The Uses of Literary History

by Brown, Marshall; Nemoianu, Virgil (CON); Arac, Jonathan (CON); Bloch, R. Howard (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780822317142
• ISBN10: 0822317141
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-12-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

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 Historyprovides 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

Table of Contents

Preface

Literary History

A Trout in the Milk

Literary History: Some Roads Not (Yet) Taken

What is the History of Literature?

The Once and Future Middle Ages

Literature, Meaning, and the Discontinuity of act

Empiricism Once More

Some Prospects for Literary History

Literature in History

Public Memory and its Discontents

Understanding the Living and Talking to the Dead: The Historicity of Psychoanalysis

Figures of the Feminine: An Amazonian Revolution in Feminist Literary History?

Editing as Cultural Formation: The Sexing of Shakespeare's Sonnet

Textual Politics/Sexual Politics

The Pedigree of the White Stallion: Postcoloniality and Literary History

The Victims of New Historicism

Literature as History

Preface to a Lyric History

Can We Be Historical Ever? Some Hopes for a Dialectical Model of Historical Self-Consciousness

On Literature Considered as a Dead Language

More Speech on Free Speech

Textual Conquests: On Readerly Competence and "Minority"

Literature

The Hum of Literature: Ostension in Language

Contributors

Index

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