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Ecocriticism in its early years was more appreciative than truly critical. It was hostile to literary theory, which it found overly skeptical and needlessly abstruse, and against which it urged a revival of literary realism. Ecocritics argued for the realism of verbal representation of the natural world, and called for nature writing (both poetry and prose) to be taken seriously as an art form, one with its own tradition of greatness, especially in the United States. Ecocritics focused their attention on the typical features of American nature writing, such as its celebration of subjectivity, and especially of individual sensory experience or, more narrowly, of perception; its attempts to merge culture with nature; and, paradoxically, the conviction of many of its authors (and readers) that culture and nature are separated by a gulf that poses a grave ontological and epistemological obstacle, one cutting human beings off from the natural world. Ironically, in their attempts to make sense of these features of American nature writing while avoiding the traps set by contemporary academic culture, ecocritics inevitably had to rely on terms and concepts that were either implicitly or explicitly theoretical, which some of them were trying very hard to avoid having to do. The bulk of this chapter (which closes with a reading of Petersons field guide to birds, ostensibly a realist text) is devoted to a critique of ecocritical monographs by Joseph Meeker, John Elder, and Lawrence Buell, monographs in which notions borrowed from scientific and literary theory including notions of adÈquation, evolution, ecosystem ecology, the pastoral, poetics, epiphany, prophetic speech, landscape, place, and mimesis are used, generally unsuccessfully, to shore up some flawed though well-intentioned arguments on behalf of environmental literature.

This chapter focuses on literary interpretation, in the sense of an account of what a work of literature means; and interpretation involved in performance, whether of musical or dramatic works. Both forms of interpretation involve efforts to attribute meaning and significance to underlying texts, but performers, unlike critics, actually replicate the texts for audiences. Within the law, judges may seem to resemble performers more than critics, although their applications of texts to concrete circumstances are not repetitions of the words of the texts but decisions about what consequences they entail. Legal scholars often aim at recommendations about desirable interpretations, but not all legal scholarship takes that form. Some scholarly explanations and critiques do not focus on how judges might best interpret legal texts.

This introductory chapter discusses briefly the history of the study of Egyptian literature, highlighting how broader developments in the theory of literature have come to be applied within Egyptology, and outlining the significant interpretative issues that still remain. This is particularly acute when studying a civilisation such as Ancient Egypt, with an only fragmentarily preserved literate culture, and no continuous tradition of reception to condition modern engagement with the ancient texts. The chapter reviews the approaches taken by contributors to the volume, and evaluates how they relate to recent developments in the application of theoretically informed approaches to Egyptian texts. The range of topics covered demonstrates the vitality and diversity of current Egyptological engagement with Ancient Egyptian texts.

This chapter discusses aspects of Egyptian ‘fine literature’ (belles-lettres), and combines general literary and cultural-scientific theoretical considerations with specific case studies from both Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian literature. It addresses questions of form and function, producers and recipients, as well as discussing the search for empirical readers. Also discussed are the question of original manuscripts and the potential significance of writing errors.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to demonstrate that there existed for a period of time in the nineteenth century a literary theory called ‘the physiology of the novel’. It traces: its most important practitioners; its central texts and influences; its methodological peculiarities tendencies, and blind spots; its critical protocols; and its thoroughly reciprocal impact upon the novels produced during its most influential period. The chapter then discusses some axioms for physiological novel theory and the social norms of cognition. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter proposes a coherent and strong formulation of the Propositional Theory of Literary Truth. A Propositional Theory of Literary Truth could be formulated as follows: the literary work contains or implies general thematic statements about the world which the reader as part of an appreciation of the work has to assess as true or false. The theory presents two claims. First, a literary work implies propositions which can be construed as general propositions about the world. Second, these propositions are to be construed as involved in true or false claims about the world.

This chapter explores some major issues in developing a model for the study of metaphor as a literary category. Purely structural categorization should be supplemented with sensitivity to context in the operation of metaphor. Central to the purpose of metaphor are the judgements they imply, and their use to create vocabulary for new fields of thought thus throws useful light on how those fields are viewed. Ancient personifications of rhetoric as a woman are used as a case study.

This chapter explores physiological novel theory's vexed relation with notions of ‘organic form’ by examining the discourse of psychophysics, a theory of the discrete building-blocks of consciousness, and how its description of ‘units of consciousness’ made older notions of organic wholeness untenable, as reflected in both Vernon Lee's essays on the novel form and George Meredith's ostentatiously fragmented The Egoist (1879).

First-generation ecocriticism often originated in an epiphany, which tended to occur when desk-bound professors of literature suddenly rediscovered the natural world and found it not only refreshing, but also morally superior to, and more real than, texts and ideas. Ironically, this epiphany only led many of those who experienced it to feel a renewed concern with verbal representation, which soon emerged as a central issue in ecocriticism as many ecocritics embraced some version of literary realism or another, and as they rejected outright the skeptical insights about mimesis offered by contemporary literary theory and the philosophical tradition. This was a mistake, since figuration and not representation is essential to literature, especially to the pastoral, which some ecocritics argued ought to be revived in order to counter the corrosive influence of postmodernism. Yet because environments are not spaces (or landscapes) but hyperspaces (which contain innumerable niches or “multidimensional hypervolumes”), the world described by ecological science is, at least in this one aspect, more like the vertiginous world of hyperreality described by postmodernism than first-generation ecocritics realized. An eclectic pragmatism, one taking its cues not only from William James and other philosophers but also from cultural critics like Umberto Eco and Bruno Latour, offers a way to make use of the ideas of seemingly opposed parties in the debate over “the truth of ecology” and the fate of “nature-culture”, and to do so without resorting to long-discredited ideas about the relation of words to the world.

Postwar New American poets and their successors, the Language Writers, insisted that their poetry was capable of intellectual inquiry. After giving examples of their claims for poetry, the chapter sets out the book’s methodological assumptions. Literary theory has struggled to represent adequately the interrelations between science and poetry because it has not engaged with the epistemological claims of the sciences. Yet science is part of the DNA of modern literary theory. One major theme of the book is how poets attempted to develop new poetic epistemologies. Science envy has been attributed to the early-twentieth-century modernist poets, but the book argues that the picture is more complex in the postwar era. Many disciplines employed methods and concepts from physics, seeing this not as physics envy but as intellectual opportunity. The book then maps out schematically the different kinds of responses made by postwar American poets of all kinds to the sciences. It goes on to show how some of these responses had antecedents among modernist predecessors. Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Einstein” is discussed in detail because of its representative character. The importance of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound for later poets is discussed.

This chapter considers how Wyatt’s poetry was received and renewed. John Leland and Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey) commemorate Wyatt’s literary activities by reweaving echoes from his writing in their laments. These acts of verbal reuse and textual renewal are located in a broader paradigm, which draws upon theories of literary practice in the early sixteenth century. The chapter discusses the impact of Erasmian hermeneutics, Reformation theology, pedagogic methods, and humanist strategies of translation on the literary practice and ‘grammar’ which underwrite Wyatt’s texts. Wyatt’s writing—especially his two prose apologias—can be understood against the backdrop of a shift from a referential to a relational semiotics; an Erasmian appeal to usage; invitations for readers to construct meaning by collating texts; a literary theory predicated on the unfolding of infolded meaning; and the practice of readerly rewriting by which the introduction of new text performs or reifies extant words