ROBERT D. HUME
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198186328
- eISBN:
- 9780191674518
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186328.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The primary object of Archaeo–Historicism is to reconstruct historical texts. The aim here is to analyse the methodological problems that underlie any attempt to recreate the context that might be ...
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The primary object of Archaeo–Historicism is to reconstruct historical texts. The aim here is to analyse the methodological problems that underlie any attempt to recreate the context that might be used for the explanation of ‘old’ works. This chapter considers the relationship of Archaeo–Historicism to other notions of historicism, the justifications for practising Archaeo–Historicism, the reasons for constructing such contexts, the possibilities and limitations laid down by Jauss, and the kinds of scholarship that form Archaeo–Historicism. It also claims that Archaeo–Historicism is based on the premise that any conclusion is subject to factual and logical challenge.Less
The primary object of Archaeo–Historicism is to reconstruct historical texts. The aim here is to analyse the methodological problems that underlie any attempt to recreate the context that might be used for the explanation of ‘old’ works. This chapter considers the relationship of Archaeo–Historicism to other notions of historicism, the justifications for practising Archaeo–Historicism, the reasons for constructing such contexts, the possibilities and limitations laid down by Jauss, and the kinds of scholarship that form Archaeo–Historicism. It also claims that Archaeo–Historicism is based on the premise that any conclusion is subject to factual and logical challenge.
Robert S. Lehman
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780804799041
- eISBN:
- 9781503600140
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804799041.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Impossible Modernism reveals in the modernism of T.S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin a shared project: both authors sought to resist the forms of narrating events that had been codified by academic ...
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Impossible Modernism reveals in the modernism of T.S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin a shared project: both authors sought to resist the forms of narrating events that had been codified by academic historians during the nineteenth century; and both sought to re-envision the possibilities of historical representation by turning to specifically literary devices. Tracing the fraught relationship between poetry and history back to Aristotle’s Poetics and forward to Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, the book begins by establishing the coordinates of the intellectual-historical problem that Eliot and Benjamin would inherit. Turning to Eliot and Benjamin, it discovers in their major works—Eliot’s poetic experiments from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to The Waste Land, and Benjamin’s critical writings from “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” to The Arcades Project—alternative models for imagining the shape of historical time and the possibility of historical change, models derived from literary forms such as lyric, satire, anecdote, allegory, and myth. The book thus cuts across debates over the autonomy of the aesthetic, the political investment of modernism, and the relative merits of formalist or historicist reading practices so as to develop an original understanding of the familiar incitement to “make it new.”Less
Impossible Modernism reveals in the modernism of T.S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin a shared project: both authors sought to resist the forms of narrating events that had been codified by academic historians during the nineteenth century; and both sought to re-envision the possibilities of historical representation by turning to specifically literary devices. Tracing the fraught relationship between poetry and history back to Aristotle’s Poetics and forward to Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, the book begins by establishing the coordinates of the intellectual-historical problem that Eliot and Benjamin would inherit. Turning to Eliot and Benjamin, it discovers in their major works—Eliot’s poetic experiments from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to The Waste Land, and Benjamin’s critical writings from “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” to The Arcades Project—alternative models for imagining the shape of historical time and the possibility of historical change, models derived from literary forms such as lyric, satire, anecdote, allegory, and myth. The book thus cuts across debates over the autonomy of the aesthetic, the political investment of modernism, and the relative merits of formalist or historicist reading practices so as to develop an original understanding of the familiar incitement to “make it new.”
Jurgen Pieters
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748615889
- eISBN:
- 9780748652020
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748615889.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book deals with the special power of literary texts to put us in contact with the past. A large number of authors, coming from different ages, have described this power in terms of ‘the ...
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This book deals with the special power of literary texts to put us in contact with the past. A large number of authors, coming from different ages, have described this power in terms of ‘the conversation with the dead’: when these texts are read, we somehow find ourselves conducting a special kind of dialogue with dead authors. The book covers a number of texts and authors that make use of this metaphor: Petrarch, Machiavelli, Sidney, Flaubert, Michelet, Barthes. In connecting these texts and authors in novel ways, it tackles the all-important question of why we remain fascinated with literature in general and with the specific texts that to us are still its backbone. Situated in the aftermath of New Historicism, the book challenges the idea that literary history as a reading practice stems from a desire to ‘speak with the dead’, and offers a broad survey of classical literature, Renaissance literature, and modern theory and history. The author issues a plea for the importance of reading literary texts and the power of literature, and discusses key figures from the Western canon, such as Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Machiavelli. The book combines theoretical discussions of the relationship between literature and history with close reading of works by major literary authors and historians.Less
This book deals with the special power of literary texts to put us in contact with the past. A large number of authors, coming from different ages, have described this power in terms of ‘the conversation with the dead’: when these texts are read, we somehow find ourselves conducting a special kind of dialogue with dead authors. The book covers a number of texts and authors that make use of this metaphor: Petrarch, Machiavelli, Sidney, Flaubert, Michelet, Barthes. In connecting these texts and authors in novel ways, it tackles the all-important question of why we remain fascinated with literature in general and with the specific texts that to us are still its backbone. Situated in the aftermath of New Historicism, the book challenges the idea that literary history as a reading practice stems from a desire to ‘speak with the dead’, and offers a broad survey of classical literature, Renaissance literature, and modern theory and history. The author issues a plea for the importance of reading literary texts and the power of literature, and discusses key figures from the Western canon, such as Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Machiavelli. The book combines theoretical discussions of the relationship between literature and history with close reading of works by major literary authors and historians.
Alexander Etkind
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691153599
- eISBN:
- 9781400845248
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691153599.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
This chapter examines the representation of Soviet terror in post-Soviet culture. It proposes a new concept, that of memory-dread, to analyze how Russians perceive the Soviet terror. It interprets ...
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This chapter examines the representation of Soviet terror in post-Soviet culture. It proposes a new concept, that of memory-dread, to analyze how Russians perceive the Soviet terror. It interprets the fearful visions of post-Soviet writers, fimmakers, and intellectuals as a territory of memory-dread, a space of the undead. Recognizing ghosts, spirits, vampires, dolls, and other man-made and man-imagined simulacra that carry the memory of the unburied Soviet dead, the chapter develops a theory of cultural memory as consisting of three elements that are intimately connected: monuments (hardware), texts (software), and specters (ghostware). It also discusses three stages in the Russian memory of the so-called “unjustified repressions”: denial, repression, and interpretation. Finally, it considers the carnivalesque dynamics of the post-catastrophic melancholia, along with Magical Historicism in the post-Soviet novel.Less
This chapter examines the representation of Soviet terror in post-Soviet culture. It proposes a new concept, that of memory-dread, to analyze how Russians perceive the Soviet terror. It interprets the fearful visions of post-Soviet writers, fimmakers, and intellectuals as a territory of memory-dread, a space of the undead. Recognizing ghosts, spirits, vampires, dolls, and other man-made and man-imagined simulacra that carry the memory of the unburied Soviet dead, the chapter develops a theory of cultural memory as consisting of three elements that are intimately connected: monuments (hardware), texts (software), and specters (ghostware). It also discusses three stages in the Russian memory of the so-called “unjustified repressions”: denial, repression, and interpretation. Finally, it considers the carnivalesque dynamics of the post-catastrophic melancholia, along with Magical Historicism in the post-Soviet novel.
J. Samaine Lockwood
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469625362
- eISBN:
- 9781469625386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469625362.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
This epilogue presents a series of recognitions regarding how the intimate historicism practiced by the New England regionalists—their sensual history making endeavors—resonate with the historicism ...
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This epilogue presents a series of recognitions regarding how the intimate historicism practiced by the New England regionalists—their sensual history making endeavors—resonate with the historicism pursued by the generation of feminist literary scholars who brought women writers into full intellectual view. Thus, this epilogue beings rethinking the feminist era of US women's intellectual history and outlines the ways in which forms of historicism are central to queer and feminist practices.Less
This epilogue presents a series of recognitions regarding how the intimate historicism practiced by the New England regionalists—their sensual history making endeavors—resonate with the historicism pursued by the generation of feminist literary scholars who brought women writers into full intellectual view. Thus, this epilogue beings rethinking the feminist era of US women's intellectual history and outlines the ways in which forms of historicism are central to queer and feminist practices.
Eric Hayot
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195377965
- eISBN:
- 9780199869435
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195377965.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History, Asian History
This chapter presents a lengthy reading of an account of the torture of a Chinese goldsmith recorded in Edmund Scott's 1606 Exact Discourse of the Subtilties… of the East Indians, and Stephen ...
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This chapter presents a lengthy reading of an account of the torture of a Chinese goldsmith recorded in Edmund Scott's 1606 Exact Discourse of the Subtilties… of the East Indians, and Stephen Greenblatt's reproduction of that account in the introduction to his 1990 collection, Learning to Curse. By moving back and forth between Scott's original account of the torture and Greenblatt's reading of it, the chapter extends Greenblatt's theorization of the anecdote as the emblem of new historicist literary work beyond the limits he himself finds there. A comparison of the edited version of the text Greenblatt cites and the original manuscript allows the chapter to make the case for an anecdotal theory whose treatment of what Greenblatt calls “real bodies” and “real people” nonetheless retains a strong connection to the literary.Less
This chapter presents a lengthy reading of an account of the torture of a Chinese goldsmith recorded in Edmund Scott's 1606 Exact Discourse of the Subtilties… of the East Indians, and Stephen Greenblatt's reproduction of that account in the introduction to his 1990 collection, Learning to Curse. By moving back and forth between Scott's original account of the torture and Greenblatt's reading of it, the chapter extends Greenblatt's theorization of the anecdote as the emblem of new historicist literary work beyond the limits he himself finds there. A comparison of the edited version of the text Greenblatt cites and the original manuscript allows the chapter to make the case for an anecdotal theory whose treatment of what Greenblatt calls “real bodies” and “real people” nonetheless retains a strong connection to the literary.
Randall Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195313925
- eISBN:
- 9780199787753
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313925.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the construction of Emerson by Sacvan Bercovitch and the New Americanists. Focusing on the so-called subversion-containment model of the New Historicism, it reveals how ...
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This chapter examines the construction of Emerson by Sacvan Bercovitch and the New Americanists. Focusing on the so-called subversion-containment model of the New Historicism, it reveals how Bercovitch's application of this model to Emerson grew out of his own unusual circumstances as a Canadian Jew who own gradually migrated to American Studies.Less
This chapter examines the construction of Emerson by Sacvan Bercovitch and the New Americanists. Focusing on the so-called subversion-containment model of the New Historicism, it reveals how Bercovitch's application of this model to Emerson grew out of his own unusual circumstances as a Canadian Jew who own gradually migrated to American Studies.
PARK HONAN
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182894
- eISBN:
- 9780191673917
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182894.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter considers the concepts of New Criticism and the New Historicism by looking a novelist, a poet, and a playwright in the light of a few of the ideas of deconstruction. The chapter tries to ...
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This chapter considers the concepts of New Criticism and the New Historicism by looking a novelist, a poet, and a playwright in the light of a few of the ideas of deconstruction. The chapter tries to see Jane Austen, Matthew Arnold, and Shakespeare in a biographical light. It is stated that the New Critical paradigm is workable but may be less useful if there are insufficient author's letters. There is still a need to ‘take in’ author and opus.Less
This chapter considers the concepts of New Criticism and the New Historicism by looking a novelist, a poet, and a playwright in the light of a few of the ideas of deconstruction. The chapter tries to see Jane Austen, Matthew Arnold, and Shakespeare in a biographical light. It is stated that the New Critical paradigm is workable but may be less useful if there are insufficient author's letters. There is still a need to ‘take in’ author and opus.
SWAPAN CHAKRAVORTY
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182665
- eISBN:
- 9780191673856
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182665.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Surmounting over three centuries of neglect, Middleton is more our contemporary today than any other Jacobean playwright. This book studies society and ...
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Surmounting over three centuries of neglect, Middleton is more our contemporary today than any other Jacobean playwright. This book studies society and politics in Middleton’s plays in an attempt to historicize the texts as a condition for understanding the source of their undiminished vitality. It shares with New Historicism the desire for basing interpretation on a dialogical understanding of history, for reading changing event into the text’s changeless structure. It focuses on the context and career of a playwright whose response to the events, images, and professional demands of his time generated disturbing insights into the structures of social and political authority. Middleton’s ambivalent relation to political authority was mistaken in the past for cynical opportunism; his ability to bring into simultaneous view the shifts of history and art, for bland dispassion. It is easier for our times to recognize in these traits a great precursor of politically self-conscious theatre.Less
Surmounting over three centuries of neglect, Middleton is more our contemporary today than any other Jacobean playwright. This book studies society and politics in Middleton’s plays in an attempt to historicize the texts as a condition for understanding the source of their undiminished vitality. It shares with New Historicism the desire for basing interpretation on a dialogical understanding of history, for reading changing event into the text’s changeless structure. It focuses on the context and career of a playwright whose response to the events, images, and professional demands of his time generated disturbing insights into the structures of social and political authority. Middleton’s ambivalent relation to political authority was mistaken in the past for cynical opportunism; his ability to bring into simultaneous view the shifts of history and art, for bland dispassion. It is easier for our times to recognize in these traits a great precursor of politically self-conscious theatre.
A. D. Nuttall
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184621
- eISBN:
- 9780191674327
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184621.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, Drama
This chapter looks at a strange tragedy by the Elizabethan Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe's Dr Faustus — the story of the magician who sold his soul to the Devil for knowledge and power — looks at ...
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This chapter looks at a strange tragedy by the Elizabethan Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe's Dr Faustus — the story of the magician who sold his soul to the Devil for knowledge and power — looks at first sight like the text for the Old Historicist. Much of the drama of the period is nervous about theology, too conscious of its own secular frivolity to engage with the deepest elements in the Christian world-view; but Marlowe's play is frankly — thunderously — theological. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a clearer case of a theocratic drama than this, in which the hero is taught the folly and wickedness of his presumption by being cast at the end into the fire of hell. Gnosticism and its connection with Marlowe's play are also discussed.Less
This chapter looks at a strange tragedy by the Elizabethan Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe's Dr Faustus — the story of the magician who sold his soul to the Devil for knowledge and power — looks at first sight like the text for the Old Historicist. Much of the drama of the period is nervous about theology, too conscious of its own secular frivolity to engage with the deepest elements in the Christian world-view; but Marlowe's play is frankly — thunderously — theological. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a clearer case of a theocratic drama than this, in which the hero is taught the folly and wickedness of his presumption by being cast at the end into the fire of hell. Gnosticism and its connection with Marlowe's play are also discussed.
ROBERT D. HUME
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198186328
- eISBN:
- 9780191674518
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186328.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter aims to broaden the perspective and inquire into the relationship between historical scholarship and other methods. The first section differentiates method from theory. Method dictates ...
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This chapter aims to broaden the perspective and inquire into the relationship between historical scholarship and other methods. The first section differentiates method from theory. Method dictates the plan or system of inquiry while theories of various sorts represent potential solutions. The second section distinguishes between inquiry and a priori analysis. The third section looks at syncretism — attempted reconciliation or union of different principles, practices, or parties — and borrowing. The fourth section examines five kinds of reading: textual, deconstructive, historicist, applicative, and a priori. The last section considers Archaeo–Historicism as a method.Less
This chapter aims to broaden the perspective and inquire into the relationship between historical scholarship and other methods. The first section differentiates method from theory. Method dictates the plan or system of inquiry while theories of various sorts represent potential solutions. The second section distinguishes between inquiry and a priori analysis. The third section looks at syncretism — attempted reconciliation or union of different principles, practices, or parties — and borrowing. The fourth section examines five kinds of reading: textual, deconstructive, historicist, applicative, and a priori. The last section considers Archaeo–Historicism as a method.
John Lee
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198185048
- eISBN:
- 9780191674433
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198185048.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
‘Who's there?’ is central to New Historicists' self-definition; who they say they are, what they say they are about, and how they say they are going to carry that out. The question should provide the ...
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‘Who's there?’ is central to New Historicists' self-definition; who they say they are, what they say they are about, and how they say they are going to carry that out. The question should provide the focus of their critical drama — a ‘whodunit’ with a novel twist, if the notices are to be believed, in which the villain is not the butler but nobody. This chapter turns to that critical drama, mindful that notices, particularly those written by the performing company, are not always accurate.Less
‘Who's there?’ is central to New Historicists' self-definition; who they say they are, what they say they are about, and how they say they are going to carry that out. The question should provide the focus of their critical drama — a ‘whodunit’ with a novel twist, if the notices are to be believed, in which the villain is not the butler but nobody. This chapter turns to that critical drama, mindful that notices, particularly those written by the performing company, are not always accurate.
John Lee
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198185048
- eISBN:
- 9780191674433
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198185048.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
New Historicists, given their self-definitions and critical practice, were seen to have many reasons to focus on Hamlet as a key text to substantiate their arguments regarding notions of ...
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New Historicists, given their self-definitions and critical practice, were seen to have many reasons to focus on Hamlet as a key text to substantiate their arguments regarding notions of subjectivity. Yet Hamlet was an absent presence, often sensed but rarely seen; the play was described as the ghost that walked across the New Historicist stage, representing as it did both an unacknowledged past and a critical task that remained deferred in the present. Cultural Materialists, by contrast, recognize that, given their concerns over subjectivity, it is Hamlet that ‘would be spoke to’. What is more, Cultural Materialists question this play directly and repeatedly; Hamlet becomes what it always promised to be within New Historicism — a central text. Explaining the presence of Hamlet at the centre of Cultural Materialist criticism is a particularly profitable way of distinguishing that critical movement from New Historicism — at least in respect of those movements' discussions of the issue of subjectivity. In examining this presence, this chapter focuses predominantly on areas which distinguish the two movements. This might give the impression that there are simple, clear-cut divisions between the two critical movements, but this is not so. They are deeply interrelated, though often antagonistic to each other — kin though less than kind.Less
New Historicists, given their self-definitions and critical practice, were seen to have many reasons to focus on Hamlet as a key text to substantiate their arguments regarding notions of subjectivity. Yet Hamlet was an absent presence, often sensed but rarely seen; the play was described as the ghost that walked across the New Historicist stage, representing as it did both an unacknowledged past and a critical task that remained deferred in the present. Cultural Materialists, by contrast, recognize that, given their concerns over subjectivity, it is Hamlet that ‘would be spoke to’. What is more, Cultural Materialists question this play directly and repeatedly; Hamlet becomes what it always promised to be within New Historicism — a central text. Explaining the presence of Hamlet at the centre of Cultural Materialist criticism is a particularly profitable way of distinguishing that critical movement from New Historicism — at least in respect of those movements' discussions of the issue of subjectivity. In examining this presence, this chapter focuses predominantly on areas which distinguish the two movements. This might give the impression that there are simple, clear-cut divisions between the two critical movements, but this is not so. They are deeply interrelated, though often antagonistic to each other — kin though less than kind.
John Lee
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198185048
- eISBN:
- 9780191674433
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198185048.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
The debate within Hamlet, involving as it does the presentation of competing conceptions of the nature of subjectivity, parallels at many points the controversies of self. One might say that the ...
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The debate within Hamlet, involving as it does the presentation of competing conceptions of the nature of subjectivity, parallels at many points the controversies of self. One might say that the controversies of self are internal to Hamlet. Yet this debate over the nature of subjectivity is given no role within either New Historicist or Cultural Materialist discussions of the nature of English Renaissance subjectivity. The result of (or perhaps the reason for) this omission is to see Hamlet, as well as other plays, as static, unthinking objects that must demonstrate a certain, set, and single view of subjectivity. Under such a view, the play is rendered subject, its voices silent under the discourse of the critic. However, the play is in this respect, as in others, a voluble argument, an argument held both within itself and with its culture. It is this argument that generates the dynamic contingency between the play and its culture, a contingency which New Historicists and Cultural Materialists claim to value highly. It is also this argument which ensures that the play eludes causal historical explanation, another linchpin of New Historicists' and Cultural Materialists' stated approaches. The play of this book (in three acts, not five) draws to a close by listening to this argument in another way. As is fitting, perhaps, the protagonist is called forward to deliver a brief epilogue. However, as he does so, that protagonist is seen to be double; for when Prince Hamlet steps forward, it becomes clear that there is not one Prince Hamlet, but two. There are two Princes Hamlet because the verbal variants between the Q2 and Folio texts of Hamlet create two versions of the Prince, each with a different sense of self. This chapter argues that not only Hamlet but also Shakespeare can be seen debating the controversies of self. Shakespeare can be seen, in the Quarto-Folio variants, creating different senses of self for his Princes Hamlet.Less
The debate within Hamlet, involving as it does the presentation of competing conceptions of the nature of subjectivity, parallels at many points the controversies of self. One might say that the controversies of self are internal to Hamlet. Yet this debate over the nature of subjectivity is given no role within either New Historicist or Cultural Materialist discussions of the nature of English Renaissance subjectivity. The result of (or perhaps the reason for) this omission is to see Hamlet, as well as other plays, as static, unthinking objects that must demonstrate a certain, set, and single view of subjectivity. Under such a view, the play is rendered subject, its voices silent under the discourse of the critic. However, the play is in this respect, as in others, a voluble argument, an argument held both within itself and with its culture. It is this argument that generates the dynamic contingency between the play and its culture, a contingency which New Historicists and Cultural Materialists claim to value highly. It is also this argument which ensures that the play eludes causal historical explanation, another linchpin of New Historicists' and Cultural Materialists' stated approaches. The play of this book (in three acts, not five) draws to a close by listening to this argument in another way. As is fitting, perhaps, the protagonist is called forward to deliver a brief epilogue. However, as he does so, that protagonist is seen to be double; for when Prince Hamlet steps forward, it becomes clear that there is not one Prince Hamlet, but two. There are two Princes Hamlet because the verbal variants between the Q2 and Folio texts of Hamlet create two versions of the Prince, each with a different sense of self. This chapter argues that not only Hamlet but also Shakespeare can be seen debating the controversies of self. Shakespeare can be seen, in the Quarto-Folio variants, creating different senses of self for his Princes Hamlet.
Lauren Shohet
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199295890
- eISBN:
- 9780191594311
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199295890.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter shows that mid‐ and late‐ seventeenth‐century booksellers' catalogues designate public theatrical masques, Interregnum closet pieces, and Restoration operas as “masques.” Masques were ...
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This chapter shows that mid‐ and late‐ seventeenth‐century booksellers' catalogues designate public theatrical masques, Interregnum closet pieces, and Restoration operas as “masques.” Masques were more than nonce works, instead retaining commercial appeal long past their performance dates. This chapter cross‐reads masques from different venues, contained within plays, intertextually mentioned in pageants, parodied in ballads, and recorded in gossip. Masques' habitual intertextual allusiveness contributes to the genre's self‐conscious explorations of how drama constitutes authority, their canniness contradicting New Historicist symptomatic readings. Case studies include two intertextually related masques of 1617–18 (White's Cupid's Banishment, produced by a London girls' school, and Jonson's courtly Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue); a cluster of 1630s masques of temperance (Milton's Ludlow masque Comus, Davenant's courtly Luminalia, Thomas Nabbes's public theatrical masque Microcosmus, Thomas Heywood's Lord Mayor's show Porta Pietatis); and Shirley's spectacular 1634 Triumph of Peace.Less
This chapter shows that mid‐ and late‐ seventeenth‐century booksellers' catalogues designate public theatrical masques, Interregnum closet pieces, and Restoration operas as “masques.” Masques were more than nonce works, instead retaining commercial appeal long past their performance dates. This chapter cross‐reads masques from different venues, contained within plays, intertextually mentioned in pageants, parodied in ballads, and recorded in gossip. Masques' habitual intertextual allusiveness contributes to the genre's self‐conscious explorations of how drama constitutes authority, their canniness contradicting New Historicist symptomatic readings. Case studies include two intertextually related masques of 1617–18 (White's Cupid's Banishment, produced by a London girls' school, and Jonson's courtly Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue); a cluster of 1630s masques of temperance (Milton's Ludlow masque Comus, Davenant's courtly Luminalia, Thomas Nabbes's public theatrical masque Microcosmus, Thomas Heywood's Lord Mayor's show Porta Pietatis); and Shirley's spectacular 1634 Triumph of Peace.
Sara Brandellero
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199589524
- eISBN:
- 9780191595462
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199589524.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter studies João Cabral's collection Crime na Calle Relator (1987), giving particular attention to the poet's treatment of crime narratives and his use of anecdotal material. It gives ...
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This chapter studies João Cabral's collection Crime na Calle Relator (1987), giving particular attention to the poet's treatment of crime narratives and his use of anecdotal material. It gives particular consideration to how the collection deals with questions of culpability through a consistent disruption of rigid categorizations, particularly significant in the light of the political climate of post-dictatorial Brazil in which Cabral was writing. Borrowing critical approaches proposed by New Historicism theory, the chapter goes on to discuss Cabral's incursions into Brazilian history and the manner in which, through anecdotal narratives, official historical accounts are debunked, reflecting the poet's unwavering postcolonial perspective.Less
This chapter studies João Cabral's collection Crime na Calle Relator (1987), giving particular attention to the poet's treatment of crime narratives and his use of anecdotal material. It gives particular consideration to how the collection deals with questions of culpability through a consistent disruption of rigid categorizations, particularly significant in the light of the political climate of post-dictatorial Brazil in which Cabral was writing. Borrowing critical approaches proposed by New Historicism theory, the chapter goes on to discuss Cabral's incursions into Brazilian history and the manner in which, through anecdotal narratives, official historical accounts are debunked, reflecting the poet's unwavering postcolonial perspective.
Robert S. Lehman
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780804799041
- eISBN:
- 9781503600140
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804799041.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Impossible Modernism concludes with a short discussion of two figures: the flash of lightning that cuts across the desert scene in the last section of The Waste Land and the “storm of progress” that ...
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Impossible Modernism concludes with a short discussion of two figures: the flash of lightning that cuts across the desert scene in the last section of The Waste Land and the “storm of progress” that blows through the ninth thesis “On the Concept of History.” These images, it is maintained, in their attempt to present together tradition, on the one hand, and event, on the other, bring to the fore modernism’s paradoxical historical imagination, and the relevance of this imagination to our contemporary aesthetic and political concerns.Less
Impossible Modernism concludes with a short discussion of two figures: the flash of lightning that cuts across the desert scene in the last section of The Waste Land and the “storm of progress” that blows through the ninth thesis “On the Concept of History.” These images, it is maintained, in their attempt to present together tradition, on the one hand, and event, on the other, bring to the fore modernism’s paradoxical historical imagination, and the relevance of this imagination to our contemporary aesthetic and political concerns.
Damian Walford Davies (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781784991418
- eISBN:
- 9781526150370
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526107077
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Introducing contingency and that which did not happen as necessary and revealing conditions both of Romanticism itself and of our critical relationship with it, Counterfactual Romanticism explores ...
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Introducing contingency and that which did not happen as necessary and revealing conditions both of Romanticism itself and of our critical relationship with it, Counterfactual Romanticism explores the affordances of counterfactualism as a heuristic and as an imaginative tool. Innovatively extending counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography and literary criticism and theory, the volume reveals the ways in which the shapes of Romanticism are conditioned by that which did not come to pass. Exploring – and creatively performing – various modalities of counterfactual speculation and inquiry across a range of Romantic-period authors, genres and concerns, and identifying the Romantic credentials of counterfactual thought, the introduction and eleven chapters in this collection offer a radical new purchase on literary history, on the relationship between history and fiction, on our historicist methods to date – and thus on the Romanticisms we (think we) have inherited. Counterfactual Romanticism provides a ground-breaking method of re-reading literary pasts and our own reading presents; in the process, literary production, texts and reading practices are unfossilised and defamiliarised. To emancipate the counterfactual imagination and embrace the counterfactual turn and its provocations is to reveal the literary multiverse and quantum field within which our far-from-inevitable literary inheritance is located.Less
Introducing contingency and that which did not happen as necessary and revealing conditions both of Romanticism itself and of our critical relationship with it, Counterfactual Romanticism explores the affordances of counterfactualism as a heuristic and as an imaginative tool. Innovatively extending counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography and literary criticism and theory, the volume reveals the ways in which the shapes of Romanticism are conditioned by that which did not come to pass. Exploring – and creatively performing – various modalities of counterfactual speculation and inquiry across a range of Romantic-period authors, genres and concerns, and identifying the Romantic credentials of counterfactual thought, the introduction and eleven chapters in this collection offer a radical new purchase on literary history, on the relationship between history and fiction, on our historicist methods to date – and thus on the Romanticisms we (think we) have inherited. Counterfactual Romanticism provides a ground-breaking method of re-reading literary pasts and our own reading presents; in the process, literary production, texts and reading practices are unfossilised and defamiliarised. To emancipate the counterfactual imagination and embrace the counterfactual turn and its provocations is to reveal the literary multiverse and quantum field within which our far-from-inevitable literary inheritance is located.
Micah L. Auerback
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226286389
- eISBN:
- 9780226286419
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226286419.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Buddhism
This book offers a diachronic analysis of narratives recounting the life of the Buddha and their transformations—typically in written texts, but including material culture and ritual practice. It ...
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This book offers a diachronic analysis of narratives recounting the life of the Buddha and their transformations—typically in written texts, but including material culture and ritual practice. It traces accounts of the Buddha from ancient Japan through the medieval and early modern eras, into the early 1910s. After a millennium of hagiography written in alignment with canonical accounts, stories of the life of the Buddha left the control of Buddhist organizations and entered the realm of commercial production. This shift produced a “vernacular Buddha” popular in the literary imagination of the early modern period, but unevenly responsive to the canon. Text-critical scholarship about the life of the Buddha emerged in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The book concludes by illuminating the activities of elite modern makers of culture—both lay intellectuals and lay artists—who embraced aspects of historicism to recast the Buddha as a human being and historical figure. These men inducted the Buddha into the distinctly modern, universal cult of great men of the past. This book thus argues that for Japan’s Buddhist heritage, modernity meant not only “secularization,” but also new acts of narrative apotheosisLess
This book offers a diachronic analysis of narratives recounting the life of the Buddha and their transformations—typically in written texts, but including material culture and ritual practice. It traces accounts of the Buddha from ancient Japan through the medieval and early modern eras, into the early 1910s. After a millennium of hagiography written in alignment with canonical accounts, stories of the life of the Buddha left the control of Buddhist organizations and entered the realm of commercial production. This shift produced a “vernacular Buddha” popular in the literary imagination of the early modern period, but unevenly responsive to the canon. Text-critical scholarship about the life of the Buddha emerged in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The book concludes by illuminating the activities of elite modern makers of culture—both lay intellectuals and lay artists—who embraced aspects of historicism to recast the Buddha as a human being and historical figure. These men inducted the Buddha into the distinctly modern, universal cult of great men of the past. This book thus argues that for Japan’s Buddhist heritage, modernity meant not only “secularization,” but also new acts of narrative apotheosis
Alexander Gelley
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823262564
- eISBN:
- 9780823266562
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823262564.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a “macroscosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, ...
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In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a “macroscosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides.” This book examines the figurative status of sleeping and awakening within the allegorical structure of The Arcades Project and in Benjamin’s thought more broadly. For Benjamin, memory is not antiquarian: it functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. The motif of awakening involves a qualified but crucial performative intention that was central to Benjamin’s undertaking. Benjamin’s passages are not just the Paris arcades: they refer also to Benjamin’s effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his writings. In tracing these corridors of thought, the book treats many of Benjamin’s most important works and examines important critical questions: the interplay of aesthetics and politics, the genre of The Arcades Project, citation, language, messianism, aura and image, and the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening.Less
In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a “macroscosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides.” This book examines the figurative status of sleeping and awakening within the allegorical structure of The Arcades Project and in Benjamin’s thought more broadly. For Benjamin, memory is not antiquarian: it functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. The motif of awakening involves a qualified but crucial performative intention that was central to Benjamin’s undertaking. Benjamin’s passages are not just the Paris arcades: they refer also to Benjamin’s effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his writings. In tracing these corridors of thought, the book treats many of Benjamin’s most important works and examines important critical questions: the interplay of aesthetics and politics, the genre of The Arcades Project, citation, language, messianism, aura and image, and the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening.
