Putting Context to New Use in Literary Studies: A Conceptual-Historicist Interpretation of Poe's "Man of the Crowd"

Reading and Not Reading 'The Man of the Crowd': Poe, the City, and the Gothic Text

Abstract: Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’, as Patricia Merivale has observed, be justifiably be considered a counterpart to ‘The Purloined Letter’ in its significance in cultural theory. It has been particularly valued as a kind of sociological document which reveals and critiques aspects of the scopic and material conditions of the modern city.Yet despite an almost universal acknowledgement that the tale is about ‘reading’, most critics have worked with a rather impoverished model of reading. Following the example of Tom Gunning, who has argued that the tale provides premonitions of a range of spectator positions in cinema, this essay argues that the story dramatizes typical responses to the literary text which are more complex than the flan flanerie. To place the text in a more explicitly literary context opens it up to an analysis which takes account of how complex its structure is, and the fact that the narrator has typically-Poe-esque ‘delusional’ credentials, and acknowledge how this might compromise or complicate some of the arguments about urban reading. As such it demands to be considered in terms of the capacity of Poe’s fiction to seduce readers into what Joseph Kronick has called, ‘identifying the intepretation with the text’, particularly in relation to the particular self-reflexive effect Garrett Stewart has termed the ‘gothic of reading’.

On the Path to Citizenship : A Conceptual Historicist Reading of Antebellum Women's Protest Literature

Abstract: This essay introduces a new approach to the history of pro‐ test literature, and to literary history writing in general. My case studies investigate three antebellum American works by women that ex ...

Democracy in America

Abstract: Abridged, with an Introduction by Patrick Renshaw. Democracy in America is a classic of political philosophy. Hailed by John Stuart Mill and Horace Greely as the finest book ever written on the nature of democracy, it continues to be an influential text on both sides of the Atlantic, above all in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe. De Tocqueville examines the structures, institutions and operation of democracy, and shows how Europe can learn from American success and failures. His central theme is the advancement of the rule of the people, but he also predicts that slavery will bring about the 'most horrible of civil wars', foresees that the USA and Russia will be the Superpowers of the twentieth century, and is 150 years ahead of his time in his views on the position and importance of women.

Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time

Abstract: Introduction, by Keith TribePart I: On the Relation of Past and Future in Modern History Chapter 1 Modernity and the Planes of HistoricityChapter 2 Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical ProcessChapter 3 Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of RevolutionChapter 4 Historical Prognosis in Lorenz von Stein s Essay on the Prussian ConstitutionPart II Theory and Method of the Historical Determination of Time Chapter 5 Begriffsgeschichte and Social HistoryChapter 6 History, Histories, and Formal Time StructuresChapter 7 Representation, Event, and StructureChapter 8 Chance as Motivational Trace in Historical WritingChapter 9 Perspective and Temporality: A Contribution to the Historiographical Exposure of the Historical WorldPart III Semantic Remarks on the Mutation of Historical Experience Chapter 10 The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric CounterconceptsChapter 11 On the Disposability of HistoryChapter 12 Terror and Dream: Methodological Remarks on the Experience of Time during the Third Reich Third ReichChapter 13 Neuzeit : Remarks on the Semantics of Modern Concepts of MovementChapter 15 Space of Experience and Horizon of Expectation : Two Historical CategoriesNotes

The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts

Abstract: 1 On the Need for Theory in the Discipline of History 2 Social History and Conceptual History 20 3 Introduction to Hayden White's Tropics ofDiscourse 38 4 Transformations of Experience and Methodological Change: A Historical-Anthropological Essay 45 5 The Temporalization of Utopia 84 6 Time and History 100 7 Concepts of Historical Time and Social History 125 8 The Unknown Future and the Art of Prognosis 131 9 Remarks on the Revolutionary Calendar and Neue Zeit 148 10 The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity 154 11 On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung I70 12 Three biirgerliche Worlds? Preliminary Theoretical-Historical Remarks on the Comparative Semantics of Civil Society in Germany, England, and France 208 13 "Progress" and "Decline": An Appendix to the History of Two Concepts 218 14 Some Questions Regarding the Conceptual History of"Crisis" 236 15 The Limits of Emancipation: A Conceptual-Historical Sketch 248 16 Daumier and Death 265 17 War Memorials: Identity Formations of the Survivors 285 18 Afterword to Charlotte Beradt's The Third Reich of Dreams 327