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Introduction

William Oddie

in Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874-1908

This introductory chapter begins with a brief review of Chesterton's works including Orthodoxy, The Man who was Thursday, and The Wild Knight. It considers the roots of Chesterton's views on ... More

This introductory chapter begins with a brief review of Chesterton's works including Orthodoxy, The Man who was Thursday, and The Wild Knight. It considers the roots of Chesterton's views on modernity and Christianity. The chapter then sets out the purpose of the book, which is to trace the growth of Chesterton's mind from early childhood to the point in his literary career at which he had fully established the intellectual foundations on which the massive oeuvre of his last three decades was to be built.Less

Life and Contexts

Lee Spinks

in James Joyce A Critical Guide

This chapter offers a brief account of James Joyce's life and literary career. The narrative of Joyce's life is punctuated by subsections dealing with issues such as the historical and political ... More

This chapter offers a brief account of James Joyce's life and literary career. The narrative of Joyce's life is punctuated by subsections dealing with issues such as the historical and political situation of late nineteenth-century Ireland, Irish political nationalism and the rise of the physical force tradition, the Irish cultural revival, and the literary and cultural ‘scandal’ of Ulysses. Joyce's father and Belvedere contributed to his personality and attitudes. The 1916 Easter Rising and the Irish Civil War of 1922–3 set the Irish political events of Joyce's lifetime. The double disappointment of failing to secure the publication of Chamber Music and Dubliners affected Joyce. The publication of Ulysses did not put an end to the controversies surrounding the novel. Finnegans Wake attracted bemused or hostile reviews. Maud Ellmann's study should still constitute the first port of call for the reader keen to discover more about Joyce's life and times.Less

Toward a Provincializing Literary Production

in On Uneven Ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan

This chapter explores the provincialization of literary production in Japan in the context of Miyazawa Kenji's children's book The Restaurant of Many Orders. It explains that many of Miyazawa's ... More

This chapter explores the provincialization of literary production in Japan in the context of Miyazawa Kenji's children's book The Restaurant of Many Orders. It explains that many of Miyazawa's experiments with narrative strategies with provincializing intent were incorporated in this novel and contends that the history of this work illustrates what provincial publishers were up against in trying to compete in such an uneven literary market. This chapter also highlights the impact of Miyazawa's exchange with the dowa movement on his literary career.Less

What Do Poets Want to Write?

Simon Park

in Poets, Patronage, and Print in Sixteenth-Century Portugal: From Paper to Gold

This chapter explores the careers of sixteenth-century Portuguese poets as articulated by themselves and their contemporaries. It draws on scholarly work in the developing field of career criticism ... More

This chapter explores the careers of sixteenth-century Portuguese poets as articulated by themselves and their contemporaries. It draws on scholarly work in the developing field of career criticism to consider moments when poets discussed what they had written and what they one day hoped to produce. For all that writers wrote a lot about what they had achieved or wanted to achieve, this chapter shows that their careers rarely proceeded in a purely linear fashion as was claimed for some ancient authors, such as Virgil. The chapter suggests that when we refuse the lure of hindsight or look beyond the ways that writers tried to iron out their own careers, we see that lots of anxiety attended moments of career reflexivity, that choices of genre were determined by a mixture of personal, economic, political, and social motivations and, moreover, that writers would foreground different motivations when writing in different contexts or addressing different individuals.Less

Corpus (Vulnerability)

Andrew Piper

in Enumerations: Data and Literary Study

The “corpus” (or body of work, since Cicero) of an author is meant to be organic, integral--well connected--but also distinct and whole; it marks limits; it is the material complement to the author’s ... More

The “corpus” (or body of work, since Cicero) of an author is meant to be organic, integral--well connected--but also distinct and whole; it marks limits; it is the material complement to the author’s life. What does it mean to imagine writing as a body, something with a distinct shape/form, but also subject to vulnerability? How do we understand those moments when a writer opens herself or her corpus up to change, how radical or gradual are these movements, how permanent, fleeting, or even recurrent? Is there something called “late style,” a distinctive signature that characterizes the end of a career as contours of an aging body mapped onto the weave of writing? When and how do we intellectually/creatively exfoliate? While we have very successful ways of detecting “authors” or “style,” we have considerably fewer techniques for talking about change, the nature of the variability within an author’s corporal outline, the variety of measures to study the shape of a writer’s career. Working with a trilingual collection of roughly 30,000 poems in French, German and English, this chapter explores questions of local/global vulnerability and late style, concluding with a computationally informed reading of the work of Wanda Coleman.Less

Daniel, Drayton, Chapman

Katharine Cleland

in The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry

This chapter examines the literary careers of the sixteenth-century English poets, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and George Chapman. In particular, the chapter demonstrates how they vie with one ... More

This chapter examines the literary careers of the sixteenth-century English poets, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and George Chapman. In particular, the chapter demonstrates how they vie with one another for the distinction of being England’s poet laureate. To do so, it traces the way their careers develop from early experimentations with such genres as pastoral, lyric, and epyllion before turning to the ultimate laureate genre, epic. In their quest to achieve laureate status, each poet intentionally dedicates his career to the formation of a uniquely English literary tradition that builds upon and revises its Classical and Continental predecessors. Daniel, Drayton, and Chapman’s wide-ranging experimentations with poetic form and genre profoundly impact the history of English poetry.Less

Taking Manhattan

Wayne Franklin

in James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years

This chapter examines James Fenimore Cooper's literary career in New York City. It discusses his founding of the Bread and Cheese Club, or the “Lunch,” an all-male soiree of expansive membership, in ... More

This chapter examines James Fenimore Cooper's literary career in New York City. It discusses his founding of the Bread and Cheese Club, or the “Lunch,” an all-male soiree of expansive membership, in April 1823. It describes his journalistic work on horse racing and the challenges in finishing the novel The Pilot. This chapter also suggests that Cooper's literary and social life in the first half of 1823 hit the immovable wall of the world's opposition to mere desire.Less

Minor Epic

Daniel Moss

in The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry

Traditional accounts of the minor epic have emphasised alternately their emanation from the rhetorical training of the Elizabethan schoolroom and their erotic experimentalism, but the wide ... More

Traditional accounts of the minor epic have emphasised alternately their emanation from the rhetorical training of the Elizabethan schoolroom and their erotic experimentalism, but the wide variousness and peculiar constitution of the minor epic canon demand a more concerted account of where the genre fits into the career models available to the poets of the 1590s and early seventeenth century. Identifying the three primary examples by Lodge, Marlowe, and Shakespeare as immediately successful and lastingly influential, this chapter turns to less studied epyllia by Heywood, Marston, Fletcher, and Chapman to propose that secondary minor epics are best understood as calculated acts of emulation, a way for professionalising poets to map their relations to the works of their predecessors, rivals, and peers.Less

‘The Republic of Letters’: Frederick Douglass, Ireland and the Irish Narratives

in Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World

This chapter investigates the Irish editions of Frederick Douglass's first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, published in 1845. The ... More

This chapter investigates the Irish editions of Frederick Douglass's first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, published in 1845. The reprinting of the Narrative in Ireland highlighted the start of a stage in Douglass's literary career. The Irish Narrative, which emphasized the colonial history and the related issue of paternity, individual and cultural, also exceeded contemporary discussions of slavery as a localized American problem. Its introductory frames showed the tension between Douglass and US abolitionism, and also impacted upon the meaning and interpretation of the text in the wider transatlantic context in which it is encrypted. Such an edition reviewed the complicated path of that subjective and literary emergence, formally marking Douglass's accession to the coveted ‘republic of letters’.Less

Hierophants: C. Day-Lewis and Graham Greene

Stefan Collini

in Common Writing: Essays on Literary Culture and Public Debate

This chapter explores the life and work of two writers who came to prominence in the 1930s and enjoyed high standing over the next two decades. Day-Lewis embodied some of the traditional role of the ... More

This chapter explores the life and work of two writers who came to prominence in the 1930s and enjoyed high standing over the next two decades. Day-Lewis embodied some of the traditional role of the poet as bard, the exalted voice of his people, while Greene staged his existential conflicts against ever more exotic fictional backdrops. Both were for a while looked to as guides about how to live, and both benefited from belonging to that stratum of upper-middle-class English life that so dominated literature in these decades. The chapter explores the way that reputations made in the 1930s and 1940s enabled writers to play wider cultural roles in the postwar world.Less

Conclusion (Implications)

Andrew Piper

in Enumerations: Data and Literary Study

To be implicated can also mean--more literally--to be folded into something. This book discusses how we can become more implicated in our observations about literature past and present. Modeling in ... More

To be implicated can also mean--more literally--to be folded into something. This book discusses how we can become more implicated in our observations about literature past and present. Modeling in particular allows us to fold our­selves into the techniques/technologies, through which we arrive at new knowledge of our objects of study. Models can account, more explicitly, for the mediations that govern our insights. This conclusion gestures toward ways to implicate ourselves more fully in our scholarship, moving from acts of self-measurement, observing the ways our own books are constructed and related to the field; to institutional accounting, the ways in which the institutions we work for, or those that we create (e.g., authors or concepts), are distributed across the field of academic publishing. These practices are part of a larger movement to imagine new forms of algorithmic openness, where computation is used not as an afterthought (as a means of searching for things that have already been preselected and sorted), but as a form of forethought (a means of generating more diverse ecosystems of knowledge). How can we use the tools of data science to capture and more adequately represent those values we care about in systems of scholarly communication?Less

Mother Love

Elizabeth Harlan

in George Sand

This chapter discusses the meeting of George Sand and the then young Polish composer Frederic Chopin. With the looming threat of the Russian occupation, Chopin fled Poland and arrived in Paris in ... More

This chapter discusses the meeting of George Sand and the then young Polish composer Frederic Chopin. With the looming threat of the Russian occupation, Chopin fled Poland and arrived in Paris in 1831, the same year Aurore Dudevant went to the capital to launch her literary career. Among the other distinguished guests at the soiree were Giacomo Meyerbeer, Eugene Sue, Heinrich Heine, and a group of Polish exiles associated with Adam Mickiewicz, who would shortly become a professor at the College de France. Although Sand was immediately taken with Chopin, the relationship got off to a slow start. “I've made the acquaintance of a great celebrity, Madame Dudevant, known by the name George Sand,” Chopin wrote his parents several days after their meeting. “But her face doesn't appeal to me at all. There's even something about her that puts me off.”Less

To Speak in Print (1551)

Matthew Woodcock

in Thomas Churchyard: Pen, Sword, and Ego

This chapter discusses Churchyard’s first publication, the contentious broadside poem Davy Dycars Dreame, which appeared in the summer of 1551. It proposes that this poem and the contention it ... More

This chapter discusses Churchyard’s first publication, the contentious broadside poem Davy Dycars Dreame, which appeared in the summer of 1551. It proposes that this poem and the contention it initiates helped establish Churchyard’s name as a published author. The chapter places the Dreame in the context of mid-Tudor commonwealth complaint literature and the textual responses to the economic crises of Somerset’s protectorate. Attention focuses on the controversy that the poem initiates following an attack in print from one Thomas Camell and traces arguments between Churchyard and William Baldwin, William Elderton, and Richard Beeard. It discusses how the contention raises questions about the role of poetry in public, political debate and proposes that Churchyard as an author becomes an object of discourse and debate, which was a significant, formative moment in his nascent literary career.Less