The Rise of English Literary History

The Rise of English Literary History PDF Author: Rene Wellek
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781469613161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The value of this readable account lies in the perspective it gives on the long process that established modern historical sense and the understanding of literary change and development. Though not primarily a history of English scholarship, careful attention has been given the rediscovery of early literature, history of critical thought, and the linguistic science in the eighteenth century. Originally published in 1941. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The Rise of English Literary History

The Rise of English Literary History PDF Author: Rene Wellek
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781469613161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The value of this readable account lies in the perspective it gives on the long process that established modern historical sense and the understanding of literary change and development. Though not primarily a history of English scholarship, careful attention has been given the rediscovery of early literature, history of critical thought, and the linguistic science in the eighteenth century. Originally published in 1941. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Romanticism and the Rise of English

Romanticism and the Rise of English PDF Author: Andrew Elfenbein
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804769893
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 Romanticism and the Rise of English addresses a peculiar development in contemporary literary criticism: the disappearance of the history of the English language as a relevant topic. Elfenbein argues for a return not to older modes of criticism, but to questions about the relation between literature and language that have vanished from contemporary investigation. His book is an example of a kind of work that has often been called for but rarely realized—a social philology that takes seriously the formal and institutional forces shaping the production of English. This results not only in a history of English, but also in a recovery of major events shaping English studies as a coherent discipline. This book points to new directions in literary criticism by arguing for the need to reconceptualize authorial agency in light of a broadened understanding of linguistic history.

The Routledge History of Literature in English

The Routledge History of Literature in English PDF Author: Ronald Carter
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415243179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 598

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Book Description
This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.

Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism

Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism PDF Author: Bryan M. Santin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108974236
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Bryan M. Santin examines over a half-century of intersection between American fiction and postwar conservatism. He traces the shifting racial politics of movement conservatism to argue that contemporary perceptions of literary form and aesthetic value are intrinsically connected to the rise of the American Right. Instead of casting postwar conservatives as cynical hustlers or ideological fanatics, Santin shows how the long-term rhetorical shift in conservative notions of literary value and prestige reveal an aesthetic antinomy between high culture and low culture. This shift, he argues, registered and mediated the deeper foundational antinomy structuring postwar conservatism itself: the stable social order of traditionalism and the creative destruction of free-market capitalism. Postwar conservatives produced, in effect, an ambivalent double register in the discourse of conservative literary taste that sought to celebrate neo-aristocratic manifestations of cultural capital while condemning newer, more progressive manifestations revolving around racial and ethnic diversity.

Why Literary Periods Mattered

Why Literary Periods Mattered PDF Author: Ted Underwood
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804788448
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In the mid-nineteenth century, the study of English literature began to be divided into courses that surveyed discrete "periods." Since that time, scholars' definitions of literature and their rationales for teaching it have changed radically. But the periodized structure of the curriculum has remained oddly unshaken, as if the exercise of contrasting one literary period with another has an importance that transcends the content of any individual course. Why Literary Periods Mattered explains how historical contrast became central to literary study, and why it remained institutionally central in spite of critical controversy about literature itself. Organizing literary history around contrast rather than causal continuity helped literature departments separate themselves from departments of history. But critics' long reliance on a rhetoric of contrasted movements and fateful turns has produced important blind spots in the discipline. In the twenty-first century, Underwood argues, literary study may need digital technology in particular to develop new methods of reasoning about gradual, continuous change.

History of English Literature from Beowulf to Swinburne

History of English Literature from Beowulf to Swinburne PDF Author: Andrew Lang
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 0809532298
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 710

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Book Description
Andrew Lang's survey of English literature is a remarkably thorough look at the history of English writing, covering authors from Abbot Adamnan to Edward Young, and everyone of note in between.

The Rise and Fall of Meter

The Rise and Fall of Meter PDF Author: Meredith Martin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069115273X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, "English meter" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline. The Rise and Fall of Meter tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.

Lost Property

Lost Property PDF Author: Jennifer Summit
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226780122
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The English literary canon is haunted by the figure of the lost woman writer. In our own age, she has been a powerful stimulus for the rediscovery of works written by women. But as Jennifer Summit argues, "the lost woman writer" also served as an evocative symbol during the very formation of an English literary tradition from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Lost Property traces the representation of women writers from Margery Kempe and Christine de Pizan to Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, exploring how the woman writer became a focal point for emerging theories of literature and authorship in English precisely because of her perceived alienation from tradition. Through original archival research and readings of key literary texts, Summit writes a new history of the woman writer that reflects the impact of such developments as the introduction of printing, the Reformation, and the rise of the English court as a literary center. A major rethinking of the place of women writers in the histories of books, authorship, and canon-formation, Lost Property demonstrates that, rather than being an unimaginable anomaly, the idea of the woman writer played a key role in the invention of English literature.

Institutionalizing English Literature

Institutionalizing English Literature PDF Author: Franklin E. Court
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804720434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
"This book has a dual purpose. First, it presents a detailed historical record of how the academic discipline of English literary study began in British universities. It traces the process of academic legitimation and autonomy from Adam Smith, who first offered formal university lectures on English literature, between 1748 and 1751, to the formation of the Oxford English School by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1904." "Much of this material is drawn directly from the lives and careers of the prominent professors who were the avatars of the new discipline. The author examines pedagogical practices, programmatic decisions, and shifting political currents of academic fashion. The primary focus is on two institutions, the University of Edinburgh and University College, London. Not only were they in the forefront in the initial disciplinary formation of English literary study, they were both especially sensitive registers of continually changing ideological imperatives and scholarly trends." "The second purpose of the book is to demonstrate, to those who consider the politicization of literary study a contemporary plague, that political ideologies and ethnocentric parochialism have consistently determined the historical development of the discipline, and that the institutional history of English literary study is largely a history of ideological and racial controversy. Though basically historical in its methodology, the book extends into areas of general literary criticism and cultural theory, examining how an interdisciplinary network of relations created the political climates and shaped the scholarly trends that determined the discipline's history." "The record of the genesis of English literary study is in part a record of major institutional commitments, of the publication of definitive critical works, of the shaping of a teachable canon of literary works, and of the vibrant and colorful personalities who left their marks on generations of students. But as this book shows, the full record also includes other traces of the past: salary disputes, professional jealousies and conflicts, conflicting pedagogical visions, British racial distinctions, economic constraints, the marketing of books, committee bureaucracies, degree requirements, political demagoguery, social and religious pressures, and many others."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism PDF Author: Joanne Parker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191648264
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 709

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Book Description
In 1859, the historian Lord John Acton asserted: 'two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery, antiquity and the middle ages'. The influence on Victorian culture of the 'Middle Ages' (broadly understood then as the centuries between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance) was both pervasive and multi-faceted. This 'medievalism' led, for instance, to the rituals and ornament of the Medieval Catholic church being reintroduced to Anglicanism. It led to the Saxon Witan being celebrated as a prototypical representative parliament. It resulted in Viking raiders being acclaimed as the forefathers of the British navy. And it encouraged innumerable nineteenth-century men to cultivate the superlative beards we now think of as typically 'Victorian'—in an attempt to emulate their Anglo-Saxon forefathers. Different facets of medieval life, and different periods before the Renaissance, were utilized in nineteenth-century Britain for divergent political and cultural agendas. Medievalism also became a dominant mode in Victorian art and architecture, with 75 per cent of churches in England built on a Gothic rather than a classical model. And it was pervasive in a wide variety of literary forms, from translated sagas to pseudo-medieval devotional verse to triple-decker novels. Medievalism even transformed nineteenth-century domesticity: while only a minority added moats and portcullises to their homes, the medieval-style textiles produced by Morris and Co. decorated many affluent drawing rooms. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism is the first work to examine in full the fascinating phenomenon of 'medievalism' in Victorian Britain. Covering art, architecture, religion, literature, politics, music, and social reform, the Handbook also surveys earlier forms of antiquarianism that established the groundwork for Victorian movements. In addition, this collection addresses the international context, by mapping the spread of medievalism across Europe, South America, and India, amongst other places.