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Conclusion

Bart van Es

in Spenser’s Forms of History

This chapter discusses that the book tried to place Edmund Spenser in the context of different and coexisting conceptions of the past, particularly those influenced by religious, nationalistic, and ... More

This chapter discusses that the book tried to place Edmund Spenser in the context of different and coexisting conceptions of the past, particularly those influenced by religious, nationalistic, and scholarly perspectives on history. It investigates Early Modern England's absorption, use, and critical awareness of diverse modes of historical narrative, and argues for the significance of these modes in determining the writer's or reader's outlook on distant events. It illustrates the ways in which the poet engaged with the languages of history surrounding him. It concludes that the poet has a profound, playful, and above all, multiform sense of the past for he was deeply knowledgeable about the historical writing of his day—using it extensively across the full range of his literary production.Less

Popularization of Culture and the Bourgeois Trend

Amina Elbendary

in Crowds and Sultans: Urban Protest in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria

This chapter focuses on the popularization of literature and historiography and the development of the bourgeois trend during the Mamluk period. It first considers the factors behind the ... More

This chapter focuses on the popularization of literature and historiography and the development of the bourgeois trend during the Mamluk period. It first considers the factors behind the popularization of culture and cultural production in the Mamluk sultanate before discussing the collective experiences of urban dwellers and their cultural manifestations, along with the link between social mobility and the bourgeois trend. It then examines changes in Mamluk culture, the rise of new types of patronage and new audiences for popular poetry, the spread of literacy, the emergence of middling classes and of new audiences for written literature, and the increased importance of Sufism. It also describes various manifestations of popularization in written cultural and literary production and compares the Egyptian and Syrian schools of medieval historiography. Finally, it looks at the so-called “civic interest” that connects many of the late Mamluk and early Ottoman historical writings.Less

Introduction: Guilty Pleasures

Matt Erlin

in Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770-1815

This book examines the field of literary production and the culture of consumption in Germany between 1770 and 1815 in relation to luxury and the fine arts. Drawing on recent work done in German and ... More

This book examines the field of literary production and the culture of consumption in Germany between 1770 and 1815 in relation to luxury and the fine arts. Drawing on recent work done in German and British studies on both consumer culture in a narrower sense and the interface between literature and political economy more generally, the book analyzes the discursive and material contexts that shape the novel during the period. It offers a new perspective on the broader trajectory of German literature by exploring how deeply preoccupied artists and especially authors are with their status as luxury producers. It also discusses the structural and rhetorical features of literary works by reading the novels of Joachim Heinrich Campe, Christoph Martin Wieland, Karl Philipp Moritz, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Novalis.Less

Conclusion

Tobias Boes

in Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

This concluding chapter considers the continuing importance of Thomas Mann in the world republic of letters. It explains how the parameters that conditioned Mann's rise to the status of literary ... More

This concluding chapter considers the continuing importance of Thomas Mann in the world republic of letters. It explains how the parameters that conditioned Mann's rise to the status of literary celebrity and antifascist icon in the United States of the 1930s and 1940s foreshadowed developments in the world republic of letters. These developments, moreover, did not fully come to fruition until after the Second World War. Furthermore, they continue to affect global literary production in the twenty-first century. In many respects, Thomas Mann was a forerunner for experiences that have become commonplace for writers in our own day, especially those that hail from the periphery of the global literary community.Less

The Book and the Voice

in The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship

Throughout his works, Jerome makes constant reference to his reliance on stenographers to take dictation as he composes. In a few texts he reports that his assistants also read to him. These modes of ... More

Throughout his works, Jerome makes constant reference to his reliance on stenographers to take dictation as he composes. In a few texts he reports that his assistants also read to him. These modes of literacy have complex associations within Jerome's own texts. In the context of his broader social milieu, they mark his mode of literary production as elite, even aristocratic. His command of skilled assistants implied that he had the resources to pay them, or at least to support them. His emphasis on their presence drew attention to the similarities between the way he wrote and the habits that elite authors had developed over centuries.Less

Woolf’s Aesthetics of Potentiality

Ewa Płonowska Ziarek

in Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

This chapter situates the transformative capacity of literature—its ability to contest gender domination, imperialism, and the gendered division of labor—in relation to women's political aspirations ... More

This chapter situates the transformative capacity of literature—its ability to contest gender domination, imperialism, and the gendered division of labor—in relation to women's political aspirations to freedom. Conversely, this class, gender, and racist domination also threatens the very possibility of art even before its inception. In fact, Woolf's imaginary history of women's literary production begins with the utter destruction of women's art and their bodies—a destruction internalized as madness, melancholia, and resentment. It is only by bearing witness to both the destruction of women's artistic capacities and women's revolutionary aspirations for political and economic freedom that feminist aesthetics can inaugurate new possibilities of writing and passionate relations between women.Less

Introduction: Science as Literature

in The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856

This introductory chapter first discusses how, in the early nineteenth century in Britain, the new science of geology was publicized in spectacular and theatrical forms that enabled it to gain the ... More

This introductory chapter first discusses how, in the early nineteenth century in Britain, the new science of geology was publicized in spectacular and theatrical forms that enabled it to gain the cultural authority it enjoys today. Performance was central to the public face of earth science. Its adherents pulled off an imaginative coup by giving their public tantalizing glimpses of an earth history far longer and stranger than the story of a literal six-day Creation which had held sway over much of that public at the turn of the century. This was no easy task. The new narrative had to compete not only with the Book of Genesis, but also with centuries of sacred-historical tradition, of which John Milton's epic poem of Creation and Fall, Paradise Lost (1667), was only the most prestigious expression. Rather than assaulting this potent body of narrative head-on, proponents of the new science turned it to their own ends, “justify[ing] the ways of God to men” by forging a new Creation-myth for an imperial age. Popularization took many forms, including lectures, exhibitions, and even custom-built geological museums. But it was in their literary productions—in books, journals, magazines, and newspapers—that these geologists and their followers reached most of their increasingly variegated public. This book aims to show how the truth-claims of public science have been supported by (and expressed within) structures that we are used to thinking of as fundamentally opposed to scientific procedure. By examining science as literature, rather than science and literature, it hopes to complicate some of the oppositions to which the latter duality has given rise.Less

Post-Manichaean Aesthetics: Asian Texts and Lives

Gaurav Desai

in Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination

This chapter first considers Franz Fanon's account of the workings of colonialism. He refers to the colonial world as a “Manichean world” where the settler does not only delimit physically the place ... More

This chapter first considers Franz Fanon's account of the workings of colonialism. He refers to the colonial world as a “Manichean world” where the settler does not only delimit physically the place of the native, but paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. This vision resonated with the experiences of a number of colonized intellectuals and writers who, in the Africa of the fifties and early sixties, fought against the oppressive restrictions of colonial society in the hopes of creating a socially just, independent future. Of the many literary critics that Fanon inspired, perhaps the most influential was Abdul Jan Mohamed, whose 1983 study Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa sought to articulate a sociopolitical theory of literary production that took into account the binary divisions of the colonial world that Fanon had previously laid out. The remainder of the chapter traces the genealogy of Asian-African creative production in the twentieth century, accounting for some of the silences and self-censorship undertaken by the community.Less

Exteriority: Women Readers at the British Museum

Susan David Bernstein

in Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf

This chapter sets out the book's two central arguments: first, it shows that the British Museum Round Reading Room facilitated various practices of women's literary production and tradition; second, ... More

This chapter sets out the book's two central arguments: first, it shows that the British Museum Round Reading Room facilitated various practices of women's literary production and tradition; second, it questions the overdetermined value of privacy and autonomy in constructions of female authorship. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary events, the book considers the public and social dimensions of literary production. Drawing on archival materials around this national library reading room the book also integrates historical, theoretical, literary, and documentary sources to examine the significance of this space for women writers and their treatment of reading and writing spaces, and more broadly the meaning of communal spaces.Less

Epilog: After the American Renaissance

Günter Leypoldt

in Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective

This chapter reviews the American-Renaissance construction, which lost a lot of its credibility during the 1960s and 1970s, looking at the post-Kantian Whitmanian moment, and describing Whitman's ... More

This chapter reviews the American-Renaissance construction, which lost a lot of its credibility during the 1960s and 1970s, looking at the post-Kantian Whitmanian moment, and describing Whitman's image of the American poetry. It suggests that reductionism can be solved if one views literary production as a kind of imaginary world-making that cuts across strict world–art oppositions, such as socio-political expressiveness versus stylistic artistry.Less

The Professionalization of Authorship

Graham Law

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820-1880

This chapter examines changes in both the profession of authorship and the publishing trade in Britain the nineteenth century. It charts the tension between conflicting concepts of authorship and ... More

This chapter examines changes in both the profession of authorship and the publishing trade in Britain the nineteenth century. It charts the tension between conflicting concepts of authorship and developments in intellectual property and literary journalism under three headings: ‘Novelists and literary property’, concerning copyright in theory and practice; ‘Novelists as journalists’, on the interface between periodical publication and literary production; and, finally, ‘The novel of the author’, regarding the incorporation of themes and scenes of authorship and publishing into works of fiction themselves.Less

Faulkner’s Figures: Speech, Writing, and The Marionettes

Serena Haygood Blount

in Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text

This chapter examines William Faulkner’s early experiments with texts and textuality in his play The Marionettes as a training ground for an aesthetic intensely concerned with “meditations on ... More

This chapter examines William Faulkner’s early experiments with texts and textuality in his play The Marionettes as a training ground for an aesthetic intensely concerned with “meditations on language and literary production.” It analyzes the dynamics of the characters, Pierrot and Shade of Pierrot, Marietta and the Marionettes, as well as the complex and contradictory relationship between these figures. The chapter shows how Faulkner makes visible their emptiness and status as characters in language. It also considers Faulkner’s use of calligraphy and illustration, which turns him into a mime of Aubrey Beardsley, and explains how the returns of the text signify the inscriptions and reinscriptions of character.Less

Hustlers in the House of Literature: Julian Mayfield, Chester Himes, and the Black Literary Ghetto

in Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African American Popular Culture

This chapter examines African American literature in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. It analyzes the overlooked works of Julian Mayfield and Chester Himes and provides new insights into the ... More

This chapter examines African American literature in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. It analyzes the overlooked works of Julian Mayfield and Chester Himes and provides new insights into the crises confronting the more canonized members of the black literati during this period. The chapter suggests that popular literary production of African American writers was designed to decenter the dominant understanding of the period and its cultural meaning for black America, and that that anti-institutional character of ghetto-centric writing contradicted efforts toward integration.Less

Introduction: The Voice of Lavinia

John Watkins

in After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy

This book examines the role of marriage in the formation, maintenance, and disintegration of a premodern European diplomatic society. The argument develops in dialogue with the so-called English ... More

This book examines the role of marriage in the formation, maintenance, and disintegration of a premodern European diplomatic society. The argument develops in dialogue with the so-called English school of international relations theory, with its emphasis on the contemporary international system as a society of states sharing certain values, norms, and common interests rather than as an anarchy driven solely by power struggles. In studying the place of marriage diplomacy in questions of monarchical and national sovereignty, the book draws on interdisciplinary methodologies that have long characterized academic studies of queenship and, more recently, European diplomatic culture. It begins with Virgil, whose epic tells the story of Aeneas's marriage to Lavinia—the paradigmatic interdynastic marriage. It also considers the inseparability of marriage diplomacy from literary production. Finally, it discusses the factors that precipitated the disintegration of marriage diplomacy, including new technologies of print and the large public theaters for promoting diplomatic literacy.Less

Vibrant Commonalities and the Yugoslav Legacy: A Few Remarks

Gordana P. Crnković

in After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land

While political elites and new governments continue to assert the distinctiveness of the Yugoslav successor states and the nonconnection with a shared Yugoslav past, the art created in the region in ... More

While political elites and new governments continue to assert the distinctiveness of the Yugoslav successor states and the nonconnection with a shared Yugoslav past, the art created in the region in the last two decades seems to frequently make, assume, and even emphasize these connections. This chapter offers a brief sample catalog of such works and the ways in which they enact the above connections, including references to Yugoslav-era works (of the other independent states) in post-Yugoslav literary and cinematic production, and the common interstate connections in post-Yugoslav cinema production. The chapter also points to one feature discernible in select contemporary literature and cinema that could be identified as an aspect rooted in the region’s connection with its Yugoslav past. Finally, the author mentions some of the most literal instances of bringing back, retrieving, and reactivating the Yugoslav intellectual and artistic past into the present.Less

A Meteorological Journal of the Mind

Alan D. Hodder

in Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness

This chapter focuses on Thoreau's journals, the first nearly complete edition of which was published in 1906. The earliest journals, especially those kept from the fall of 1837 till about the end of ... More

This chapter focuses on Thoreau's journals, the first nearly complete edition of which was published in 1906. The earliest journals, especially those kept from the fall of 1837 till about the end of 1839, seem to have functioned as a sort of showcase or commonplace book for reading notes, poems, and a series of fairly polished mini-essays, often headed with brief titles, on a wide array of topics. Beginning, however, around May of 1850, the journal no longer functioned primarily as a staging area for other writings but as a principal mode of literary production in and of itself.Less

Between Innovation and Conservatism

Avraham Grossman

in Rashi

This chapter explores the innovations that Rashi introduced. There is a degree of innovation in the attention Rashi devoted to interpreting the Bible and liturgical poems, in the breadth of his ... More

This chapter explores the innovations that Rashi introduced. There is a degree of innovation in the attention Rashi devoted to interpreting the Bible and liturgical poems, in the breadth of his interpretative effort, and in the very transformation of the interpretative genre into the central intellectual activity within the Jewish society of his time—at first in France and Germany and ultimately beyond them. However, Rashi's four most important innovations are in the area of education. First is the openness and willingness to accept Torah teachings from all the Jewish centres in Europe and the Muslim lands, including Babylonia, the Land of Israel, Italy, Germany, Provence, and Spain. Second is critical analysis, while the third is Rashi's encouragement of literary production by students while they were still students. Fourth is his attitude to custom. In his willingness to abrogate some customs, Rashi took an independent path at odds with those of his contemporary Ashkenazi sages. The chapter then considers how Rashi attained his historic status.Less