Historical Studies and Literary Criticism

Historical Studies and Literary Criticism PDF Author: Jerome J. McGann
Publisher: Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
For the past fifty years literary studies and criticism have been dominated by formalist, structural and text-centered approaches. The editor of this volume, Jerome J. McGann, has been arguing in recent years for more expansive and contextual procedures. In this collection of essays he has brought together a group of distinguished collaborators--including Terry Eagleton, Marilyn Butler, Cecil Lang, and Sandra Gilbert--whose work emphasizes the importance of social and historical methodologies for the study of literary texts. Representing a variety of viewpoints and critical strategies, these critics together demonstrate the sociohistorical dimensions of literary works, provide examples of how studies of such literary works might be pursued, and suggest some central areas of investigation. The resulting effort to reconstitute some vital and neglected critical approaches will engage students and scholars of literature, and move them to reassess current critical assumptions. Fundamental to this collection is the sense that literary texts are more than self-enclosed verbal constructs. In his introduction to the essays, editor McGann examines how and why the concept of referentiality fell into disfavor with modern literary schools. The antihistorical bias of the New Critics, Structuralists, and Deconstructionists, he argues, ultimately limit their critical vision. For literature, McGann stresses, has various points of reference to a larger world of social interactions and historical influence; only by recognizing and reconstructing that world can we mine the full meaning, and communicative potential, of a fictional work.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Literary Theory and Criticism PDF Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486144674
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Essential anthology of Poe's critical works reviews works by Dickens, Hawthorne, many others. Includes Theory of Poetry ("The Philosophy of Composition," "The Rationale of Verse," "The Poetic Principle"). Introduction.

The Last Enchantments

The Last Enchantments PDF Author: Charles Finch
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250018706
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The Last Enchantments is a powerfully moving and lyrically written novel. A young American embarks on a year at Oxford and has an impassioned affair that will change his life forever After graduating from Yale, William Baker, scion of an old line patrician family, goes to work in presidential politics. But when the campaign into which he's poured his heart ends in disappointment, he decides to leave New York behind, along with the devoted, ambitious, and well-connected woman he's been in love with for the last four years. Will expects nothing more than a year off before resuming the comfortable life he's always known, but he's soon caught up in a whirlwind of unexpected friendships and romantic entanglements that threaten his safe plans. As he explores the heady social world of Oxford, he becomes fast friends with Tom, his snobbish but affable flat mate; Anil, an Indian economist with a deep love for gangster rap; Anneliese, a German historian obsessed with photography; and Timmo, whose chief ambition is to become a reality television star. What he's least prepared for is Sophie, a witty, beautiful and enigmatic woman who makes him question everything he knows about himself. For readers who made a classic of Richard Yates's A Good School, Charles Finch's The Last Enchantments is a sweeping novel about love and loss that redefines what it means to grow up as an American in the twenty-first century.

Historical Studies and Literary Criticism

Historical Studies and Literary Criticism PDF Author: Jerome J. McGann
Publisher: Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
For the past fifty years literary studies and criticism have been dominated by formalist, structural and text-centered approaches. The editor of this volume, Jerome J. McGann, has been arguing in recent years for more expansive and contextual procedures. In this collection of essays he has brought together a group of distinguished collaborators--including Terry Eagleton, Marilyn Butler, Cecil Lang, and Sandra Gilbert--whose work emphasizes the importance of social and historical methodologies for the study of literary texts. Representing a variety of viewpoints and critical strategies, these critics together demonstrate the sociohistorical dimensions of literary works, provide examples of how studies of such literary works might be pursued, and suggest some central areas of investigation. The resulting effort to reconstitute some vital and neglected critical approaches will engage students and scholars of literature, and move them to reassess current critical assumptions. Fundamental to this collection is the sense that literary texts are more than self-enclosed verbal constructs. In his introduction to the essays, editor McGann examines how and why the concept of referentiality fell into disfavor with modern literary schools. The antihistorical bias of the New Critics, Structuralists, and Deconstructionists, he argues, ultimately limit their critical vision. For literature, McGann stresses, has various points of reference to a larger world of social interactions and historical influence; only by recognizing and reconstructing that world can we mine the full meaning, and communicative potential, of a fictional work.

Let Me Feel Your Pulse

Let Me Feel Your Pulse PDF Author: O. Henry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Alcoholism
Languages : en
Pages : 70

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Book Description


Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction

Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction PDF Author: Anne H. Stevens
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1770485619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction provides an accessible overview of major figures and movements in literary theory and criticism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. It is designed for students at the undergraduate level or for others needing a broad synthesis of the long history of literary theory. An introductory chapter provides an overview of some of the major issues within literary theory and criticism; further chapters survey theory and criticism in antiquity, the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth century. For twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory, the discussion is subdivided into separate chapters on formalist, historicist, political, and psychoanalytic approaches. The final chapter applies a variety of theoretical concepts and approaches to two famous works of literature: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism PDF Author: Charles E. Bressler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The second edition of Literary Criticism by Charles E. Bressler is designed to help readers make conscious, informed, and intelligent choices concerning literary interpretation. By explaining the historical development and theoretical positions of eleven schools of criticism, author Charles Bressler reveals the richness of literary texts along with the various interpretative approaches that will lead to a fuller appreciation and understanding of such texts.

The Limits of Critique

The Limits of Critique PDF Author: Rita Felski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629403X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Why do critics feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What is the rationale for their conviction that language is always withholding some important truth, that the critic's task is to unearth what is unsaid, naturalized, or repressed? These are the features of critique, a mode of thought that thoroughly dominates academic criticism. In this book, Rita Felski brilliantly exposes critique's more troubling qualities and proposes alternatives to it. Critique, she argues, is not just a method but also a sensibility--one best captured by Paul Ricoeur's phrase "the hermeneutics of suspicion." As the characteristic affect of critique, suspicion, Felski shows, helps us understand critique's seductions and limitations. The questions that Felski poses about critique have implications well beyond intramural debates among literary scholars. Literary studies, says Felski, is facing a legitimation crisis thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves the field struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? For Felski, the tendencies to make literary texts the object of suspicious reading or, conversely, impute to them qualities of critique, forecloses too many other possibilities. Felski offers an alternative model that she calls "postcritical reading." Rather than looking behind the text for its hidden causes, conditions, and motives, she suggests that literary scholars place themselves in front of a text, reflecting on what it calls forth and makes possible. Here Felski enlists the work of Bruno Latour to rethink reading as a co-production between actors, rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking. As a scholar with an abiding respect for theory who has long deployed elements of critique in her own work, Felski is able to provide an insider's account of critique's limits and alternatives that will resonate widely in the humanities.

The Critic as Amateur

The Critic as Amateur PDF Author: Saikat Majumdar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501341405
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Can the criticism of literature and culture ever be completely professionalized? Does criticism retain an amateur impulse even after it evolves into a highly specialized discipline enshrined in the university? The Critic as Amateur brings leading and emerging scholars together to explore the role of amateurism in literary studies. While untrained reading has always been central to arenas beyond the academy – book clubs, libraries, used bookstores – its role in the making of professional criticism is often disavowed or dismissed. This volume, the first on the critic as amateur, restores the links between expertise, autodidactic learning and hobbyist pleasure by weaving literary criticism in and out of the university. Our contributors take criticism to the airwaves, through the culture of early cinema, the small press, the undergraduate classroom and extracurricular writing groups. Canonical critics are considered alongside feminist publishers and queer intellectuals. The Critic as Amateur is a vital book for readers invested in the disciplinary history of literary studies and the public role of the humanities. It is also a crucial resource for anyone interested in how literary criticism becomes a richly diverse yet shared discourse in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The World, the Text, and the Critic

The World, the Text, and the Critic PDF Author: Edward W. Said
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674961876
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Said demonstrates that critical discourse has been strengthened by the writings of Derrida and Foucault and by influences like Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. But, he argues, these forces have compelled literature to meet the requirements of a theory or system, ignoring complex affiliations binding the texts to the world.

Inside the Critics’ Circle

Inside the Critics’ Circle PDF Author: Phillipa K. Chong
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691212503
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
An inside look at the politics of book reviewing, from the assignment and writing of reviews to why critics think we should listen to what they have to say Taking readers behind the scenes in the world of fiction reviewing, Inside the Critics’ Circle explores the ways critics evaluate books despite the inherent subjectivity involved and the uncertainties of reviewing when seemingly anyone can be a reviewer. Drawing on interviews with critics from such venues as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post, Phillipa Chong delves into the complexities of the review-writing process, including the considerations, values, and cultural and personal anxieties that shape what critics do. Chong explores how critics are paired with review assignments, why they accept these time-consuming projects, how they view their own qualifications for reviewing certain books, and the criteria they employ when making literary judgments. She discovers that while their readers are of concern to reviewers, they are especially worried about authors on the receiving end of reviews. As these are most likely peers who will be returning similar favors in the future, critics’ fears and frustrations factor into their willingness or reluctance to write negative reviews. At a time when traditional review opportunities are dwindling while other forms of reviewing thrive, book reviewing as a professional practice is being brought into question. Inside the Critics’ Circle offers readers a revealing look into critics’ responses to these massive transitions and how, through their efforts, literary values get made.