Author: Brian G. CaraherPublisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271040653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
Wordsworth's Slumber and the Problematics of Reading
Author: Brian G. CaraherPublisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271040653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
Wordsworth, Dialogics and the Practice of Criticism
Author: Don H. BialostoskyPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521412490
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
Wordsworth's poetry has been a focus for many of the theoretical schools of criticism that comprise modern literary studies. Don Bialostosky here proposes to adjudicate the diverse claims of these numerous schools and to trace their implications for teaching. Bialostosky draws on the work of Bakhtin and his followers to create a 'dialogic' critical synthesis of what Wordsworth's readers - from Coleridge to de Man - have made of his poetry. He reveals Wordsworth's poetry as itself 'dialogically' responding to its various contexts, and opens up fruitful possibilities for criticism and teaching of Wordsworth. This challenging book uses the case of Wordsworth studies to make a far-reaching survey of modern literary theory and its implications for the practice of criticism and teaching today.
Wordsworth's Slumber and the Problematics of Reading
Author: Brian G. CaraherPublisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271026244
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
A critical study of the interpretive problems surrounding readings of one of Wordsworth's best-known lyrics. Wordsworth's "Slumber" and the Problematics of Reading engages in detail both the nature and the implications of what can be called literary pragmatics. It offers a new interpretation of Wordsworth's "A slumber did my spirit seal" as well as "Strange fits of passion" and "She dwelt among untrodden ways," making a major contribution to an ongoing interpretive debate concerning the first poem and the theoretical issues to which is gives rise. It also provides new ways to contextualize Wordsworth's so-called Lucy poems as well as Coleridge's appropriations of them in 1799. Caraher analyzes solipsism and strange fantasies of death as they surface in readings of Wordsworth's lyric and provides critical examinations of the rhetoric, assumptions, and evidences of reading on the part of many of Wordsworth's most famous critics. He then makes a strong case for the theoretical viability of the work of John Dewey and Stephen Pepper for the field of literary studies, especially for theories of literary reading, theories of evidence, and the logic of literary inquiry. Caraher's identification of the "problematic" of Wordsworth's poem gives direction to a powerful inquiry into the poem's meanings, its reader's judgments, and its culture's pathologies. He makes a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion concerning pragmatism in literary studies and to the understanding of Wordsworth and the theory of reading.
Reading, Writing, and Romanticism
Author: Lucy NewlynPublisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780198187110
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436
Book Description
Bridging the gulf between materialist and idealist approaches this study, informed by an historical awareness of Romantic hermeneutics and its later developments, examines how readers are imagined, addressed, and figured in Romantic poetry
Reading the Written Image
Author: Christopher CollinsPublisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271007632
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
Reading the Written Image is a study of the imagination as it is prompted by the verbal cues of literature. Since every literary image is also a mental image, a representation of an absent entity, Collins contends that imagination is a poiesis, a making-up, an act of play for both author and reader. The &"willing suspension of disbelief,&" which Coleridge said &"constitutes poetic faith,&" therefore empowers and directs the reader to construct an imagined world in which particular hypotheses are proposed and demonstrated. Although the imagination as a central concept in poetics emerges into critical debate only in the eighteenth century, it has been a crucial issue for over two millennia in religious, philosophical, and political discourse. The two recognized alternative methodologies in the study of literature, the poetic and the hermeneutic, are opposed on the issue of the written image: poets and readers feel free to imagine, while hermeneuts feel obliged to specify the meanings of images and, failing that, to minimize the importance of imagery. Recognizing this problem, Collins proposes that reading written texts be regarded as a performance, a unique kind of play that transposes what had once been an oral-dramatic situation onto an inner, imaginary stage. He applies models drawn from the psychology of play to support his theory that reader response is essentially a poietic response to a rule-governed set of ludic cues.
New Conservative Explications
Author: Kenneth B. NewellPublisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443828017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 135
Book Description
Because of the triumph of postmodern studies, explication of classic poems by great dead white male English poets of preceding centuries has greatly declined in the last several decades, even though many of the poems may still be puzzling to interested readers, young and old. This book is addressed to both audiences in the hope that new explications of twelve classic poems (or sections of these poems) by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hardy, Yeats, and Auden may help sustain interest in the poems. Although the explication procedure is now unpopular in theory and held to be as subjective as interpretation, the procedure is based on the experience that, if a puzzling poem is reasoned with, it can often be found to make sense on a basic level of understanding—a sense perhaps complex, ambiguous, or ambivalent but not self-contradictory. In essence, then, this is a book of poetry explications having esthetic aims but written in an era of unesthetic political and cultural studies. The term conservative in the title refers to explicatory rather than political conservatism as well as to critical and literary conservation—i.e., to conserving the practice of explication whether upon literary works old or new, and so also conserving esthetic interest in the old works themselves. The book also attempts to show that new conservative explications are still possible and can be still useful—even in the postmodern era and even on classic poems already much explicated—and that therefore explication still has much to do in the work of literary studies in the postmodern era.
The Reputations of Thomas Moore
Author: Sarah McCleavePublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000650960
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
This collection of eleven essays positions Moore within a developing and expanding international readership during the course of the nineteenth century. In accounting for the successes he achieved and the challenges he faced, recurring themes include: Moore’s influence and reputation; modes of dissemination through networks and among communities; also, the articulation of personal, political, and national identities. This book, the product of an international team of scholars, is the first to focus explicitly on the reputations of Thomas Moore in different parts of the world, including Bombay, Dublin, Leipzig, and London, as well as America, Canada, Greece, and the Hispanic world. Through it, we will understand more about Moore’s reception, and also appreciate how the publication and dissemination of poetry and song in the romantic and Victorian eras operated in different parts of the world—in particular considering how artistic and political networks effected the transmission of cultural products.
Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration
Author: Sarah McCleavePublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351984152
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 381
Book Description
Written by internationally established scholars of Thomas Moore’s music, poetry, and prose writing, Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration is a collection of twelve essays and a timely response to significant new biographical, historiographical and editorial work on Moore. This collection reflects the rich variety of cutting-edge work being done on this significant and prolific figure. Sarah McCleave and Brian Caraher have contributed an introduction that positions Moore in his own time (1800-1850), addresses subsequent neglect in the twentieth century, and contextualises the contemporary re-evaluation of Thomas Moore as a figure of considerable interdisciplinary artistic and cultural significance. The contributions to this collection establish Moore’s importance in the fields of Neoclassical and Romantic lyricism, musical performance, song-writing, postcolonial criticism, Orientalism and biographical writing— as well as defining the significance of his voice as an engaged social and political commentator of a strongly cosmopolitan and pluralistic inclination.
Literature as Communication
Author: Roger D. SellPublisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027298963
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 364
Book Description
This book offers foundations for a literary criticism which seeks to mediate between writers and readers belonging to different historical periods or social groupings. This makes it, among other things, a timely intervention in the postmodern “culture wars”, though the theory put forward will be of interest not only to students of literature and culture, but also to linguists. Sell describes communication in general as strongly interactive, as very much affected by the disparate situationalities of “sending” and “receiving”, yet as by no means completely determined by them. Seen this way, men and women are both social beings and individuals, capable of empathizing with sociohistorical formations which are alien to them, sometimes even to the extent of changing their own life-world. By treating literary activity as communicational in this same dynamic sense, Sell radically modifies the main paradigms of twentieth-century literary theory, casting much new light on questions of genre, interpretation, affect and ethics.
Literary Studies and the Philosophy of Literature
Author: Andrea SelleriPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319331477
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291
Book Description
This book is about the interaction between literary studies and the philosophy of literature. It features essays from internationally renowned and emerging philosophers and literary scholars, challenging readers to join them in taking seriously the notion of interdisciplinary study and forging forward in new and exciting directions of thought. It identifies that literary studies and the philosophy of literature address similar issues: What is literature? What is its value? Why do I care about characters? What is the role of the author in understanding a literary work? What is fiction as opposed to non-fiction? Yet, genuine, interdisciplinary interaction remains scarce. This collection seeks to overcome current obstacles and seek out new paths for exploration.
