The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives

by Besserman,Lawrence

• ISBN13: 9780815321033
• ISBN10: 0815321031
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-08-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In these essays some of today's leading literary scholars and cultural critics re-examine major writers, genres, and themes in relation to their traditional period affiliations. The essays cover a broad range of writers and periods from the Middle Ages to the present, grouped in two main areas: Chaucer and Medieval and Renaissance studies (Larry D. Benson, Heiko A. Oberman, Lee Patterson, and Aldo Scaglione), and English and American literary history (Sanford Budick, H. M. Daleski, Denis Donoghue, Robert J. Griffin, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Jerome McGann, and Helen Vendler). In addition to shedding new light on a specific author, each essay also refines or reinvigorates critical approaches to specific periods. The analyses illuminate and clarify our understanding of what are traditionally but problematically called the Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Modern, and Postmodern eras in European cultural history.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives	p. 3
The Beginnings of Chaucer's English Style	p. 29
The Place of the Modern in the Late Middle Ages	p. 51
Reuchlin and the Jews: Obstacles on the Path to Emancipation	p. 67
The Periodization of the Renaissance and the Question of Mannerism	p. 95
Counter-Periodization and Chiasmus: The Case of Wordsworth and "the days of Dryden and Pope"	p. 107
A Critique of Romantic Periodization	p. 133
A Project for the Sun	p. 147
Rethinking Romanticism	p. 161
Thomas Hardy: A Victorian Modernist?	p. 179
Reading and Periodization: Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West"	p. 197
Is There a Perennial Literature?	p. 217
Periodizing Modern American Poetry	p. 233
List of Contributors	p. 245
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