The Limits Of Literary Historicism

Author : Allen Dunn
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN 13 : 1572338318
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Limits of Literary Historicism written by Allen Dunn and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Limits of Literary Historicism is a collection of essays arguing that historicism, which has come to dominate the professional study of literature in recent decades, has become ossified. By drawing attention to the limits of historicism—its blind spots, overreach, and reluctance to acknowledge its commitments—this provocative new book seeks a clearer understanding of what historicism can and cannot teach us about literary narrative. Editors Allen Dunn and Thomas F. Haddox have gathered contributions from leading scholars that challenge the dominance of contemporary historicism. These pieces critique historicism as it is generally practiced, propose alternative historicist models that transcend mere formula, and suggest alternatives to historicism altogether. The volume begins with the editors’ extended introduction, “The Enigma of Critical Distance; or, Why Historicists Need Convictions,” and then is divided into three sections: “The Limits of Historicism,” “Engagements with History,” and “Alternatives to History.” Defying convention, The Limits of Literary Historicism shakes up established modes to move beyond the claustrophobic analyses of contemporary historicism and to ask larger questions that envision more fulfilling and more responsible possibilities in the practice of literary scholarship.

Author : Catherine Gallagher
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022677256X
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Practicing New Historicism written by Catherine Gallagher and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For almost twenty years, new historicism has been a highly controversial and influential force in literary and cultural studies. In Practicing the New Historicism, two of its most distinguished practitioners reflect on its surprisingly disparate sources and far-reaching effects. In lucid and jargon-free prose, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt focus on five central aspects of new historicism: recurrent use of anecdotes, preoccupation with the nature of representations, fascination with the history of the body, sharp focus on neglected details, and skeptical analysis of ideology. Arguing that new historicism has always been more a passionately engaged practice of questioning and analysis than an abstract theory, Gallagher and Greenblatt demonstrate this practice in a series of characteristically dazzling readings of works ranging from paintings by Joos van Gent and Paolo Uccello to Hamlet and Great Expectations. By juxtaposing analyses of Renaissance and nineteenth-century topics, the authors uncover a number of unexpected contrasts and connections between the two periods. Are aspects of the dispute over the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist detectable in British political economists' hostility to the potato? How does Pip's isolation in Great Expectations shed light on Hamlet's doubt? Offering not only an insider's view of new historicism, but also a lively dialogue between a Renaissance scholar and a Victorianist, Practicing the New Historicism is an illuminating and unpredictable performance by two of America's most respected literary scholars. "Gallagher and Greenblatt offer a brilliant introduction to new historicism. In their hands, difficult ideas become coherent and accessible."—Choice "A tour de force of new literary criticism. . . . Gallagher and Greenblatt's virtuoso readings of paintings, potatoes (yes, spuds), religious ritual, and novels—all 'texts'—as well as essays on criticism and the significance of anecdotes, are likely to take their place as model examples of the qualities of the new critical school that they lead. . . . A zesty work for those already initiated into the incestuous world of contemporary literary criticism-and for those who might like to see what all the fuss is about."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Author : Allen Dunn
Publisher : Univ Tennessee Press
ISBN 13 : 9781572338203
Total Pages : 206 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Limits of Literary Historicism written by Allen Dunn and published by Univ Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Limits of Literary Historicism is a collection of essays arguing that historicism, which has come to dominate the professional study of literature in recent decades, has become ossified. By drawing attention to the limits of historicism—its blind spots, overreach, and reluctance to acknowledge its commitments—this provocative new book seeks a clearer understanding of what historicism can and cannot teach us about literary narrative. Editors Allen Dunn and Thomas F. Haddox have gathered contributions from leading scholars that challenge the dominance of contemporary historicism. These pieces critique historicism as it is generally practiced, propose alternative historicist models that transcend mere formula, and suggest alternatives to historicism altogether. The volume begins with the editors’ extended introduction, “The Enigma of Critical Distance; or, Why Historicists Need Convictions,” and then is divided into three sections: “The Limits of Historicism,” “Engagements with History,” and “Alternatives to History.” Defying convention, The Limits of Literary Historicism shakes up established modes to move beyond the claustrophobic analyses of contemporary historicism and to ask larger questions that envision more fulfilling and more responsible possibilities in the practice of literary scholarship.

Author : Rita Felski
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022629403X
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Limits of Critique written by Rita Felski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Brook Thomas
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691015071
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The New Historicism written by Brook Thomas and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brook Thomas explores the new historicism and the challenges posed to it by a postmodern world that questions the very possibility of newness. He considers new historicism's engagement with poststructuralism and locates the former within a tradition of pragmatic historiography in the United States.

Author : Claire Colebrook
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780719049873
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book New Literary Histories written by Claire Colebrook and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is histricism a problem? Why do we need a new historicism? This text considers these questions and aims to show that the problem of historicism, and new historicism, is more than just a problem of knowledge-validity and that new historicism is not so much an answer to the difficulties of history writing but the opening of new questions.

Author : Adam Talib
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004350535
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How Do You Say “Epigram” in Arabic?: Literary History at the Limits of Comparison written by Adam Talib and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-29 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Do You Say “Epigram” in Arabic? is the first study of one of the most popular and enduring genres in the history of Arabic poetry, the maqṭūʿah, and a contribution toward a decolonized comparative literature.

Author : Harold Veeser
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317761200
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The New Historicism written by Harold Veeser and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following Clifford Geertz and other cultural anthropologists, the New Historicist critics have evolved a method for describing culture in action. Their "thick descriptions" seize upon an event or anecdote--colonist John Rolfe's conversation with Pocohontas's father, a note found among Nietzsche's papers to the effect that "I have lost my umbrella"--and re-read it to reveal through the analysis of tiny particulars the motive forces controlling a whole society. Contributors: Stephen J. Greenblatt, Louis A. Montrose, Catherine Gallagher, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Gerald Graff, Jean Franco, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Frank Lentricchia, Vincent Pecora, Jane Marcus, Jon Klancher, Jonathan Arac, Hayden White, Stanley Fish, Judith Newton, Joel Fineman, John Schaffer, Richard Terdiman, Donald Pease, Brooks Thomas.

Author : John Frow
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780674332805
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Marxism and Literary History written by John Frow and published by . This book was released on 1986-02-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frow's book is a novel contribution to Marxist literary theory, proposing a reconciliation of formalism and historicism in order to establish the basis for a new literary history. Through a critique of his forerunners in Marxist theory, Frow seeks to define the strengths and the limitations of this tradition and then to extend its possibilities in a radical reworking of the concept of discourse.

Author : Suzanne Gearhart
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691657122
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Open Boundary of History and Fiction written by Suzanne Gearhart and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the view that a critical sense of history is missing from the Enlightenment, Suzanne Gearhart links the works of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rosseau with the inquiry into the boundary between literature and history in contemporary critical discourse. She considers the theories of Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Althusser, Genette, White, de Man, and Derrida in order to develop a critical approach to fiction and history and to reveal that investigations into the fo undations of historical knowledge, and specifically into what distinguishes hsitory from fiction, were central to the Enlightenment. This book questions many assumptions basic to contemporary criticism by establishing a dialogue between major theorists and Enlightenment figures. It challenges certitudes of fiction and literature by examining the historicity of language, form, and literature itself, redefining history to show its crucial relevance to literary studies and opening historiography to the insights of literary theory. Suzanne Gearhart is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.