Download or read book The Achievement of Literary Authority written by Ina Ferris and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although literary historians have largely neglected them, Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels mark a pivotal moment in the formation of the modern literary field, Ina Ferris argues, exemplifying the complex intersections of gender and genre in the evolution of nineteenth-century literary authority. Focusing on the critical reception of Scott's early works, Ferris shows how their extraordinary success propelled the novel from the margins of the culture into the literary hierarchy. Drawing on the insights of poststructuralist, feminist, and Bakhtinian theory, Ferris reconstructs reviewers' debates about fiction at several critical points in Scott's career. His literary authority and innovative power, she maintains, depended on the way in which his historical novels responded to the anxieties about discourse and modernity expressed in the literary reviews. Gender was a central source of anxiety, and the "manliness" of Scott's historical novels was decisive in their legitimation of the novel. It was largely through a problematic allegiance to the "female" genre of romance, however, that the Waverley Novels both recuperated fiction for male reading and helped to redefine for the nineteenth century the writing of history itself. Ferris locates the Waverley Novels in relation to fiction and history by such contemporaries of Scott's as Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, John Galt, James Hogg, Augustin Thierry, and Thomas Babington Macaulay. Students of the novel, feminist critics, and others interested in the relations between history and fiction will want to read The Achievement of Literary Authority.
Download or read book Literary Authority written by Claude Willan and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the cultural history of an idea which now seems so self-evident as barely to be worth stating: through writing imaginative literature, an author can accrue significant and lasting economic and cultural power. We take for granted, now, that authority dwells in literature and in being its author. This state of affairs was not naturally occurring, but deliberately invented. This book tells the story of that invention. The story's central figures are Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. But its narrative begins in the 1680s, with the last gasp of the bond linking literary to political authority. While Jacobite poets celebrated (and mourned) the Stuart dynasty, Whig writers traced the philosophical and aesthetic consequences of the accession of William of Orange. Both groups left behind sets of literary devices ready-made to confer and validate authority. Claude Willan challenges the continued reign of the "Scriblerian" model of the period and shows how that reign was engineered. In so doing he historicizes the relationship between "good" and "bad" writing, and suggests how we might think about literature and beauty had Pope and Johnson not taken literary authority for themselves. What might literature have looked like, and what could we use it like for, he provocatively asks.
Download or read book An Uncomfortable Authority written by Heidi Kaufman and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) has been the subject of increasing interest. A woman, a member of the landholding elite, an educator, and a daughter who lived under the historical shadow of her father, Edgeworth's life is difficult to categorize. Ironically, these very aspects of Edgeworth's identity that once excluded her from literary and historical discussions now form the basis of current interest in her life and her writing. This collection of essays builds on existing scholarship to develop new perspectives about Edgeworth's place in English and Irish history, literary history, and women's history. These essays explore the ways in which Edgeworth's entire adult life was an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, an attempt to justify and preserve her own privileged position even as she acknowledged the tenuousness of that position and as she sought to claim other privileges denied her. Christopher Fauske is the assistant dean in the School of Arts & Science at Salem State College, Salem, Massachusetts. Heidi Kaufman is assistant Professor of English at the University of Delaware.
Download or read book Book Men Book Clubs and the Romantic Literary Sphere written by Ina Ferris and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-08-29 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book re-reads the tangled relations of book culture and literary culture in the early nineteenth century by restoring to view the figure of the bookman and the effaced history of his book clubs. As outliers inserting themselves into the matrix of literary production rather than remaining within that of reception, both provoked debate by producing, writing, and circulating books in ways that expanded fundamental points of literary orientation in lateral directions not coincident with those of the literary sphere. Deploying a wide range of historical, archival and literary materials, the study combines the history and geography of books, cultural theory, and literary history to make visible a bookish array of alterative networks, genres, and locations that were obscured by the literary sphere in establishing its authority as arbiter of the modern book.
Download or read book John Galt written by Regina Hewitt and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume revalue the work of the Romantic-era Scottish writer John Galt, connecting his methods and goals with Scottish Enlightenment "conjectural" historiography and with later social theorizing. Emphasizing the construction, representation and use of social knowledge, the essays find new meaning in Galt's perceptions of the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds in which he traveled, his attitudes toward community building and progress, and his innovations in fiction, drama, journalism and biography.
Download or read book The Ruins of Experience written by Matthew Wickman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There emerged, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a reflexive relationship between shifting codes of legal evidence in British courtrooms and the growing fascination throughout Europe with the "primitive" Scottish Highlands. New methods for determining evidential truth, linked with the growing prominence of lawyers and a formalized division of labor between witnesses and jurors, combined to devalue the authority of witness testimony, magnifying the rupture between experience and knowledge. Juries now pronounced verdicts based not upon the certainty of direct experience but rather upon abstractions of probability or reasonable likelihood. Yet even as these changes were occurring, the Scottish Highlands and Hebridean Islands were attracting increased attention as a region where witness experience in sublime and communal forms had managed to trump enlightened progress and the probabilistic, abstract, and mediated mentality on which the Enlightenment was predicated. There, in a remote corner of Britain, natives and tourists beheld things that surpassed enlightened understanding; experience was becoming all the more alluring to the extent that it signified something other than knowledge. Matthew Wickman examines this uncanny return of experiential authority at the very moment of its supposed decline and traces the alluring improbability of experience into our own time. Thematic in its focus and cross-disciplinary in its approach, The Ruins of Experience situates the literary next to the nonliterary, the old beside the new. Wickman looks to poems, novels, philosophical texts, travel narratives, contemporary theory, and evidential treatises and trial narratives to suggest an alternative historical view of the paradoxical tensions of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras.
Download or read book A Companion to Scottish Literature written by Gerard Carruthers and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-12-26 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Scottish Literature offers fresh readings of major authors and periods of Scottish literary production from the first millennium to the present. Bringing together contributions by many of the world’s leading experts in the field, this comprehensive resource provides the historical background of Scottish literature, highlights new critical approaches, and explores wider cultural and institutional contexts. Dealing with texts in the languages of Scots, English, and Gaelic, the Companion offers modern perspectives on the historical milieux, thematic contexts and canonical writers of Scottish literature. Original essays apply the most up-to-date critical and scholarly analyses to a uniquely wide range of topics, such as Gaelic literature, national and diasporic writing, children’s literature, Scottish drama and theatre, gender and sexuality, and women’s writing. Critical readings examine William Dunbar, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Muriel Spark and Carol Ann Duffy, amongst others. With full references and guidance for further reading, as well as numerous links to online resources, A Companion to Scottish Literature is essential reading for advanced students and scholars of Scottish literature, as well as academic and non-academic readers with an interest in the subject.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English written by Matthew Stratton and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English provides an interdisciplinary overview of the vibrant connections between literature, politics, and the political. Featuring contributions from 44 scholars across a variety of disciplines, the collection is divided into five parts: Connecting Literature and Politics; Constituting the Polis; Periods and Histories; Media, Genre, and Techne; and Spaces. Organized around familiar concepts—such as humans, animals, workers, empires, nations, and states—rather than theoretical schools, it will help readers to understand the ways in which literature affects our understanding of who is capable of political action, who has been included in and excluded from politics, and how different spaces are imagined to be political. It also offers a series of engagements with key moments in literary and political history from 1066 to the present in order to assess and reassess the utility of conventional modes of periodization. The book extends current discussions in the area, looking at cutting-edge developments in the discipline of literary studies, which will appeal to academics and researchers seeking to orient their own interventions within broader contexts.
Download or read book A Companion to British Literature Volume 4 written by Robert DeMaria, Jr. and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to British Literature, Victorian and Twentieth-Century Literature, 1837 - 2000
Download or read book Radicalism in British Literary Culture 1650 1830 written by Timothy Morton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-03 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description (unedited publisher data) In this volume of interdisciplinary essays, leading scholars examine the radical tradition in British literary culture from the English Revolution to the French Revolution. They chart continuities between the two periods and examine the recuperation of ideas and texts from the earlier period in the 1790s and beyond. Contributors utilize a variety of approaches and concepts: from gender studies, the cultural history of food and diet and the history of political discourse, to explorations of the theatre, philosophy and metaphysics. This volume argues that the radical agendas of the mid-seventeenth century, intended to change society fundamentally, did not disappear throughout the long eighteenth-century only to be resuscitated at its close. Rather, through close textual analysis, these essays indicate a more continuous transmission. Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: English literature 18th century History and criticism, Radicalism in literature, English literature Early modern, 1500-1700 History and criticism, English literature 19th century History and criticism, Revolutionary literature, English History and criticism, Politics and literature Great Britain History, Radicalism Great Britain History.
Download or read book History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children s Literature written by Jackie C. Horne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the 'flat' characters of eighteenth-century children's literature become 'round' by the mid-nineteenth? While previous critics have pointed to literary Romanticism for an explanation, Jackie C. Horne argues that this shift can be better understood by looking to the discipline of history. Eighteenth-century humanism believed the purpose of history was to teach private and public virtue by creating idealized readers to emulate. Eighteenth-century children's literature, with its impossibly perfect protagonists (and its equally imperfect villains) echoes history's exemplar goals. Exemplar history, however, came under increasing pressure during the period, and the resulting changes in historiographical practice - an increased need for reader engagement and the widening of history's purview to include the morals, manners, and material lives of everyday people - find their mirror in changes in fiction for children. Horne situates hitherto neglected Robinsonades, historical novels, and fictionalized histories within the cultural, social, and political contexts of the period to trace the ways in which idealized characters gradually gave way to protagonists who fostered readers' sympathetic engagement. Horne's study will be of interest to specialists in children's literature, the history of education, and book history.
Download or read book Imperfect Histories written by Ann Rigney and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperfect Histories puts "imperfection" at the heart of a theory of historical representation. Ann Rigney shows how historical writing involves dealing with intractable subjects that resist our efforts to know and to shape them. Those who write history, she says, engage in an ongoing struggle to match up what they find relevant in the past with the information and interpretive models at their disposal. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of historical practice. This is especially evident in the various attempts made over the last two centuries to write an "alternative" history of everyday experience. Focusing on historical writing in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, Rigney analyzes a wide range of works by Walter Scott, Jules Michelet, Augustin Thierry, and Thomas Carlyle. She shows how the attempt to write an alternative history brought historical writing into a close yet fraught relationship with literature. The result is a new account of that relationship as it took shape in the romantic period and as it continues to influence contemporary practices.
Download or read book Modern Irish and Scottish Literature written by Richard Alan Barlow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-04 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms explores the ways Irish and Scottish literatures have influenced each other from the 1760s onwards. Although an early form of Celticism disappeared with the demise of the Celtic Revivals of Ireland and Scotland, the 'Celtic world' and the 'Celtic temperament' remained key themes in central texts of Irish and Scottish literature well into the twentieth century. Richard Barlow examines the emergence, development, and transformation of Celticism within Irish and Scottish writing and identifies key connections between modern Irish and Scottish authors and texts. By reading works from figures such as James Macpherson, Walter Scott, Sydney Owenson, Augusta Gregory, W. B. Yeats, Fiona Macleod, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, and Seamus Heaney in their political and cultural contexts, Barlow provides a new account of the characteristics and phases of literary Celticism within Romanticism, Modernism, and beyond.
Download or read book Horror Literature from Gothic to Post Modern written by Michele Brittany and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From shambling zombies to Gothic ghosts, horror has entertained thrill-seeking readers for centuries. A versatile literary genre, it offers commentary on societal issues, fresh insight into the everyday and moral tales disguised in haunting tropes and grotesque acts, with many stories worthy of critical appraisal. This collection of new essays takes in a range of topics, focusing on historic works such as Ann Radcliffe's Gaston de Blondeville (1826) and modern novels including Max Brooks' World War Z. Other contributions examine weird fiction, Stephen King, Richard Laymon, Indigenous Australian monster mythology and horror in picture books for young children.
Download or read book Books for Children Books for Adults written by Teresa Michals and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how ideas about age changed for novels and their readers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Download or read book Romantic Capabilities written by Mike Goode and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romantic Capabilities discusses the relationship between popular new media uses of literary texts. Devising and modelling an original critical methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, this volume contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals medial capabilities of the text that can transform how we understand its significance for the original historical context for which it was created. Following an introductory theoretical chapter that explains the book's unconventional approach to the archive, Romantic Capabilities analyzes significant popular "media behaviors" exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake's pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and 3D photographers to Walter Scott's historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen's novels and their imaginary country estates. The result is a book that reveals Blake to be an important early theorist of viral media and the law, Scott's novels to be studies in vision that helped give rise to modern immersive media, and Austenian realism to be a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends. It offers insight into the politics of virality, the dependence of immersion on a sense of frame, and the extent to which eighteenth-century landscape gardening anticipated Deleuzian ideas of the "virtual" by granting existence to reality's as-yet-unrealized capabilities.
Download or read book Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction written by Ian Dennis and published by Springer. This book was released on 1997-07-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction analyses a sequence of early-nineteenth-century British and American texts from a perspective informed by Rene Girard's theory of triangular of 'mimetic' desire. Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs , Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl , Sir Walter Scott's Waverley , Old Mortality , Rob Roy , The Pirate and Redgauntlet , and Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and Lionel Lincoln are given detailed new readings. General conclusions about the relationship of desire and nationalism in historical fiction are proposed.