the social and material histories of the Anglophone novel to 1950: the ‘glocalized’ geographies of print and trade; newspapers and local literary cultures; colonial editions; libraries, readers and writers; trade and copyright legislation.Less
This chapter discusses Book History. Drawing on the disciplinary fields of ‘analytical bibliography’ and influenced by work in Annales social history, Book History takes as its subject the cultural history and the sociology of print, and also the impact of print on the ‘thought and behaviour of mankind’ from the Gutenberg press to the present day. As books make the complicated journey from the idea to print in all its variant forms, the connections between publishing, cultural, educational, and literary institutions—and the individuals involved in these—are crucial to understanding how they emerge in print, how they are used, how they circulate, and what they mean. The chapter thus addresses the following areas of importance to the social and material histories of the Anglophone novel to 1950: the ‘glocalized’ geographies of print and trade; newspapers and local literary cultures; colonial editions; libraries, readers and writers; trade and copyright legislation.
Lise Jaillant
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474417242
- eISBN:
- 9781474434560
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474417242.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Cheap Modernism is the first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon – in Britain, Continental ...
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Cheap Modernism is the first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon – in Britain, Continental Europe and elsewhere. Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are often presented as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers’ Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience – thus transforming a little-read “highbrow” movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from “high” to “low”) but also spatial – since publishers’ series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language – a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism sheds new light on the complex relationship between modernism and the marketplace.Less
Cheap Modernism is the first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon – in Britain, Continental Europe and elsewhere. Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are often presented as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers’ Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience – thus transforming a little-read “highbrow” movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from “high” to “low”) but also spatial – since publishers’ series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language – a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism sheds new light on the complex relationship between modernism and the marketplace.
Michelle Levy
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474457064
- eISBN:
- 9781474481205
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474457064.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
Although we have more literary manuscripts from the Romantic period than for any previous period, these manuscripts have been consulted chiefly for the textual evidence they provide. This book begins ...
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Although we have more literary manuscripts from the Romantic period than for any previous period, these manuscripts have been consulted chiefly for the textual evidence they provide. This book begins the work of unearthing the alternative histories manuscripts tell us about British Romantic literary culture: describing the practices by which they were written, shared, altered and preserved; exploring the functions they served as instruments of expression and sociability; and explicating the migration of texts between the copying technologies of script and print. Deploying a range of methodologies, including quantitative approaches, it considers both literary manuscripts of texts that went unprinted during the lifetimes of their creators as well as those that were printed, presenting a capacious account of how handwritten literary documents were shared, copied, read, and valued. It describes the material processes that brought these manuscripts to audiences small and large, and preserved them for future generations. This book situates manuscript practices within an expanding print marketplace, arguing that the realms of script and print interacted to nurture and transform the period’s literary culture. Providing a comprehensive analysis of the values ascribed to literary manuscripts and the practices involved in their creation and use, this study illuminates the complex entanglements between various media. It concludes with an examination of the ongoing transformations of Romantic literary manuscripts, by textual scholars and digital humanists.Less
Although we have more literary manuscripts from the Romantic period than for any previous period, these manuscripts have been consulted chiefly for the textual evidence they provide. This book begins the work of unearthing the alternative histories manuscripts tell us about British Romantic literary culture: describing the practices by which they were written, shared, altered and preserved; exploring the functions they served as instruments of expression and sociability; and explicating the migration of texts between the copying technologies of script and print. Deploying a range of methodologies, including quantitative approaches, it considers both literary manuscripts of texts that went unprinted during the lifetimes of their creators as well as those that were printed, presenting a capacious account of how handwritten literary documents were shared, copied, read, and valued. It describes the material processes that brought these manuscripts to audiences small and large, and preserved them for future generations. This book situates manuscript practices within an expanding print marketplace, arguing that the realms of script and print interacted to nurture and transform the period’s literary culture. Providing a comprehensive analysis of the values ascribed to literary manuscripts and the practices involved in their creation and use, this study illuminates the complex entanglements between various media. It concludes with an examination of the ongoing transformations of Romantic literary manuscripts, by textual scholars and digital humanists.
Peter J. Kalliney
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199977970
- eISBN:
- 9780199346189
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199977970.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
Chapter Six examines Heinemann Educational Book's African Writers Series, the preeminent literary institution of anglophone Africa. Critics have repeatedly asked whether the series is fundamentally ...
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Chapter Six examines Heinemann Educational Book's African Writers Series, the preeminent literary institution of anglophone Africa. Critics have repeatedly asked whether the series is fundamentally imperialist - because of its links to the metropolitan publishing industry - or anti-imperialist - because it gave voice to so many politically engaged writers. This chapter, by contrast, places the series in the context of global changes in English studies. In the US and in metropolitan Britain, the series seemed to be participating in the fragmentation of the discipline: the breakup of Leavis's Great Tradition and the incorporation of minority writers into the canon. In Africa, however, it is possible to read the series as a part of an expansion and consolidation of English language and literary studies. How the series managed this apparent contradiction is the main topic of the chapter.Less
Chapter Six examines Heinemann Educational Book's African Writers Series, the preeminent literary institution of anglophone Africa. Critics have repeatedly asked whether the series is fundamentally imperialist - because of its links to the metropolitan publishing industry - or anti-imperialist - because it gave voice to so many politically engaged writers. This chapter, by contrast, places the series in the context of global changes in English studies. In the US and in metropolitan Britain, the series seemed to be participating in the fragmentation of the discipline: the breakup of Leavis's Great Tradition and the incorporation of minority writers into the canon. In Africa, however, it is possible to read the series as a part of an expansion and consolidation of English language and literary studies. How the series managed this apparent contradiction is the main topic of the chapter.
Peter J. Kalliney
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199977970
- eISBN:
- 9780199346189
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199977970.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
Chapter Seven examines the evolution of Jean Rhys's long and unusual career. In the 1920s and 30s, Rhys was a typical member of the expatriate artist community of the Left Bank. In the 1940s and 50s, ...
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Chapter Seven examines the evolution of Jean Rhys's long and unusual career. In the 1920s and 30s, Rhys was a typical member of the expatriate artist community of the Left Bank. In the 1940s and 50s, however, she disappeared, staging an improbable comeback in the 1960s, culminating in the release of Wide Sargasso Sea and the republication of her earlier fiction. In those intervening years, however, a number of high-profile Caribbean writers had come to the attention of metropolitan critics and audiences. This chapter situates Rhys's changing depictions of racial difference in this long context, exploring the subtle continuities and equally subtle differences between her interwar fiction and her postcolonial writing.Less
Chapter Seven examines the evolution of Jean Rhys's long and unusual career. In the 1920s and 30s, Rhys was a typical member of the expatriate artist community of the Left Bank. In the 1940s and 50s, however, she disappeared, staging an improbable comeback in the 1960s, culminating in the release of Wide Sargasso Sea and the republication of her earlier fiction. In those intervening years, however, a number of high-profile Caribbean writers had come to the attention of metropolitan critics and audiences. This chapter situates Rhys's changing depictions of racial difference in this long context, exploring the subtle continuities and equally subtle differences between her interwar fiction and her postcolonial writing.
Eva Mroczek
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190279837
- eISBN:
- 9780190279851
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190279837.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Biblical Studies
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a world of early Jewish writing larger than the Bible: from multiple versions of biblical texts to “revealed” books not found in our canon. But despite ...
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The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a world of early Jewish writing larger than the Bible: from multiple versions of biblical texts to “revealed” books not found in our canon. But despite this diversity, the way we read Second Temple Jewish literature remains constrained by two anachronistic categories: a theological one, “Bible,” and a bibliographic one, “book.” The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity suggests ways of thinking about how Jews understood their own literature before these categories had emerged. Using familiar sources, such as the Psalms, Ben Sira, and Jubilees, it tells an unfamiliar story about sacred writing not bound in a Bible. In many texts, we see an awareness of a vast tradition of divine writing found in multiple locations, only partially revealed in available scribal collections. Ancient heroes like David are not simply imagined as scriptural authors, but are multidimensional characters who come to be known as great writers and honored as founders of growing textual traditions. Scribes recognize the divine origin of texts like the Enoch literature and other writings revealed to ancient patriarchs, which present themselves not as derivative of material we now call biblical, but prior to it. Sacred writing stretches back to the dawn of time, yet new discoveries are always around the corner. While listening to the way ancient writers describe their own literature—their own metaphors and narratives about writing—this book also argues for greater suppleness in our own scholarly imagination, no longer bound by modern canonical and bibliographic assumptions.Less
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a world of early Jewish writing larger than the Bible: from multiple versions of biblical texts to “revealed” books not found in our canon. But despite this diversity, the way we read Second Temple Jewish literature remains constrained by two anachronistic categories: a theological one, “Bible,” and a bibliographic one, “book.” The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity suggests ways of thinking about how Jews understood their own literature before these categories had emerged. Using familiar sources, such as the Psalms, Ben Sira, and Jubilees, it tells an unfamiliar story about sacred writing not bound in a Bible. In many texts, we see an awareness of a vast tradition of divine writing found in multiple locations, only partially revealed in available scribal collections. Ancient heroes like David are not simply imagined as scriptural authors, but are multidimensional characters who come to be known as great writers and honored as founders of growing textual traditions. Scribes recognize the divine origin of texts like the Enoch literature and other writings revealed to ancient patriarchs, which present themselves not as derivative of material we now call biblical, but prior to it. Sacred writing stretches back to the dawn of time, yet new discoveries are always around the corner. While listening to the way ancient writers describe their own literature—their own metaphors and narratives about writing—this book also argues for greater suppleness in our own scholarly imagination, no longer bound by modern canonical and bibliographic assumptions.
Peter J. Kalliney
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199977970
- eISBN:
- 9780199346189
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199977970.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
Chapter Five assesses the impact of development discourse on the literary institutions of the period. At midcentury, the idea of economic development was crucial for managing the transition from ...
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Chapter Five assesses the impact of development discourse on the literary institutions of the period. At midcentury, the idea of economic development was crucial for managing the transition from imperial governance to national autonomy, especially in Africa. A case study of Amos Tutuola and his experience at Faber and Faber illustrates that metropolitan publishers began the 1950s with high hopes for cultivating African talent and audiences along high modernist lines, only to be disappointed by the fact that colonial intellectuals had a different understanding of what development could accomplish. This treatment goes on to examine how the discourse of development frames Tutuola's first two novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which the chapter reads as implicit criticisms of late colonial development models.Less
Chapter Five assesses the impact of development discourse on the literary institutions of the period. At midcentury, the idea of economic development was crucial for managing the transition from imperial governance to national autonomy, especially in Africa. A case study of Amos Tutuola and his experience at Faber and Faber illustrates that metropolitan publishers began the 1950s with high hopes for cultivating African talent and audiences along high modernist lines, only to be disappointed by the fact that colonial intellectuals had a different understanding of what development could accomplish. This treatment goes on to examine how the discourse of development frames Tutuola's first two novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which the chapter reads as implicit criticisms of late colonial development models.