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A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)
by Miriam NicholsA Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor is the first major study illustrating Robin Blaser’s significance to North American poetry. The poet Robin Blaser (1925–2009) was an important participant in the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1950s and San Francisco poetry circles of the 1960s. The book illuminates Blaser’s distinctive responses to and relationships with familiar writers including Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Charles Olson via their correspondence. Blaser contributed to the formation of the serial poem as a dominant mode in post-war New American poetry through his work and engagement with the poetry communities of the time. Offering a new perspective on a well-known and influential period in American poetry, Miriam Nichols combines the story of Blaser’s life—coming from a mid-western conservative religious upbringing and his coming of age as a gay man in Berkeley, Boston, and San Francisco—with critical assessments of his major poems through unprecedented archival research. This literary biography presents Blaser’s poetry and poetics in the many contexts from which it came, ranging from the Berkeley Renaissance to the Vancouver scene; from surrealism to phenomenology; from the New American poetry to the Canadian postmodern; from the homoerotic to high theory. Throughout, Blaser’s voice is heard in the excitement of his early years in Berkeley and Boston and the seriousness of the later years where he was doing most of his living in his work.
Literary Black Power in the Caribbean: Fiction, Music and Film (African Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies)
by Rita KeresztesiLiterary Black Power in the Caribbean focuses on the Black Power movement in the anglophone Caribbean as represented and critically debated in literary texts, music and film. This volume is groundbreaking in its focus on the creative arts and artists in their evaluations of, and insights on, the relevance of the Black Power message across the region. The author takes a cultural studies approach to bring together the political with the aesthetic, enriching an already fertile debate on the era and the subject of Black Power in the Caribbean region. The chapters discuss various aspects of Black Power in the Caribbean: on the pages of journals and magazines, at contemporary conferences that radicalized academia to join forces with communities, in fiction and essays by writers and intellectuals, in calypso and reggae music, and in the first films produced in the Caribbean. Produced at the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Black Power Revolution in Port of Spain, Trinidad, this timely book will be of interest to students and academics focusing on Black Power, Caribbean literary and cultural studies, African diaspora, and Global South radical political and cultural theory.
Literary Boston As I Knew It: From 'Literary Friends and Acquaintances'
by William Dean HowellsWilliam Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author and literary critic. He wrote his first novel, Their Wedding Journey, in 1871, but his literary reputation really took off with the realist novel A Modern Instance, published in 1882, which describes the decay of a marriage. His 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham is perhaps his best known, describing the rise and fall of an American entrepreneur in the paint business. His social views were also strongly reflected in the novels Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). While known primarily as a novelist, his short story "Editha" (1905) - included in the collection Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907) - appears in many anthologies of American literature. Howells also wrote plays, criticism, and essays about contemporary literary figures such as Ibsen, Zola, Verga, and, especially, Tolstoy, which helped establish their reputations in the United States. He also wrote critically in support of many American writers. It is perhaps in this role that he had his greatest influence.
Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities (The Nineteenth Century Series)
by Jen HarrisonWhat are we to make of the Victorians’ fascination with collecting? What effect did their encounters with the curious, exotic and downright odd have on Victorian writers and their works? The essays in this collection take up these questions by examining the phenomenon of bric-Ã -brac in Victorian literature. The contributors to Literary Bric-Ã -Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities explore sites of unusual concurrence (including museums, the home, art galleries, private collections) and the way in which bric-Ã -brac brought the alien into everyday settings, the past into the present and the wild into the domestic. Focusing on the representation of material culture in Victorian literature, the essays in this volume seek out miscellaneous and incongruous objects that take readers beyond the commonplace paradigms associated with commodity culture. Individual chapters analyse the work of writers as different as Edward Lear and John Henry Newman, Robert Browning and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. In so doing they shed light on a dizzying array of topics and objects that include class and capitalism, the occult and the sacraments, Darwinism and dandyism, umbrellas, textiles, the Philosopher’s Stone and even the household nail.
Literary Butte: A History in Novels & Film
by Aaron ParrettKnown worldwide as the 'Richest Hill on Earth,' Butte, Montana, lured immigrants from every part of the world to sweat in the copper mines that powered America in its Gilded Age. Dozens of writers celebrated this 'wide-open town' with impassioned novels of the rugged souls who braved the western frontier at the edge of the Continental Divide. They wrote of the opulence of success and the agony of broken dreams. They catalogued the clash between labor and capital as Butte boomed from a crude village of mules and men to prestige as Montana's biggest city with towering buildings of brick and iron. In Literary Butte, award-winning author Aaron Parrett surveys the wealth of literature that has come from the town that calls itself 'Butte, America.' Aaron Parrett was born in Butte, Montana. He earned a degree in Philosophy from the University of Montana and holds a Masters and a Doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia. He has published widely in many fields, including fiction. He has also gathered accolades for his original music, including the 1996 album The Sinners. In 2004 he won The Peoples Choice Award from the Montana Historical Society for his article 'Montana's Worst Natural Disaster.'
Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century: Spaces beyond the Centres (Literary Urban Studies)
by Richard Hibbitt Arunima Bhattacharya Laura ScuriattiThis book develops our understanding of the global literary field in the long nineteenth century by discussing nine different places outside the established metropoles. It shows how different economic, geographical and political factors combined to give each place its own distinctive literary culture and symbolic capital. Taking a geocritical approach, the book shows how its different case studies can be seen as ‘literary capitals’ in terms of their role within the wider nation, region or empire. The volume is divided into three parts. Part One discusses Kolkata, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. Part Two considers ‘semi-peripheral’ European cities: Pest-Buda (Budapest), Helsinki and Dublin. Part Three focuses on cities within Italy: Trieste, Florence and Rome. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts and different genres, the book reads the nineteenth-century literary field as a constellation where different connections can be plotted across various points on the map at different times.
Literary Careers in the Modern Era
by Nicola Evans Guy DavidsonThis is the first study of the shape and diversity of the literary career in the 20th and 21st centuries. Bringing together essays on a wide range of authors from Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, the book investigates how literary careers are made and unmade, and how norms of authorship are shifting in the digital era.
Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850-1914
by Alexis EasleyThis study examines literary celebrity in Britain from 1850 to 1914. Through lively analysis of rare cultural materials, Easley demonstrates the crucial role of the celebrity author in the formation of British national identity. As Victorians toured the homes and haunts of famous writers, they developed a sense of shared national heritage. At the same time, by reading sensational accounts of writers’ lives, they were able to reconsider conventional gender roles and domestic arrangements. As women were featured in interviews and profiles, they were increasingly associated with the ephemerality of the popular press and were often excluded from emerging narratives of British literary history, which defined great literature as having a timeless appeal. Nevertheless, women writers were able to capitalize on celebrity media as a way of furthering their own careers and retelling history on their own terms. Press attention had a more positive effect on men’s literary careers since they were expected to assume public identities; however, in some cases, media exposure had the effect of sensationalizing their lives, bodies, and careers. With the development of proto-feminist criticism and historiography, the life stories of male writers were increasingly used to expose unhealthy domestic relationships and imagine ideal forms of British masculinity. The first section of Literary Celebrity explores the practice of literary tourism in Victorian Britain, focusing specifically on the homes and haunts of Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Harriet Martineau. This investigation incorporates analysis of fascinating cultural texts, including maps, periodicals, and tourist guidebooks. Easley links the practice of literary tourism to a variety of cultural developments, including nationalism, urbanization, spiritualism, the women’s movement, and the expansion of popular print culture. The second section provides fresh insight into the ways that celebrity culture informed the development of Victorian historiography. Easley demonstrates how women were able to re-tell history from a proto-feminist perspective by writing contemporary history, participating in architectural reform movements, and becoming active in literary societies. In this chapter she returns to the work of Harriet Martineau and introduces a variety of lesser-known contributors to the field, including Mary Gillies and Mary Ward. Literary Celebrity concludes with a third section focused on the expansion of celebrity media at the fin de siècle. These chapters and a brief coda link the popularization of celebrity news to the de-canonization of women writers, the professionalization of medicine, the development of the open space movement, and the institutionalization of English studies. These investigations elucidate the role of celebrity media in the careers of Charlotte Robinson, Marie Corelli, Mary Braddon, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Ernest Hart, and Octavia Hill. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Literary Celebrity in Canada
by Lorraine YorkIn recent years, Canadian authors have enjoyed tremendous international success, writing novels that become Oscar-nominated films or achieve coveted success as selections for the Oprah Winfrey bookclub. Literary Celebrity in Canada is the first extended study of the dynamics of celebrity in the field of Canadian literature. Building on the argument that celebrity is a phenomenon firmly embraced by mainstream culture, Lorraine York examines it in relation to various tensions and conflicts within the literary community and beyond.Using as examples three contemporary literary celebrities, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Carol Shields, and four earlier popular writers, Pauline Johnson, Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, and L.M. Montgomery, York demonstrates that individual authors respond differently to fame in ways that can be contradictory and complex. She casts doubt on the notion of a specifically Canadian response to fame. Depending on the public interpretation of a particular writer's life and work, different tensions arise in negotiating literary celebrity. Privacy versus publicity; swift success versus laborious apprenticeship; national versus international association, or ownership of the celebrity - no single version of celebrity applies to all.Citizenship, however, is a remarkably consistent site of tension for stars, literary or otherwise. Like citizenship, celebrity marks an uneasy space wherein the single, special individual and the group demographic both meet and separate. Literary Celebrity in Canada explores that space, drawing on current theories of celebrity and questioning their tendency to view fame as an empty phenomenon. This study is an innovative attempt to understand the psychology of literary stardom and will influence future research on contemporary literature and popular culture.
The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel
by Margaret Cohen Carolyn DeverThe Literary Channel defines a crucial transnational literary "zone" that shaped the development of the modern novel. During the first two centuries of the genre's history, Britain and France were locked in political, economic, and military struggle. The period also saw British and French writers, critics, and readers enthusiastically exchanging works, codes, and theories of the novel. Building on both nationally based literary history and comparatist work on poetics, this book rethinks the genre's evolution as marking the power and limits of modern cultural nationalism. In the Channel zone, the novel developed through interactions among texts, readers, writers, and translators that inextricably linked national literary cultures. It served as a forum to promote and critique nationalist clichés, whether from the standpoint of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the insurgent nationalism of colonized spaces, or the non-nationalized culture of consumption. In the process, the Channel zone promoted codes that became the genre's hallmarks, including the sentimental poetics that would shape fiction through the nineteenth century. Uniting leading critics who bridge literary history and theory, The Literary Channel will appeal to all readers attentive to the future of literary studies, as well as those interested in the novel's development, British and French cultural history, and extra-national patterns of cultural exchange. Contributors include April Alliston, Emily Apter, Margaret Cohen, Joan DeJean, Carolyn Dever, Lynn Festa, Françoise Lionnet, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Sharon Marcus, Richard Maxwell, and Mary Helen McMurran.
The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor
by Jonathan RoseIn 1492 Columbus set out across the Atlantic; in 1776 American colonists declared their independence. Between these two events old authorities collapsed-Luther's Reformation divided churches, and various discoveries revealed the ignorance of the ancient Greeks and Romans. A new, empirical worldview had arrived, focusing now on observation, experiment, and mathematical reasoning. This engaging book takes us along on the great voyage of discovery that ushered in the modern age. David Knight, a distinguished historian of science, locates the Scientific Revolution in the great era of global oceanic voyages, which became both a spur to and a metaphor for scientific discovery. He introduces the well-known heroes of the story (Galileo, Newton, Linnaeus) as well as lesser-recognized officers of scientific societies, printers and booksellers who turned scientific discovery into public knowledge, and editors who invented the scientific journal. Knight looks at a striking array of topics, from better maps to more accurate clocks, from a boom in printing to medical advancements. He portrays science and religion as engaged with each other rather than in constant conflict; in fact, science was often perceived as a way to uncover and celebrate God's mysteries and laws. Populated with interesting characters, enriched with fascinating anecdotes, and built upon an acute understanding of the era, this book tells a story as thrilling as any in human history.
Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe: A Cross-Cultural Approach (Women And Gender In The Early Modern World Ser.)
by Julie CampbellA comparative analysis, this study examines the interactions of early modern male and female writers within the context of literary circles. In particular, Campbell examines how the querelle des femmes as a discursive rhetorical tradition of praise and blame influenced perceptions of well-educated women who were part of literary circles in Italy, France, and England from approximately 1530 to 1650. To gain a better sense of how querelle language and issues were used for or against learned women writers, Campbell aligns selected works by female and male writers, pairing them to analyze how the woman writer responds, deflects, or rewrites the male writer's ideological script on women. She focuses first on the courtesan Tullia d'Aragona's response in her Dialogo della infinità di amore to Sperone Speroni's Dialogo di amore, and contrasts the actress/writer Isabella Andreini's pastoral La Mirtilla with Torquato Tasso's Aminta. She then discusses the influence of Italian actresses upon the manners and mores of French women of the Valois court, especially focusing on performative aspects of French women's participation in court and salon rituals. To that end, she examines the influential salon of the aristocratic, learned Claude-Catherine de Clermont, duchesse de Retz, who encouraged the writing of positive querelle rhetoric in the form of Petrarchan, Neoplatonic encomiastic poetry to buttress her reputation and that of her female friends. Next, Campbell reads Louise Lab D‘t de Folie et d'Amour against Pontus de Tyard's Solitaire premier to illustrate the tensions between a traditional and nontraditional querelle stance. She then discusses Continental influence upon English writers in the context of the Sidney circle in England. Moving to the closet dramas of the Sidney circle, Campbell examines the solidarity these writers demonstrated with nontraditional stances on querelle issues, and, finally, she explores how three generations of English literary circles con
Literary Communication in Song Dynasty (ISSN)
by Wang ZhaopengBased on first-hand historical materials, this book explores the various aspects of literary communication during the Song Dynasty in China.The book investigates the single-channel dissemination of poetry and ci works, the dissemination of literary collections, the dissemination through wall inscriptions, the oral dissemination of Song ci, the remuneration and commercialization of literature in the Song Dynasty, the paths to fame for Song writers, the non-literary factors in the dissemination of literature and the dissemination of literary works through paintings and songs. The author provides insights into the six major questions in the study of literary communication: Who disseminates, where, how, what, to whom and the effects of dissemination. The author also seeks to provide detailed answers to the following questions. What was the role of female singers in both domestic and official entertainment? What were the costs and prices of the books? Who paid the authors? What methods did writers use to gain fame and social recognition?This work will be essential reading for scholars and students of Chinese studies, communication studies and media and cultural studies.
The Literary Companion
by Emma JonesWithin these pages are hundreds of facts and stories about reading and writing, from the earliest printed books to today's bestsellers.
Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture
by Betty A. SchellenbergLiterary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture offers the first study of manuscript-producing coteries as an integral element of eighteenth-century Britain's literary culture. As a corrective to literary histories assuming that the dominance of print meant the demise of a vital scribal culture, the book profiles four interrelated and influential coteries, focusing on each group's deployment of traditional scribal practices, on key individuals who served as bridges between networks, and on the aesthetic and cultural work performed by the group. The book also explores points of intersection between coteries and the print trade, whether in the form of individuals who straddled the two cultures; publishing events in which the two media regimes collaborated or came into conflict; literary conventions adapted from manuscript practice to serve the ends of print; or simply poetry hand-copied from magazines. Together, these instances demonstrate how scribal modes shaped modern literary production. This title is also available as Open Access.
Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice (Fifth Edition)
by Charles E. BresslerLiterary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, 5th Edition presents the thirteen basic schools of twentieth-century literary theory and criticism in their historical and philosophical contexts. Unlike other introductions to literary criticism, this book explores the philosophical assumptions of each school of criticism and provides a clear methodology for writing essays according to each school's beliefs and tenets.
Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History
by Joseph NorthSince the global turn to neoliberalism in the 1970s, movements in literary studies have been diagnostic rather than interventionist: scholars have developed techniques for analyzing culture but have retreated from attempts to transform it. For Joseph North, a genuinely interventionist criticism is a central task facing scholars on the Left today.
Literary Criticism: Modern Criticism (Literary Criticism)
by William K. Wimsatt, Jr. Cleanth BrooksFirst published in 1957, Literary Criticism: A Short History traces our aesthetic heritage from its classical origins up to the contemporary state of criticism in the English-speaking world. Divided into four volumes, each book adopts a fair and objective position in the presentation of various critical positions, and each critical theory is considered not only in competition with other critical theories, but also in vital dialectic with the creative literature of its own time. Volume Four focuses on Modern criticism and covers tragedy and comedy, symbolism, I. A. Richards’ critical theory, the semantic principle, Eliot and Pound, fiction and drama, and myth and archetype.
Literary Criticism: Neo-Classical Criticism (Literary Criticism)
by William K. Wimsatt, Jr. Cleanth BrooksFirst published in 1957, Literary Criticism: A Short History traces our aesthetic heritage from its classical origins up to the contemporary state of criticism in the English-speaking world. Divided into four volumes, each book adopts a fair and objective position in the presentation of various critical positions, and each critical theory is considered not only in competition with other critical theories, but also in vital dialectic with the creative literature of its own time. Volume Two focuses on Neo-Classical criticism and covers Medieval themes, the Sixteenth Century, English Neo-Classicism, late seventeenth-century themes, rhetoric and Neo-Classic wit, poetry as pictures, genius, emotion, and association, and Samuel Johnson.
Literary Criticism: Classical Criticism (Literary Criticism)
by William K. Wimsatt, Jr. Cleanth BrooksFirst published in 1957, Literary Criticism: A Short History traces our aesthetic heritage from its classical origins up to the contemporary state of criticism in the English-speaking world. Divided into four volumes, each book adopts a fair and objective position in the presentation of various critical positions, and each critical theory is considered not only in competition with other critical theories, but also in vital dialectic with the creative literature of its own time. Volume One focuses on Classical criticism, exploring Socrates and the Rhapsode, poetry as structure, tragedy and comedy, Roman classicism, and some Medieval themes.
Literary Criticism: Romantic Criticism (Literary Criticism)
by William K. Wimsatt, Jr. Cleanth BrooksFirst published in 1957, Literary Criticism: A Short History traces our aesthetic heritage from its classical origins up to the contemporary state of criticism in the English-speaking world. Divided into four volumes, each book adopts a fair and objective position in the presentation of various critical positions, and each critical theory is considered not only in competition with other critical theories, but also in vital dialectic with the creative literature of its own time. Volume Three focuses on Romantic criticism and covers poetic diction, German ideas, imagination, rhapsodic didacticism, the Arnoldian prophecy, art as propaganda, art for art’s sake, expressionism, and the Historical Method.
Literary Criticism: Idea and Act, The English Institute, 1939 - 1972
by W. K. WimsattThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.
Literary Criticism and Theory: From Plato to Postcolonialism
by Pelagia GoulimariThis incredibly useful volume offers an introduction to the history of literary criticism and theory from ancient Greece to the present. Grounded in the close reading of landmark theoretical texts, while seeking to encourage the reader's critical response, Pelagia Goulimari examines: major thinkers and critics from Plato and Aristotle to Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Said and Butler; key concepts, themes and schools in the history of literary theory: mimesis, inspiration, reason and emotion, the self, the relation of literature to history, society, culture and ethics, feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, queer theory; genres and movements in literary history: epic, tragedy, comedy, the novel; Romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. Historical connections between theorists and theories are traced and the book is generously cross-referenced. With useful features such as key-point conclusions, further reading sections, descriptive text boxes, detailed headings, and with a comprehensive index, this book is the ideal introduction to anyone approaching literary theory for the first time or unfamiliar with the scope of its history.
Literary Criticism, Culture and the Subject of 'English': F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)
by Dandan ZhangThis volume considers the highly convoluted relationship between F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, comparing their ideas in literary and cultural criticism, and connecting it to the broader discourse of English Studies as a university subject that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Comparing and contrasting all the many writings of Leavis on Eliot, and the two on Lawrence, the study examines how Eliot is formative for the theory and practice of Leavis’s literary criticism in both positive and negative ways, and investigates Lawrence’s significance in relation to Leavis’s changing attitude to Eliot. It also examines how profound differences in social, cultural, religious and national thinking strengthened Leavis’s alliance with Lawrence to the detriment of his relationship with Eliot. These differences between the two writers are presented as dichotomies between nationalism and Europeanism/internationalism, ruralism/organicism and industrialism/metropolitanism, and relate to the two men’s views on literary education, the subject of ‘English’ and the position of the Classics in the curriculum. It explores how Leavis’s increasingly conflicted feelings about a figure to whom he owned an enormous critical debt and inspiration, but whose various beliefs and literary affiliations caused him much misgiving, result in a deep sense of division in Leavis himself which he sought to transfer onto Eliot as what he called a pathological ‘case’.
Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism
by James SeatonThis book offers a history of literary criticism from Plato to the present, arguing that this history can best be seen as a dialogue among three traditions - the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and the humanistic, originated by Aristotle. There are many histories of literary criticism, but this is the first to clarify our understanding of the many seemingly incommensurable approaches employed over the centuries by reference to the three traditions. Making its case by careful analyses of individual critics, the book argues for the relevance of the humanistic tradition in the twenty-first century and beyond.