S. J. Harrison
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199203581
- eISBN:
- 9780191708176
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199203581.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This book responds to an important question of literary history: why did the period 40-13 BC in Rome produce such a rich range of complex poetical texts? The co-existence of great poets such as ...
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This book responds to an important question of literary history: why did the period 40-13 BC in Rome produce such a rich range of complex poetical texts? The co-existence of great poets such as Vergil and Horace in contemporary literary circles, and the political stimulus and stability offered by the upheavals of the triumviral period and the following pax Augusta offer a sociological and historical background, but the concern here is with literary complexity and literary history. As has long been observed, generic concerns and generic mixtures are central to Augustan poetry. As has also been observed (e.g., in Kroll's formulation of the ‘crossing of genres’), this feature recalls the poetry of Ptolemaic Alexandria which offers many literary-historical parallels. Both were periods of literature where poets operated under the shadow of classical Greek predecessors, and strove for novelty, either by creating new genres or by varying existing ones through ‘contamination’ with other kinds of writing. Generic issues are examined through a double lens — that of ancient generic markers and that of modern genre theory — in an approach which owes much to the work of Gian Biagio Conte. The language and other characterizing patterns of ancient poetical genres constitute the basic material of this book, but some fundamental theoretical ideas are needed to categorize and order that material. How can we define a literary genre in ancient terms (e.g., should we follow Francis Cairns)? Is the attractive distinction between genres and modes made by Alastair Fowler of use for the poetry of Augustan Rome? The ultimate conclusion of this book is that many poetic genres were profoundly enriched in the Augustan period by close encounters with other genres. The emphasis is on texts and genres rather than authors, since the whole premiss of the study is that generic features, working within an established tradition, are more easily recovered than authorial intentions.Less
This book responds to an important question of literary history: why did the period 40-13 BC in Rome produce such a rich range of complex poetical texts? The co-existence of great poets such as Vergil and Horace in contemporary literary circles, and the political stimulus and stability offered by the upheavals of the triumviral period and the following pax Augusta offer a sociological and historical background, but the concern here is with literary complexity and literary history. As has long been observed, generic concerns and generic mixtures are central to Augustan poetry. As has also been observed (e.g., in Kroll's formulation of the ‘crossing of genres’), this feature recalls the poetry of Ptolemaic Alexandria which offers many literary-historical parallels. Both were periods of literature where poets operated under the shadow of classical Greek predecessors, and strove for novelty, either by creating new genres or by varying existing ones through ‘contamination’ with other kinds of writing. Generic issues are examined through a double lens — that of ancient generic markers and that of modern genre theory — in an approach which owes much to the work of Gian Biagio Conte. The language and other characterizing patterns of ancient poetical genres constitute the basic material of this book, but some fundamental theoretical ideas are needed to categorize and order that material. How can we define a literary genre in ancient terms (e.g., should we follow Francis Cairns)? Is the attractive distinction between genres and modes made by Alastair Fowler of use for the poetry of Augustan Rome? The ultimate conclusion of this book is that many poetic genres were profoundly enriched in the Augustan period by close encounters with other genres. The emphasis is on texts and genres rather than authors, since the whole premiss of the study is that generic features, working within an established tradition, are more easily recovered than authorial intentions.
Claude Coste
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197266670
- eISBN:
- 9780191905391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266670.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Would Barthes have carried through to completion his plan to write a novel? The largely unpublished Roland Barthes archive, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, shows clearly that he worked ...
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Would Barthes have carried through to completion his plan to write a novel? The largely unpublished Roland Barthes archive, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, shows clearly that he worked right up to his death on his Vita nova project. What is less known is that another project entered into competition with it. In the last months of his life, Barthes was hesitating between writing a fictional work or writing the literary history he referred to as ‘Notre littérature’ (Our literature). The existence and gestation of this project, which can be traced in Barthes’s fichier, offers an illuminating example of this filing-system at work. The fichier can be seen as a curious intellectual object: autonomous and self-renewing, but in constant dialogue with previously published texts; often, these return to their starting point as fiches, before being recycled by Barthes in new contexts. More specifically, this chapter has two aims: first, to present the detail of Barthes’s project of a ‘subjective’ history of French literature, contextualising it within his earlier publications on literary history; second, to analyse his very late hesitation between the two forms of writing he wished to renew – a fictional work or a literary history.Less
Would Barthes have carried through to completion his plan to write a novel? The largely unpublished Roland Barthes archive, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, shows clearly that he worked right up to his death on his Vita nova project. What is less known is that another project entered into competition with it. In the last months of his life, Barthes was hesitating between writing a fictional work or writing the literary history he referred to as ‘Notre littérature’ (Our literature). The existence and gestation of this project, which can be traced in Barthes’s fichier, offers an illuminating example of this filing-system at work. The fichier can be seen as a curious intellectual object: autonomous and self-renewing, but in constant dialogue with previously published texts; often, these return to their starting point as fiches, before being recycled by Barthes in new contexts. More specifically, this chapter has two aims: first, to present the detail of Barthes’s project of a ‘subjective’ history of French literature, contextualising it within his earlier publications on literary history; second, to analyse his very late hesitation between the two forms of writing he wished to renew – a fictional work or a literary history.
Joanna Brooks
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195332919
- eISBN:
- 9780199851263
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332919.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, “the spirit of ...
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The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, “the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust.” This book explores the means by which the very first black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions. While shedding light on the pioneering figures of African American and Native American cultural history—including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant—this work also explores a set of little-known black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals, and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how 18th-century black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.Less
The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, “the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust.” This book explores the means by which the very first black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions. While shedding light on the pioneering figures of African American and Native American cultural history—including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant—this work also explores a set of little-known black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals, and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how 18th-century black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.
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/9780198186328.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter attempts to expose the failures, inadequacies, and limitations of Archaeo–Historicism as a method. It endeavours to establish the limits of its valid application and conclusion. It ...
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This chapter attempts to expose the failures, inadequacies, and limitations of Archaeo–Historicism as a method. It endeavours to establish the limits of its valid application and conclusion. It starts by attempting to disentangle Archaeo–Historicism from ‘literary history’ before moving on to consider some practical problems such as lack of evidence, differences between genres, and then taking up more philosophical issues such as ideology, determinism, and causation.Less
This chapter attempts to expose the failures, inadequacies, and limitations of Archaeo–Historicism as a method. It endeavours to establish the limits of its valid application and conclusion. It starts by attempting to disentangle Archaeo–Historicism from ‘literary history’ before moving on to consider some practical problems such as lack of evidence, differences between genres, and then taking up more philosophical issues such as ideology, determinism, and causation.
Alan Gillis
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199277094
- eISBN:
- 9780191707483
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199277094.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This brief chapter outlines the predominant stereotype of post-Independent Irish culture as stagnated and insular, and then asks why this might be the case given the highly impressive range of Irish ...
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This brief chapter outlines the predominant stereotype of post-Independent Irish culture as stagnated and insular, and then asks why this might be the case given the highly impressive range of Irish writers wielding manuscripts at the time, including James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, George Bernard Shaw, and W. B. Yeats. It proceeds to provide the rationale for the rest of the book’s structure, indicating that its chosen poems will be read as constellations in which aesthetic forms and historical contradictions awaken to one another.Less
This brief chapter outlines the predominant stereotype of post-Independent Irish culture as stagnated and insular, and then asks why this might be the case given the highly impressive range of Irish writers wielding manuscripts at the time, including James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, George Bernard Shaw, and W. B. Yeats. It proceeds to provide the rationale for the rest of the book’s structure, indicating that its chosen poems will be read as constellations in which aesthetic forms and historical contradictions awaken to one another.
Anne E. Monius
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195139990
- eISBN:
- 9780199834501
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195139992.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Buddhism
The nature of the Maṇimēkalai's textual or reading community is considered through an examination of the narrative as a literary work produced in the context of a diverse and multilingual South ...
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The nature of the Maṇimēkalai's textual or reading community is considered through an examination of the narrative as a literary work produced in the context of a diverse and multilingual South Indian literary culture. Through careful reading of the intertextual allusions in the Maṇimēkalai, particularly in relation to the principal themes of an earlier Tamil narrative from which the Buddhist text borrows its central characters and settings, a picture begins to emerge of a textual community of literary connoisseurs who are multilingual, well versed in world views and the literature of various religious communities, and thoroughly engaged in the project of articulating religious identity in a literary and religious landscape of extreme diversity through the medium of ornately sophisticated poetry. The Maṇimēkalai's free appropriation and translation into Tamil of Buddhist narratives and philosophical concepts found in earlier Pāli and Sanskrit transregional sources provides a glimpse of the processes of transmission of a tradition for which no other record exists. In a literary‐cultural context that includes the vehemently anti‐Buddhist invective of the earliest Hindu poet‐saints, such easy switching from transliterated Sanskrit to translated Pāli in the Maṇimēkalai bespeaks a moment in Tamil literary history when language choice did not entail the same cultural, political, or religious allegiance that it would assume by the time of the eleventh‐century Vīracōliyam.Less
The nature of the Maṇimēkalai's textual or reading community is considered through an examination of the narrative as a literary work produced in the context of a diverse and multilingual South Indian literary culture. Through careful reading of the intertextual allusions in the Maṇimēkalai, particularly in relation to the principal themes of an earlier Tamil narrative from which the Buddhist text borrows its central characters and settings, a picture begins to emerge of a textual community of literary connoisseurs who are multilingual, well versed in world views and the literature of various religious communities, and thoroughly engaged in the project of articulating religious identity in a literary and religious landscape of extreme diversity through the medium of ornately sophisticated poetry. The Maṇimēkalai's free appropriation and translation into Tamil of Buddhist narratives and philosophical concepts found in earlier Pāli and Sanskrit transregional sources provides a glimpse of the processes of transmission of a tradition for which no other record exists. In a literary‐cultural context that includes the vehemently anti‐Buddhist invective of the earliest Hindu poet‐saints, such easy switching from transliterated Sanskrit to translated Pāli in the Maṇimēkalai bespeaks a moment in Tamil literary history when language choice did not entail the same cultural, political, or religious allegiance that it would assume by the time of the eleventh‐century Vīracōliyam.
Randall Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195313925
- eISBN:
- 9780199787753
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313925.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century ...
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The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. It examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is an in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction as well as an institutional history of American literary studies in the 20th century. This book is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment — often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled — toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson.Less
The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. It examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is an in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction as well as an institutional history of American literary studies in the 20th century. This book is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment — often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled — toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson.
Anne E. Monius
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195139990
- eISBN:
- 9780199834501
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195139992.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Buddhism
The community of Buddhists imagined within the narrative world of the Maṇimēkalai itself is considered – a community whose locus is not the geographical region of Tamil‐speaking southern India in the ...
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The community of Buddhists imagined within the narrative world of the Maṇimēkalai itself is considered – a community whose locus is not the geographical region of Tamil‐speaking southern India in the narrative present, as might be expected, but rather that of all India and the far‐flung reaches of South‐east Asia in the era of the future Buddha's earthly birth. Focusing on the central role played by the begging bowl that never empties if used in service to the poor, it is argued that the bowl itself signals the coming of the future Buddha and embodies those moral values that will enable the Maṇimēkalai's audience to participate in that glorious community to come. Attention to the central locations of the narrative similarly reveals the text's expansive vision of Buddhist community that involves not only the subcontinent but also an island kingdom somewhere in South‐east Asia. Through reference to other Buddhist literature of this early medieval period, it is argued that the Maṇimēkalai participates in larger Asian patterns of redrawing the Buddhist world, relocating its centers away from the cities of northern India associated with Gautama Buddha and toward new foci of Buddhist activity in South India, Sri Lanka, China, and South‐east Asia.Less
The community of Buddhists imagined within the narrative world of the Maṇimēkalai itself is considered – a community whose locus is not the geographical region of Tamil‐speaking southern India in the narrative present, as might be expected, but rather that of all India and the far‐flung reaches of South‐east Asia in the era of the future Buddha's earthly birth. Focusing on the central role played by the begging bowl that never empties if used in service to the poor, it is argued that the bowl itself signals the coming of the future Buddha and embodies those moral values that will enable the Maṇimēkalai's audience to participate in that glorious community to come. Attention to the central locations of the narrative similarly reveals the text's expansive vision of Buddhist community that involves not only the subcontinent but also an island kingdom somewhere in South‐east Asia. Through reference to other Buddhist literature of this early medieval period, it is argued that the Maṇimēkalai participates in larger Asian patterns of redrawing the Buddhist world, relocating its centers away from the cities of northern India associated with Gautama Buddha and toward new foci of Buddhist activity in South India, Sri Lanka, China, and South‐east Asia.
Philip Lutgendorf
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- May 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195309225
- eISBN:
- 9780199785391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195309225.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Hinduism
This chapter provides annotations for each of the forty tales recounted in the previous chapter. These notes trace, when possible, the literary history of each story, examine significant ...
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This chapter provides annotations for each of the forty tales recounted in the previous chapter. These notes trace, when possible, the literary history of each story, examine significant interpretations and variants on it, and provide relevant contextual information, e.g., on the Hindu time scheme of cyclically recurring epochs or yugas. A final section proposes that the complete “biographical” corpus of Hanuman tales may be understood, in part, as an idealized human life-narrative.Less
This chapter provides annotations for each of the forty tales recounted in the previous chapter. These notes trace, when possible, the literary history of each story, examine significant interpretations and variants on it, and provide relevant contextual information, e.g., on the Hindu time scheme of cyclically recurring epochs or yugas. A final section proposes that the complete “biographical” corpus of Hanuman tales may be understood, in part, as an idealized human life-narrative.
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/9781469625362.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
This chapter demonstrates how the historical project of New England regionalism extended beyond the supposed end of that mode's popularity (c. 1915) and into the modernist era. It focuses on the ...
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This chapter demonstrates how the historical project of New England regionalism extended beyond the supposed end of that mode's popularity (c. 1915) and into the modernist era. It focuses on the writings of three women fiction writers left out of accounts of regionalism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Brown, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Each of these writers used New England-based colonial revivalism in her fiction to explore problems of race and queer desires in history. These writers consistently limned the contours of identity in time by portraying women characters as fusing with ghosts of the colonial and Revolutionary-era past. This chapter troubles traditional accounts of literary history by revealing the modernist sensibilities of New England regionalism and its very practice up through the so-called modernist moment.Less
This chapter demonstrates how the historical project of New England regionalism extended beyond the supposed end of that mode's popularity (c. 1915) and into the modernist era. It focuses on the writings of three women fiction writers left out of accounts of regionalism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Brown, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Each of these writers used New England-based colonial revivalism in her fiction to explore problems of race and queer desires in history. These writers consistently limned the contours of identity in time by portraying women characters as fusing with ghosts of the colonial and Revolutionary-era past. This chapter troubles traditional accounts of literary history by revealing the modernist sensibilities of New England regionalism and its very practice up through the so-called modernist moment.
Jon Mee
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183297
- eISBN:
- 9780191674013
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183297.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 18th-century Literature
This book considers William Blake's prophetic books written during the 1790s in the light of the French Revolution controversy raging at the time. His works are shown to be less the expressions of ...
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This book considers William Blake's prophetic books written during the 1790s in the light of the French Revolution controversy raging at the time. His works are shown to be less the expressions of isolated genius than the products of a complex response to the cultural politics of his contemporaries. Blake's work presents a stern challenge to historical criticism. This study aims to meet the challenge by investigating contexts outside the domains of standard literary histories. It traces the distinctive rhetoric of the illuminated books to the French Revolution controversy of the 1790s and Blake's fusion of the diverse currents of radicalism abroad in that decade. The study is supported by original research. Blake emerges from these pages as a ‘bricoleur’ who fused the language of London's popular dissenting culture with the more sceptical radicalism of the Enlightenment. This book presents a more comprehensively politicized picture of Blake than any previous study.Less
This book considers William Blake's prophetic books written during the 1790s in the light of the French Revolution controversy raging at the time. His works are shown to be less the expressions of isolated genius than the products of a complex response to the cultural politics of his contemporaries. Blake's work presents a stern challenge to historical criticism. This study aims to meet the challenge by investigating contexts outside the domains of standard literary histories. It traces the distinctive rhetoric of the illuminated books to the French Revolution controversy of the 1790s and Blake's fusion of the diverse currents of radicalism abroad in that decade. The study is supported by original research. Blake emerges from these pages as a ‘bricoleur’ who fused the language of London's popular dissenting culture with the more sceptical radicalism of the Enlightenment. This book presents a more comprehensively politicized picture of Blake than any previous study.
David Norbrook
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199247189
- eISBN:
- 9780191697647
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199247189.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Poetry
This book has intended to stimulate new research and to raise new questions; it is gratifying how many of those questions have received fuller answers since this book was first published in 1984, ...
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This book has intended to stimulate new research and to raise new questions; it is gratifying how many of those questions have received fuller answers since this book was first published in 1984, though much still remains to be done. At the same time, many areas which are largely or entirely neglected have started to receive a lot of attention. The methodological reasons for these different developments are discussed here. The first edition of this book was an attempt to unite literary and historical studies, a process that hopefully will continue to be aspired to.Less
This book has intended to stimulate new research and to raise new questions; it is gratifying how many of those questions have received fuller answers since this book was first published in 1984, though much still remains to be done. At the same time, many areas which are largely or entirely neglected have started to receive a lot of attention. The methodological reasons for these different developments are discussed here. The first edition of this book was an attempt to unite literary and historical studies, a process that hopefully will continue to be aspired to.
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.
Andreas Willi
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199245475
- eISBN:
- 9780191714993
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245475.003.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter identifies the conceptual links between the different chapters in this book. It attempts to help further research along similar lines by presenting in separated paragraphs some of the ...
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This chapter identifies the conceptual links between the different chapters in this book. It attempts to help further research along similar lines by presenting in separated paragraphs some of the work that has been done by others. It also provides a literary history of comic form and expression.Less
This chapter identifies the conceptual links between the different chapters in this book. It attempts to help further research along similar lines by presenting in separated paragraphs some of the work that has been done by others. It also provides a literary history of comic form and expression.
Elaine Showalter
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198123835
- eISBN:
- 9780191671616
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198123835.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This book addresses some ‘American’ questions about the history, traditions, and contradictions of American women's writing, but it also questions the idea that the multi-cultural reality of the ...
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This book addresses some ‘American’ questions about the history, traditions, and contradictions of American women's writing, but it also questions the idea that the multi-cultural reality of the present can continue to assume a monolithic national identity with a given relation to gender and literary production. The national stereotypes which have played a significant role in feminist metacriticism can no longer be accepted. Reading the examples of the ‘American feminist critic’ cited in various surveys, it is difficult to determine the terms of definition. It also expands the meaning and practice of gynocriticism with reference to American women's writing. As the writing becomes part of the common heritage of American men as well as women, as through translation and dissemination it influences readers and writers far from the United States, American women's writing ceases to be an own literature. It is in this paradox that the new literary history begins.Less
This book addresses some ‘American’ questions about the history, traditions, and contradictions of American women's writing, but it also questions the idea that the multi-cultural reality of the present can continue to assume a monolithic national identity with a given relation to gender and literary production. The national stereotypes which have played a significant role in feminist metacriticism can no longer be accepted. Reading the examples of the ‘American feminist critic’ cited in various surveys, it is difficult to determine the terms of definition. It also expands the meaning and practice of gynocriticism with reference to American women's writing. As the writing becomes part of the common heritage of American men as well as women, as through translation and dissemination it influences readers and writers far from the United States, American women's writing ceases to be an own literature. It is in this paradox that the new literary history begins.
Ann Jefferson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199270842
- eISBN:
- 9780191710292
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199270842.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter tracks the increasing awareness of the evolutionary character of literature that emerges in the latter part of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th. The discussion of genius ...
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This chapter tracks the increasing awareness of the evolutionary character of literature that emerges in the latter part of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th. The discussion of genius (e.g., Marmontel, Mercier, Condillac, Diderot) tends to present it as a dynamic, mould-breaking quality moving literature towards the future. As a result, a new kind of literary history emerges that treats literature as developing in the manner of a human being, and in ways that invite parallels between individual biography and institutional history. Mme de Staël's De la littérature is one of the first examples of this quasi-biographical kind of literary history and it contrasts with the predominantly retrospective account given in La Harpe's Lycée. The idea of a national literature treated in De l'Allemagne supports the conflation of the individual and the collective. Hugo's Préface de Cromwell also uses a quasi-biographical model for its account of the history of literature since its origins, but where Mme de Staël adopts a largely pedagogical perspective, Hugo constructs a thoroughly organic account of a life-cycle which progresses from birth to death to rebirth, and in which literature is constantly recreated and reinvented.Less
This chapter tracks the increasing awareness of the evolutionary character of literature that emerges in the latter part of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th. The discussion of genius (e.g., Marmontel, Mercier, Condillac, Diderot) tends to present it as a dynamic, mould-breaking quality moving literature towards the future. As a result, a new kind of literary history emerges that treats literature as developing in the manner of a human being, and in ways that invite parallels between individual biography and institutional history. Mme de Staël's De la littérature is one of the first examples of this quasi-biographical kind of literary history and it contrasts with the predominantly retrospective account given in La Harpe's Lycée. The idea of a national literature treated in De l'Allemagne supports the conflation of the individual and the collective. Hugo's Préface de Cromwell also uses a quasi-biographical model for its account of the history of literature since its origins, but where Mme de Staël adopts a largely pedagogical perspective, Hugo constructs a thoroughly organic account of a life-cycle which progresses from birth to death to rebirth, and in which literature is constantly recreated and reinvented.
Christopher Shackle
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780198078012
- eISBN:
- 9780199080984
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198078012.003.0016
- Subject:
- History, Indian History
The chapter offers a critique of the continuing influence of Lajwanti Rama Krishna’s pioneering English-language monograph Panjabi Sufi Poets (1938). It is argued that consequent misunderstandings of ...
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The chapter offers a critique of the continuing influence of Lajwanti Rama Krishna’s pioneering English-language monograph Panjabi Sufi Poets (1938). It is argued that consequent misunderstandings of both pre-modern Punjabi literary history and of the Islamic character of early Punjabi Sufi poetry may be corrected by taking account of comparative evidence, including the better preserved later textual and hagiographic materials which are available for the major Sufi poets of the nineteenth century. The comparison with early Sindhi literature is used to illuminate the character of the first Punjabi Sufi poetry by Farid. It is then argued that the major poets of the Mughal period (Shah Husain, Sultan Bahu, and Bullhe Shah) are each to be understood in their own terms, as Sufis rather than as exponents of some universalized Indian spiritual understanding.Less
The chapter offers a critique of the continuing influence of Lajwanti Rama Krishna’s pioneering English-language monograph Panjabi Sufi Poets (1938). It is argued that consequent misunderstandings of both pre-modern Punjabi literary history and of the Islamic character of early Punjabi Sufi poetry may be corrected by taking account of comparative evidence, including the better preserved later textual and hagiographic materials which are available for the major Sufi poets of the nineteenth century. The comparison with early Sindhi literature is used to illuminate the character of the first Punjabi Sufi poetry by Farid. It is then argued that the major poets of the Mughal period (Shah Husain, Sultan Bahu, and Bullhe Shah) are each to be understood in their own terms, as Sufis rather than as exponents of some universalized Indian spiritual understanding.
Dayton Haskin
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199212422
- eISBN:
- 9780191707216
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199212422.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
In the decade before T. S. Eliot matriculated at Harvard University, several graduates who had studied with Dean Briggs brought John Donne into the curriculum of other US colleges. By the time that ...
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In the decade before T. S. Eliot matriculated at Harvard University, several graduates who had studied with Dean Briggs brought John Donne into the curriculum of other US colleges. By the time that Eliot heard Briggs's lecture in 1907, however, the study of Donne at Harvard was on the decline. These developments — the spread of Donne studies beyond Harvard and the waning of Donne's reputation in the University where he had been made a substantial academic subject — created apt conditions for Eliot to display his individual talent a decade later as he began engaging in a neglected literary tradition in which Donne had played a central part. As Anne Ferry has shrewdly observed, even before Eliot began writing about Donne, he had imagined a future anthology, in which readers would discover in a poem such as ‘Whispers of Immortality’ a long delayed coupling between the dead writers of the 17th century and the living modern verse in which they assert their immortality.Less
In the decade before T. S. Eliot matriculated at Harvard University, several graduates who had studied with Dean Briggs brought John Donne into the curriculum of other US colleges. By the time that Eliot heard Briggs's lecture in 1907, however, the study of Donne at Harvard was on the decline. These developments — the spread of Donne studies beyond Harvard and the waning of Donne's reputation in the University where he had been made a substantial academic subject — created apt conditions for Eliot to display his individual talent a decade later as he began engaging in a neglected literary tradition in which Donne had played a central part. As Anne Ferry has shrewdly observed, even before Eliot began writing about Donne, he had imagined a future anthology, in which readers would discover in a poem such as ‘Whispers of Immortality’ a long delayed coupling between the dead writers of the 17th century and the living modern verse in which they assert their immortality.
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.
ALDA BLANCO
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198158868
- eISBN:
- 9780191673399
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198158868.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter charts the critical tradition's transformation of women as subjects of writing and reading into objects of blame and their subsequent exclusion from the text of literary history. That ...
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This chapter charts the critical tradition's transformation of women as subjects of writing and reading into objects of blame and their subsequent exclusion from the text of literary history. That women should be the ones to bear the burden of blame should come as no surprise. However, to invoke misogyny alone as an explanation of José Montesinos's indictment of the woman reader is not enough. Misogyny cannot explain a critical tradition which, from the outset, relentlessly, and maybe even obsessively, inscribed the figure of woman into its discourse as its object of blame. Rather, the chapter suggests that by mapping out the discursive underpinnings of the ideological project of Spanish literary scholarship with relation to gender, one can begin to elucidate the original nexus that forged its construction.Less
This chapter charts the critical tradition's transformation of women as subjects of writing and reading into objects of blame and their subsequent exclusion from the text of literary history. That women should be the ones to bear the burden of blame should come as no surprise. However, to invoke misogyny alone as an explanation of José Montesinos's indictment of the woman reader is not enough. Misogyny cannot explain a critical tradition which, from the outset, relentlessly, and maybe even obsessively, inscribed the figure of woman into its discourse as its object of blame. Rather, the chapter suggests that by mapping out the discursive underpinnings of the ideological project of Spanish literary scholarship with relation to gender, one can begin to elucidate the original nexus that forged its construction.
