Karin L. Hooks
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813056043
- eISBN:
- 9780813053813
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056043.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary ...
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Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary histories. Twentieth-century constructs of the field overlook an awareness that late-nineteenth century female literary historians envisioned in terms of a more inclusive and democratic American literary canon. Recovering a literary history largely erased by the turn into the twentieth century through a case study of Sarah Piatt’s career, this chapter focuses on two female literary historians of the 1890s: Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Gilder, whose literary anthologies include Piatt’s writing, unlike those of the following century. Hutchinson, who (with Edmund Clarence Stedman) edited a sizeable collection of American texts, the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, and Jeanette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic, who hosted a popular election to identify the top 125 American women writers of 1890, made arguments for the inclusion of Piatt in the canon that are worth revisiting in light of turn-of-the-century mechanisms for erasing the literary history of which Piatt was a part.Less
Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary histories. Twentieth-century constructs of the field overlook an awareness that late-nineteenth century female literary historians envisioned in terms of a more inclusive and democratic American literary canon. Recovering a literary history largely erased by the turn into the twentieth century through a case study of Sarah Piatt’s career, this chapter focuses on two female literary historians of the 1890s: Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Gilder, whose literary anthologies include Piatt’s writing, unlike those of the following century. Hutchinson, who (with Edmund Clarence Stedman) edited a sizeable collection of American texts, the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, and Jeanette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic, who hosted a popular election to identify the top 125 American women writers of 1890, made arguments for the inclusion of Piatt in the canon that are worth revisiting in light of turn-of-the-century mechanisms for erasing the literary history of which Piatt was a part.
David Norris
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620528
- eISBN:
- 9781789623864
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620528.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter uses the particularly prominent and sensitive South Slav context to compare how representatives of dominant and subordinate literary cultures attempt to characterize and narrate the ...
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This chapter uses the particularly prominent and sensitive South Slav context to compare how representatives of dominant and subordinate literary cultures attempt to characterize and narrate the history of smaller national literatures. It begins from a notion of exchange whereby dominant literary nations are traditionally perceived to export stylistic features for emulation by writers in subordinate literatures and systems of periodization and classification for adoption by those literatures’ historians. In return, these subordinate literatures gain a channel of communication through which some degree of recognition or cultural legitimacy may be bestowed. The chapter addresses recent efforts by the academic community of dominant cultural systems to move beyond national models of literary history, focusing on accounts by pre-eminent scholars Linda Hutcheon, Stephen Greenblatt, Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch that use South Slav examples to make their case. These accounts are set against the earlier endeavours of Serbian literary historians – Jovan Skerlić, Pavle Popović and Svetozar Petrović – who engage with similar questions in their complex local context. The chapter argues that this attempt to eradicate a political agenda identified in the national approach to literary history in fact reinforces the hegemony of the dominant over the subordinate.Less
This chapter uses the particularly prominent and sensitive South Slav context to compare how representatives of dominant and subordinate literary cultures attempt to characterize and narrate the history of smaller national literatures. It begins from a notion of exchange whereby dominant literary nations are traditionally perceived to export stylistic features for emulation by writers in subordinate literatures and systems of periodization and classification for adoption by those literatures’ historians. In return, these subordinate literatures gain a channel of communication through which some degree of recognition or cultural legitimacy may be bestowed. The chapter addresses recent efforts by the academic community of dominant cultural systems to move beyond national models of literary history, focusing on accounts by pre-eminent scholars Linda Hutcheon, Stephen Greenblatt, Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch that use South Slav examples to make their case. These accounts are set against the earlier endeavours of Serbian literary historians – Jovan Skerlić, Pavle Popović and Svetozar Petrović – who engage with similar questions in their complex local context. The chapter argues that this attempt to eradicate a political agenda identified in the national approach to literary history in fact reinforces the hegemony of the dominant over the subordinate.
Melanie V. Dawson and Meredith L. Goldsmith
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813056043
- eISBN:
- 9780813053813
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056043.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Across the period from 1880 to 1930, the processes of rethinking the past can be read as a historical gesture as significant as the consideration of wholly new works of art, resulting in a period of ...
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Across the period from 1880 to 1930, the processes of rethinking the past can be read as a historical gesture as significant as the consideration of wholly new works of art, resulting in a period of experimentation, negotiation, hybridity, and historical dualities. Despite pressures to valorize the modern and thus separate literary eras at the century’s dividing mark, authors from the turn of the century, or the T-20 period, explore their historical legacies as well as anticipatory inscriptions of the new. Calling for a reading practice that encourages both forward and backward glancing, essays collected in this volume attest to the irreducibility of the century’s turn, which can be read as an era of historical complexity rather than as a period shaped by a decisive teleological march into new intellectual territory. Exploring the permeable boundaries and elastic categories of a literary history rich in multiple investments, essays here stress American literature’s navigation of moving boundaries that encompass not only temporal markers but intersecting literary and cultural traditions.Less
Across the period from 1880 to 1930, the processes of rethinking the past can be read as a historical gesture as significant as the consideration of wholly new works of art, resulting in a period of experimentation, negotiation, hybridity, and historical dualities. Despite pressures to valorize the modern and thus separate literary eras at the century’s dividing mark, authors from the turn of the century, or the T-20 period, explore their historical legacies as well as anticipatory inscriptions of the new. Calling for a reading practice that encourages both forward and backward glancing, essays collected in this volume attest to the irreducibility of the century’s turn, which can be read as an era of historical complexity rather than as a period shaped by a decisive teleological march into new intellectual territory. Exploring the permeable boundaries and elastic categories of a literary history rich in multiple investments, essays here stress American literature’s navigation of moving boundaries that encompass not only temporal markers but intersecting literary and cultural traditions.
Rodolphe Gasché
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823234349
- eISBN:
- 9780823241279
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234349.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Beginnings and Endings dates from 1980. Parts of it were presented at a conference on Writing Literary History organized by Wlad, and again in 1981 at a conference on The Institutions of Criticism. ...
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Beginnings and Endings dates from 1980. Parts of it were presented at a conference on Writing Literary History organized by Wlad, and again in 1981 at a conference on The Institutions of Criticism. As indicated by the titles of these events, both of which were attended by many leading literary critics firmly entrenched in the opposing camps of either historical or text-oriented criticism, the taxing challenge was twofold. The proponents of historical literary criticism were asked to account for the practice of writing in the constitution of literary history, and the text-oriented critics to confront the fact that writing not only gives rise to self-referential texts, but also to discourses on literature such as literary history. Furthermore, both camps of professional critics were subtly invited to respond to what kind of institutional pressures shape the critical traditions to which they subscribe.Less
Beginnings and Endings dates from 1980. Parts of it were presented at a conference on Writing Literary History organized by Wlad, and again in 1981 at a conference on The Institutions of Criticism. As indicated by the titles of these events, both of which were attended by many leading literary critics firmly entrenched in the opposing camps of either historical or text-oriented criticism, the taxing challenge was twofold. The proponents of historical literary criticism were asked to account for the practice of writing in the constitution of literary history, and the text-oriented critics to confront the fact that writing not only gives rise to self-referential texts, but also to discourses on literature such as literary history. Furthermore, both camps of professional critics were subtly invited to respond to what kind of institutional pressures shape the critical traditions to which they subscribe.
Ruth Bush
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781781381953
- eISBN:
- 9781786945181
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381953.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Publishing Africa in French provides a critical analysis of the global dynamics and cultural and publishing history of French and African literature. It focuses on French readership and the French ...
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Publishing Africa in French provides a critical analysis of the global dynamics and cultural and publishing history of French and African literature. It focuses on French readership and the French literary-political sphere, and engages with issues of authorial authenticity, literary value, and author autonomy. The study is built on careful documentations of the pre- and post-publication process, and explores the relentless interweaving of ideas expressed in literary form, their institutional contexts and underlying human relationships, and asks: Who writes about Africa and who is Africa written for? The book is split into two sections, ‘Institutions’ and ‘Mediations’. The first part of the book, ‘Institutions’, situates three institutions of particular significance, the publishing houses of Le Seuil and Présence Africaine, and the Association nationale des écrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer. ‘Mediations’, the second section of the book, concludes with a consideration on how institutional structures work into or against the literary texture of selected publications, and examines readers’ reports and editorial revision; the use of pseudonyms; the development of named collections and the process of literary translation from English. Publishing Africa in French aims to bring book-historical principles to bear on a decisive period in French literary history and foregrounds the influencing factors on literary expression and its material impressions in the period of decolonization.Less
Publishing Africa in French provides a critical analysis of the global dynamics and cultural and publishing history of French and African literature. It focuses on French readership and the French literary-political sphere, and engages with issues of authorial authenticity, literary value, and author autonomy. The study is built on careful documentations of the pre- and post-publication process, and explores the relentless interweaving of ideas expressed in literary form, their institutional contexts and underlying human relationships, and asks: Who writes about Africa and who is Africa written for? The book is split into two sections, ‘Institutions’ and ‘Mediations’. The first part of the book, ‘Institutions’, situates three institutions of particular significance, the publishing houses of Le Seuil and Présence Africaine, and the Association nationale des écrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer. ‘Mediations’, the second section of the book, concludes with a consideration on how institutional structures work into or against the literary texture of selected publications, and examines readers’ reports and editorial revision; the use of pseudonyms; the development of named collections and the process of literary translation from English. Publishing Africa in French aims to bring book-historical principles to bear on a decisive period in French literary history and foregrounds the influencing factors on literary expression and its material impressions in the period of decolonization.
Mary Youssef
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474415415
- eISBN:
- 9781474449755
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415415.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Middle Eastern Studies
This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign ...
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This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising.
This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.Less
This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising.
This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.
Glyn Morgan and C. Palmer-Patel
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620139
- eISBN:
- 9781789623765
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620139.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The introduction provides a summary of the genre’s literary history from its earliest roots to the contemporary novel, presenting important examples of alternate history literature from nineteenth ...
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The introduction provides a summary of the genre’s literary history from its earliest roots to the contemporary novel, presenting important examples of alternate history literature from nineteenth century French novels to early-twentieth century essays and more recent examples of science fiction short stories, novels, television and films. It provides definitions and distinctions for key terminology such as ‘nexus point’, ‘counterfactualism’, ‘secret history’ and ‘alternate future’, as well as an overview of important existing research, and explores the relationship between alternate history texts and their source historical narratives. After setting out the aims and aspirations of this collection of essays, the introduction concludes with a precis of the essays in the rest of the collection, underlining connections between them.Less
The introduction provides a summary of the genre’s literary history from its earliest roots to the contemporary novel, presenting important examples of alternate history literature from nineteenth century French novels to early-twentieth century essays and more recent examples of science fiction short stories, novels, television and films. It provides definitions and distinctions for key terminology such as ‘nexus point’, ‘counterfactualism’, ‘secret history’ and ‘alternate future’, as well as an overview of important existing research, and explores the relationship between alternate history texts and their source historical narratives. After setting out the aims and aspirations of this collection of essays, the introduction concludes with a precis of the essays in the rest of the collection, underlining connections between them.
Cheryl A. Wall
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469646909
- eISBN:
- 9781469646923
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469646909.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
Although they have written in various genres, African American writers as notable and diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker have done their most influential work in the essay ...
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Although they have written in various genres, African American writers as notable and diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker have done their most influential work in the essay form. The Souls of Black Folk, The Fire Next Time, and In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens are landmarks in African American literary history. Many other writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright, are acclaimed essayists but achieved greater fame for their work in other genres; their essay work is often overlooked or studied only in the contexts of their better-known works. Here Cheryl A. Wall offers the first sustained study of the African American essay as a distinct literary genre.
Beginning with the sermons, orations, and writing of nineteenth-century men and women like Frederick Douglass who laid the foundation for the African American essay, Wall examines the genre's evolution through the Harlem Renaissance. She then turns her attention to four writers she regards as among the most influential essayists of the twentieth century: Baldwin, Ellison, June Jordan, and Alice Walker. She closes the book with a discussion of the status of the essay in the twenty-first century as it shifts its medium from print to digital in the hands of writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brittney Cooper. Wall's beautifully written and insightful book is nothing less than a redefinition of how we understand the genres of African American literature.Less
Although they have written in various genres, African American writers as notable and diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker have done their most influential work in the essay form. The Souls of Black Folk, The Fire Next Time, and In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens are landmarks in African American literary history. Many other writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Richard Wright, are acclaimed essayists but achieved greater fame for their work in other genres; their essay work is often overlooked or studied only in the contexts of their better-known works. Here Cheryl A. Wall offers the first sustained study of the African American essay as a distinct literary genre.
Beginning with the sermons, orations, and writing of nineteenth-century men and women like Frederick Douglass who laid the foundation for the African American essay, Wall examines the genre's evolution through the Harlem Renaissance. She then turns her attention to four writers she regards as among the most influential essayists of the twentieth century: Baldwin, Ellison, June Jordan, and Alice Walker. She closes the book with a discussion of the status of the essay in the twenty-first century as it shifts its medium from print to digital in the hands of writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brittney Cooper. Wall's beautifully written and insightful book is nothing less than a redefinition of how we understand the genres of African American literature.
Mary Youssef
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474415415
- eISBN:
- 9781474449755
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415415.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Middle Eastern Studies
The author links the purview of the “new-consciousness” novel to Edward Said’s conceptualization of “decentered consciousness,” a term he uses to describe postcolonial cultural and intellectual ...
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The author links the purview of the “new-consciousness” novel to Edward Said’s conceptualization of “decentered consciousness,” a term he uses to describe postcolonial cultural and intellectual efforts that aim at disrupting constituencies and ideologies of dominance and essentialism. Following a historical approach to understanding the emergence of novelistic genres, this chapter reviews the historical conditions surrounding the production of several Egyptian novels—from Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab to what Sabry Hafez calls the “New Egyptian Novel” of the 1990s—to exhibit how the novel, in responding to its historical moment, defies definitional stability due to the dialectical process of historical change. The socio-political and cultural context underlying the rise of the new-consciousness novel is similarly analyzed to detect the homologies and disjunctures it has with its antecedent counterparts as well as highlight its new distinct and cohesive semantic and formal features of heteroglossia and what it achieves as a corpus.Less
The author links the purview of the “new-consciousness” novel to Edward Said’s conceptualization of “decentered consciousness,” a term he uses to describe postcolonial cultural and intellectual efforts that aim at disrupting constituencies and ideologies of dominance and essentialism. Following a historical approach to understanding the emergence of novelistic genres, this chapter reviews the historical conditions surrounding the production of several Egyptian novels—from Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab to what Sabry Hafez calls the “New Egyptian Novel” of the 1990s—to exhibit how the novel, in responding to its historical moment, defies definitional stability due to the dialectical process of historical change. The socio-political and cultural context underlying the rise of the new-consciousness novel is similarly analyzed to detect the homologies and disjunctures it has with its antecedent counterparts as well as highlight its new distinct and cohesive semantic and formal features of heteroglossia and what it achieves as a corpus.
Christopher D'Addario and Matthew Augustine (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526113894
- eISBN:
- 9781526138897
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526113894.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell offers fresh perspectives from leading and emerging scholars of seventeenth-century British literature, focusing on the surprising ways that texts interacted ...
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Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell offers fresh perspectives from leading and emerging scholars of seventeenth-century British literature, focusing on the surprising ways that texts interacted with writers and readers at precise cultural moments. With particular interest in how texts entered the seventeenth-century public world, some of these essays emphasise the variety of motivations – from generic distaste to personal frustration – that explain how ideology and form fuse together in various works. Others offer fine-grained and multi-sided contextualisations of familiar texts and cruxes. With an eye to the elusive and complicated Andrew Marvell as tutelary figure of the age, the contributors provide novel readings of a range of seventeenth-century authors, often foregrounding the complexities these writers faced as the remarkable events of the century moved swiftly around them. The essays make important contributions, both methodological and critical, to the field of early modern studies and include examinations of prominent seventeenth-century figures such as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Edmund Waller. New work appears here by Nigel Smith and Michael McKeon on Marvell, Michael Schoenfeldt on new formalism, Derek Hirst on child abuse in the seventeenth century, and Joad Raymond on print politics. Because of their relevance to contemporary critical debates, the studies here will be of interest to postgraduate students and scholars working on seventeenth-century British literature, culture, and history.Less
Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell offers fresh perspectives from leading and emerging scholars of seventeenth-century British literature, focusing on the surprising ways that texts interacted with writers and readers at precise cultural moments. With particular interest in how texts entered the seventeenth-century public world, some of these essays emphasise the variety of motivations – from generic distaste to personal frustration – that explain how ideology and form fuse together in various works. Others offer fine-grained and multi-sided contextualisations of familiar texts and cruxes. With an eye to the elusive and complicated Andrew Marvell as tutelary figure of the age, the contributors provide novel readings of a range of seventeenth-century authors, often foregrounding the complexities these writers faced as the remarkable events of the century moved swiftly around them. The essays make important contributions, both methodological and critical, to the field of early modern studies and include examinations of prominent seventeenth-century figures such as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Edmund Waller. New work appears here by Nigel Smith and Michael McKeon on Marvell, Michael Schoenfeldt on new formalism, Derek Hirst on child abuse in the seventeenth century, and Joad Raymond on print politics. Because of their relevance to contemporary critical debates, the studies here will be of interest to postgraduate students and scholars working on seventeenth-century British literature, culture, and history.
Clifford Siskin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262035316
- eISBN:
- 9780262336345
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262035316.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This book illuminates the role that “system” has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge. System can describe what we see, as with Galileo’s sighting of Jupiter’s moons, operate a ...
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This book illuminates the role that “system” has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge. System can describe what we see, as with Galileo’s sighting of Jupiter’s moons, operate a computer, or be made on a page or screen like a sonnet or a letter. Starting in the seventeenth century, more and more people wrote and published works that they named and titled “system”—turning system into one of the forms, along with competitors such as treatises and histories, that filled the Enlightenment with the work of writing. I identify features of the genre of system, such as its scalability, that explain why it has been so essential to efforts to know the world for so long. Beginning with Galileo’s “message” from the stars and Bacon’s turn from scholasticism, my argument tracks system in its many intellectual and social incarnations, from Newton’s “system of the world” and the proliferating systems that generated Enlightenment and the modern disciplines and institutions that emerged from it to Darwin’s algorithmic system of survival and our own plethora of new uses for, and kinds of, system—including network, nervous, computing, and communication systems, as well as systems theory, self-organizing systems, and system professionals. It concludes by tracking system to its new position in what is being called the “computational universe”—one in which system generates the world it helps us to know. We may then we be entering a new chapter in the shape of knowledge from the Enlightenment with system in a newly performative role.Less
This book illuminates the role that “system” has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge. System can describe what we see, as with Galileo’s sighting of Jupiter’s moons, operate a computer, or be made on a page or screen like a sonnet or a letter. Starting in the seventeenth century, more and more people wrote and published works that they named and titled “system”—turning system into one of the forms, along with competitors such as treatises and histories, that filled the Enlightenment with the work of writing. I identify features of the genre of system, such as its scalability, that explain why it has been so essential to efforts to know the world for so long. Beginning with Galileo’s “message” from the stars and Bacon’s turn from scholasticism, my argument tracks system in its many intellectual and social incarnations, from Newton’s “system of the world” and the proliferating systems that generated Enlightenment and the modern disciplines and institutions that emerged from it to Darwin’s algorithmic system of survival and our own plethora of new uses for, and kinds of, system—including network, nervous, computing, and communication systems, as well as systems theory, self-organizing systems, and system professionals. It concludes by tracking system to its new position in what is being called the “computational universe”—one in which system generates the world it helps us to know. We may then we be entering a new chapter in the shape of knowledge from the Enlightenment with system in a newly performative role.
Kenneth K. Brandt
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780746312964
- eISBN:
- 9781789629156
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9780746312964.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This concluding chapter offers a succinct overview of London’s position in the canon of American literary studies and highlights important biographical and critical studies of the author’s work. ...
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This concluding chapter offers a succinct overview of London’s position in the canon of American literary studies and highlights important biographical and critical studies of the author’s work. Over the last three decades, serious scholarship on Jack London has continued to expand and deepen. International readers also incline to see him as an archetypal American writer. Following London’s death, however, literary modernists in the 1920s, whose formal difficulty catered to a culturally elite audience, were wary of his popular accessibility and largely ignored his writing. But his major concerns—generating consolatory value in an increasingly post-theistic world, remedying exploitive socioeconomic systems, and achieving a more nuanced understanding of our psychobiology—remain central to societal, political, and intellectual debates worldwide. The cultural-theoretical turn that shaped most scholarly discourse by the early 1980s initiated a more comprehensive re-evaluation of his writing. By the 1990s a London revival in the academy was well underway and scholars continue to generate innovative critical approaches to his work.Less
This concluding chapter offers a succinct overview of London’s position in the canon of American literary studies and highlights important biographical and critical studies of the author’s work. Over the last three decades, serious scholarship on Jack London has continued to expand and deepen. International readers also incline to see him as an archetypal American writer. Following London’s death, however, literary modernists in the 1920s, whose formal difficulty catered to a culturally elite audience, were wary of his popular accessibility and largely ignored his writing. But his major concerns—generating consolatory value in an increasingly post-theistic world, remedying exploitive socioeconomic systems, and achieving a more nuanced understanding of our psychobiology—remain central to societal, political, and intellectual debates worldwide. The cultural-theoretical turn that shaped most scholarly discourse by the early 1980s initiated a more comprehensive re-evaluation of his writing. By the 1990s a London revival in the academy was well underway and scholars continue to generate innovative critical approaches to his work.
Patrick McDonagh, C. F. Goodey, and Tim Stainton (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526125316
- eISBN:
- 9781526136213
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526125316.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Social History
This collection explores how concepts of intellectual or learning disability evolved from a range of influences, gradually developing from earlier and decidedly distinct concepts, including ‘idiocy’ ...
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This collection explores how concepts of intellectual or learning disability evolved from a range of influences, gradually developing from earlier and decidedly distinct concepts, including ‘idiocy’ and ‘folly’, which were themselves generated by very specific social and intellectual environments. With essays extending across legal, educational, literary, religious, philosophical, and psychiatric histories, this collection maintains a rigorous distinction between historical and contemporary concepts in demonstrating how intellectual disability and related notions were products of the prevailing social, cultural, and intellectual environments in which they took form, and themselves performed important functions within these environments. Focusing on British and European material from the middle ages to the late nineteenth century, this collection asks ‘How and why did these concepts form?’ ‘How did they connect with one another?’ and ‘What historical circumstances contributed to building these connections?’ While the emphasis is on conceptual history or a history of ideas, these essays also address the consequences of these defining forces for the people who found themselves enclosed by the shifting definitional field.Less
This collection explores how concepts of intellectual or learning disability evolved from a range of influences, gradually developing from earlier and decidedly distinct concepts, including ‘idiocy’ and ‘folly’, which were themselves generated by very specific social and intellectual environments. With essays extending across legal, educational, literary, religious, philosophical, and psychiatric histories, this collection maintains a rigorous distinction between historical and contemporary concepts in demonstrating how intellectual disability and related notions were products of the prevailing social, cultural, and intellectual environments in which they took form, and themselves performed important functions within these environments. Focusing on British and European material from the middle ages to the late nineteenth century, this collection asks ‘How and why did these concepts form?’ ‘How did they connect with one another?’ and ‘What historical circumstances contributed to building these connections?’ While the emphasis is on conceptual history or a history of ideas, these essays also address the consequences of these defining forces for the people who found themselves enclosed by the shifting definitional field.
Lucas Hollister
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786942180
- eISBN:
- 9781789623642
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786942180.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter examines how the ‘return to the story’ has been used to further an anti-modernist agenda and to delegitimize avant-garde or experimental mid-century novelistic aesthetics. Specifically, ...
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This chapter examines how the ‘return to the story’ has been used to further an anti-modernist agenda and to delegitimize avant-garde or experimental mid-century novelistic aesthetics. Specifically, it examines the work of Jean Rouaud, a writer whose investment in the ‘story’ is exemplary of a wholehearted adoption of an anti-modernist conception of literary return. Putting Rouaud’s sprawling and digressive essayistic adventure novel The Imitation of Happiness (2006) into dialogue with Rouaud’s fictional and essayistic production since the early 2000s, this chapter problematizes the literary historical narrative that underpins Rouaud’s ‘rehabilitation’ of the adventure novel. It then zooms out to consider how this anti-modernist emphasis on adventurous fiction is echoed in the rhetoric of the famous littérature-monde manifesto. A short analysis of littérature-monde then demonstrates how the return to the story functions not only as a literary history but also as a cultural map. This chapter concludes with a critique of the anti-modernist literary historical narrative of the ‘return to the story.’Less
This chapter examines how the ‘return to the story’ has been used to further an anti-modernist agenda and to delegitimize avant-garde or experimental mid-century novelistic aesthetics. Specifically, it examines the work of Jean Rouaud, a writer whose investment in the ‘story’ is exemplary of a wholehearted adoption of an anti-modernist conception of literary return. Putting Rouaud’s sprawling and digressive essayistic adventure novel The Imitation of Happiness (2006) into dialogue with Rouaud’s fictional and essayistic production since the early 2000s, this chapter problematizes the literary historical narrative that underpins Rouaud’s ‘rehabilitation’ of the adventure novel. It then zooms out to consider how this anti-modernist emphasis on adventurous fiction is echoed in the rhetoric of the famous littérature-monde manifesto. A short analysis of littérature-monde then demonstrates how the return to the story functions not only as a literary history but also as a cultural map. This chapter concludes with a critique of the anti-modernist literary historical narrative of the ‘return to the story.’
Ignacio Infante
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823251780
- eISBN:
- 9780823252831
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823251780.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This afterword stresses the importance of the concept of translation within the field of contemporary transatlantic literary and cultural studies. It also offers an alternative to the theoretical ...
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This afterword stresses the importance of the concept of translation within the field of contemporary transatlantic literary and cultural studies. It also offers an alternative to the theoretical framework offered by traditional national literary history and literary historiography as the main paradigm for the study of literature. Finally, based on the work of Erich Auerbach and Brent Hayes Edwards, it suggests the articulation of a model of transcultural literary history based on the notion of relationally at the core of édouard Glissant’s notion of a “poetics of relation.”Less
This afterword stresses the importance of the concept of translation within the field of contemporary transatlantic literary and cultural studies. It also offers an alternative to the theoretical framework offered by traditional national literary history and literary historiography as the main paradigm for the study of literature. Finally, based on the work of Erich Auerbach and Brent Hayes Edwards, it suggests the articulation of a model of transcultural literary history based on the notion of relationally at the core of édouard Glissant’s notion of a “poetics of relation.”
Philip V. Bohlman
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780520234949
- eISBN:
- 9780520966444
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520234949.003.0014
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
In a broadly historical essay Herder examines the ways in which poetry and song reflect national character. Important distinctions between the objects and subjects of poetry, especially the relation ...
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In a broadly historical essay Herder examines the ways in which poetry and song reflect national character. Important distinctions between the objects and subjects of poetry, especially the relation between song as object and singing as subject, provide a comparative framework throughout and become the foundations for a critical language to represent modern culture and politics (e.g., the relation between Volk and Nation). Herder carefully traces the historical development of national literary traditions, but he draws the reader to considerations of poetry and song in the contemporary world of the Enlightenment. He concludes by drawing attention to the ways in which certain genres of poetry and song extend beyond the traditions of single peoples, acquiring a greater impact as transnational.Less
In a broadly historical essay Herder examines the ways in which poetry and song reflect national character. Important distinctions between the objects and subjects of poetry, especially the relation between song as object and singing as subject, provide a comparative framework throughout and become the foundations for a critical language to represent modern culture and politics (e.g., the relation between Volk and Nation). Herder carefully traces the historical development of national literary traditions, but he draws the reader to considerations of poetry and song in the contemporary world of the Enlightenment. He concludes by drawing attention to the ways in which certain genres of poetry and song extend beyond the traditions of single peoples, acquiring a greater impact as transnational.
Jeffrey J. Williams
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263806
- eISBN:
- 9780823266432
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263806.003.0017
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter profiles Gordon Hutner, founding and long-time editor of the major journal, American Literary History, and critic of American literature. It tells how he founded the journal and the ...
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This chapter profiles Gordon Hutner, founding and long-time editor of the major journal, American Literary History, and critic of American literature. It tells how he founded the journal and the ins-and-outs of editing it. It also discusses his recent work inventorying modern American fiction. It draws on an in-depth interview that gives many revealing details about his work and career.Less
This chapter profiles Gordon Hutner, founding and long-time editor of the major journal, American Literary History, and critic of American literature. It tells how he founded the journal and the ins-and-outs of editing it. It also discusses his recent work inventorying modern American fiction. It draws on an in-depth interview that gives many revealing details about his work and career.
Gregory S. Jay
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190687229
- eISBN:
- 9780190687250
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190687229.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with ...
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White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with period bestsellers now sometimes forgotten. Hollywood regularly adapted them into blockbusters, reinforcing their cultural influence. These novels and films protest slavery, confront stereotypes, dramatize social and legal injustices, engage the political controversies of their time, and try to move readers emotionally toward taking action. The literary forms and arguments of these books derive from the cultural work they intend to do in educating the minds and hearts, and propelling the actions, of those who think they are white—indeed, in making the social construction of that whiteness readable and thus more susceptible of reform. The white writers of these fictions struggle with their own place in systems of oppression and privilege while asking their readers to do the same. The predominance of women among this tradition’s authors leads to exploring how their critiques of gender and race norms often reinforced each other. Each chapter provides a case study combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance. This tradition remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for passing on the intellectual and emotional tools useful in fighting injustice.Less
White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with period bestsellers now sometimes forgotten. Hollywood regularly adapted them into blockbusters, reinforcing their cultural influence. These novels and films protest slavery, confront stereotypes, dramatize social and legal injustices, engage the political controversies of their time, and try to move readers emotionally toward taking action. The literary forms and arguments of these books derive from the cultural work they intend to do in educating the minds and hearts, and propelling the actions, of those who think they are white—indeed, in making the social construction of that whiteness readable and thus more susceptible of reform. The white writers of these fictions struggle with their own place in systems of oppression and privilege while asking their readers to do the same. The predominance of women among this tradition’s authors leads to exploring how their critiques of gender and race norms often reinforced each other. Each chapter provides a case study combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance. This tradition remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for passing on the intellectual and emotional tools useful in fighting injustice.
Ruth Bush
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781781381953
- eISBN:
- 9781786945181
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381953.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter considers the colonial heritage of the main literary prizes specific to African writing in French in the post-war period, awarded by the Association nationale desécrivains de la mer et ...
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This chapter considers the colonial heritage of the main literary prizes specific to African writing in French in the post-war period, awarded by the Association nationale desécrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer (ANEMOM). It demonstrates how the ANEMOM gradually adapted to the changing political and cultural context of decolonization during the vingt glorieuses and examines how it sought to preserve certain aspects of France’s colonial imaginary by consecrating the ‘Empire de la langue française’.Less
This chapter considers the colonial heritage of the main literary prizes specific to African writing in French in the post-war period, awarded by the Association nationale desécrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer (ANEMOM). It demonstrates how the ANEMOM gradually adapted to the changing political and cultural context of decolonization during the vingt glorieuses and examines how it sought to preserve certain aspects of France’s colonial imaginary by consecrating the ‘Empire de la langue française’.
Helen Barr
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719091490
- eISBN:
- 9781781707319
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719091490.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
Beginning with Antony Gormley’s Transport sculpture in Canterbury cathedral, the Introduction introduces key conceptual premises of the book. It shows how Transport re-presents bodies in time in a ...
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Beginning with Antony Gormley’s Transport sculpture in Canterbury cathedral, the Introduction introduces key conceptual premises of the book. It shows how Transport re-presents bodies in time in a fashion that recalls characteristics of medieval cultural practices: ecclesiastical space, written texts such as Piers Plowman, The Book of Margery Kempe, Mystery plays and devotional texts. Discussion of religious iconography between The Book of the Duchess and The Miller’s Tale shows how Chaucer’s writing occupies a distinctive place in this blurring of boundaries between historical materiality, scriptural history, and contemporary fictions. Bodily transport between Chaucer’s own works anticipates the transport that is yet to be made of them in works that he did not compose.Less
Beginning with Antony Gormley’s Transport sculpture in Canterbury cathedral, the Introduction introduces key conceptual premises of the book. It shows how Transport re-presents bodies in time in a fashion that recalls characteristics of medieval cultural practices: ecclesiastical space, written texts such as Piers Plowman, The Book of Margery Kempe, Mystery plays and devotional texts. Discussion of religious iconography between The Book of the Duchess and The Miller’s Tale shows how Chaucer’s writing occupies a distinctive place in this blurring of boundaries between historical materiality, scriptural history, and contemporary fictions. Bodily transport between Chaucer’s own works anticipates the transport that is yet to be made of them in works that he did not compose.