The Uses of Literary History

The Uses of Literary History

  • Author: Brown, Marshall
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822317043
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822398783
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 1996
  • Month: January
  • Pages: 328
  • DDC: 809
  • Language: English
In this collection, Marshall Brown has gathered essays by twenty leading literary scholars and critics to appraise the current state of literary history. Representing a range of disciplinary specialties and approaches, these essays illustrate and debate the issues that confront scholars working on the literary past and its relation to the present.
Concerned with both the theory and practice of literary history, these provocative and sometimes combative pieces examine the writing of literary history, the nature of our interest in tradition, and the ways that literary works act in history. Among the numerous issues discussed are the uses of evidence, anachronism, the dialectic of texts and contexts, particularism and the resistance to reductive understanding, the construction of identities, memory, and the endurance of the past. New historicism, nationalism, and gender studies appear in relation to more traditional issues such as textual editing, taste, and literary pedagogy. Combining new and old perspectives, The Uses of Literary History provides a broad view of the field.

Contributors. Charles Altieri, Jonathan Arac, R. Howard Bloch, Richard Dellamora, Paul H. Fry, Geoffrey Hartman, Denis Hollier, Donna Landry, Lawrence Lipking, Jerome J. McGann, Walter Benn Michaels, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Virgil Nemoianu, Annabel Patterson, David Perkins, Marjorie Perloff, Meredith Anne Skura, Doris Sommer, Peter Stallybrass, Susan Stewart

  • Contents
  • Preface - Marshall Brown
  • Literary History
    • A Trout in the Milk - Lawrence Lipking
    • Literary History: Some Roads Not (Yet) Taken - Virgil Nemoianu
    • What is the History of Literature? - Jonathan Arac
    • The Once and Future Middle Ages - R. Howard Bloch
    • Literature, Meaning, and the Discontinuity of Fact - Jerome J. McGann
    • Empiricism Once More - Marjorie Perloff
    • Some Prospects for Literary History - David Perkins
  • Literature in History
    • Public Memory and its Discontents - Geoffrey H. Hartman
    • Understanding the Living and Talking to the Dead: The Historicity of Psychoanalysis - Meredith Anne Skura
    • Figures of the Feminine: An Amazonian Revolution in Feminist Literary History? - Donna Landry
    • Editing as Cultural Formation: The Sexing of Shakespeare's Sonnets - Peter Stallybrass
    • Textual Politics/Sexual Politics - Richard Dellamora
    • The Pedigree of the White Stallion: Postcoloniality and Literary History - Rukmini Bhaya Nair
    • The Victims of New Historicism - Walter Benn Michaels
  • Literature as History
    • Preface to a Lyric History - Susan Stewart
    • Can We Be Historical Ever? Some Hopes for a Dialectical Model of Historical Self-Consciousness - Charles Altieri
    • On Literature Considered as a Dead Language - Denis Hollier
    • More Speech on Free Speech - Annabel Patterson
    • Textual Conquests: On Readerly Competence and "Minority" Literature - Doris Sommer
    • The Hum of Literature: Ostension in Language - Paul H. Fry
  • Contributors
  • Index

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