Showing papers on "Literary science published in 2002"

American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853

Abstract: The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. And yet, as Meredith L. McGill argues, a mass market for books in this period was built and sustained through what we would call rampant literary piracy: a national literature developed not despite but because of the systematic copying of foreign works. Restoring a political dimension to accounts of the economic grounds of antebellum literature, McGill unfolds the legal arguments and political struggles that produced an American "culture of reprinting" and held it in place for two crucial decades. In this culture of reprinting, the circulation of print outstripped authorial and editorial control. McGill examines the workings of literary culture within this market, shifting her gaze from first and authorized editions to reprints and piracies, from the form of the book to the intersection of book and periodical publishing, and from a national literature to an internally divided and transatlantic literary marketplace. Through readings of the work of Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne, McGill seeks both to analyze how changes in the conditions of publication influenced literary form and to measure what was lost as literary markets became centralized and literary culture became stratified in the early 1850s. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 delineates a distinctive literary culture that was regional in articulation and transnational in scope, while questioning the grounds of the startlingly recent but nonetheless powerful equation of the national interest with the extension of authors' rights.

Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies

Abstract: Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation as a means to assert their civic identities and intervene in the political and literary cultures of the United States from which they were otherwise excluded. Forgotten Readers expands our definition of literacy and urges us to think of literature as broadly as it was conceived of in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members. She examines particular literary associations, including the Saturday Nighters of Washington, D.C., whose members included Jean Toomer and Georgia Douglas Johnson. She shows how black literary societies developed, their relationship to the black press, and the ways that African American women’s clubs—which flourished during the 1890s—encouraged literary activity. In an epilogue, McHenry connects this rich tradition of African American interest in books, reading, and literary conversation to contemporary literary phenomena such as Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (review)

Abstract: \"Hayden White...is the most prominent American scholar to unite historiography and literary criticism into a broader reflection on narrative and cultural understanding.\" --'The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism' In his earlier books such as 'Tropics of Discourse' and 'The Content of the Form', Hayden White focused on the conventions of historical writing and on the ordering of historical consciousness. In 'Figural Realism', White collects eight interrelated essays primarily concerned with the treatment of history in recent literary critical discourse. \"'History' is not only an object we can study,\" writes White, \"it is also and even primarily a certain kind of relationship to 'the past' mediated by a distinctive kind of written discourse. It is because historical discourse is actualized in its culturally significant form as a specific kind of writing that we may consider the relevance of literary theory to both the theory and the practice of historiography.\

The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen

Abstract: Theorists, scholars, and critics usually consider literary works to be fixed objects, assuming that any variations in the text of a work should be stabilized, reduced, eliminated John Bryant urges that these variations create valuable records of the interactions between the artist and society Preprint revisions, revised editions, adaptations for film, and expurgations for children are among the many forms of flux that shape literary works and position them relative to their audiences Fully understanding the life of a literary work in its cultural situation requires recognizing the fluidity of text, and the present work makes the first coherent theoretical, critical, and editorial approach to the study of revisionThe author develops his theory and its critical application drawing upon the example of Melville's "Typee, " using its various versions to present protocols for fluid text analysis He shows how the mountain of scholarly material comprising the fluid text can be presented by a partnership of book and computer screen, in ways that offer new opportunities, insights, and pleasures for scholars and readers"The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen" is written in a clear and accessible style and will appeal to scholars and students in editorial theory, literary criticism and analysis, and anyone concerned with the information architecture of complex literary works in digital mediaJohn Bryant is Professor of English, Hofstra University His most recent book is an edition of "Melville's Tales, Poems, and Other Writings"

A literary theory perspective on accounting: Towards heteroglossic accounting reports

Abstract: This paper adopts a literary theory perspective to depict accounting reports and information as texts rather than as economic commodities and so available for analysis from the vantage point of semiotic linguistic theory In doing so it takes the literary turn followed by many of the social sciences and humanities in recent decades It compares and contrasts four dominant genres of literary theory – expressive realism, the new criticism, structuralism, and deconstructionism – to developments in accounting The paper illustrates these and other ideas in the context of the controversies surrounding the oil and gas accounting crisis and practices circa 1961 to 1990 The paper concludes by outlining a new way of preparing accounting reports based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the heteroglossic novel This approach calls for making accounting for an enterprise an ongoing conversation rather than a monologic process of closing down on a single meaning

Language and Literary Structure: The Linguistic Analysis of Form in Verse and Narrative

Abstract: How does a literary text get to have literary form, and what is the relation between literary form and linguistic form? This theoretical study of linguistic structure in literature focuses on verse and narrative from a linguistic perspective. Nigel Fabb provides a simple and realistic linguistic explanation of poetic form in English from 1500–1900, drawing on the English and American verse and oral narrative tradition, as well as contemporary criticism. In recent years literary theory has paid relatively little attention to form; this book argues that form is interesting. Fabb offers a new linguistic approach to how metre and rhythm work in poetry, based on pragmatic theory and provides a pragmatic explanation of formal ambiguity and indeterminacy and their aesthetic effects. He also uses linguistics to examine the experience of poetry. Language and Literary Structure will be welcomed by students and researchers in linguistics, literary theory and stylistics.

European literary careers : the author from antiquity to the Renaissance

Abstract: Authorial studies, or 'career criticism' is a new and distinctive branch of interpretive methodology that explores various paths of European careers, particularly literary careers. In this first book-length study in the field various specialists from Italian, French, English, and Spanish studies collectively discuss literary careers spanning from classical antiquity through the Renaissance. They argue that the idea of a literary career evolves slowly, derives centrally from Virgil, and that the periodization from classical, medieval and Renaissance culture helps to elucidate the details of that evolution. Including authors from Theocritus to Spenser, the contributors correlate an author's sense of a career to the period of history in which he or she is writing, foregrounding his or her role in the multi-sphered life of the nation, especially its institutions of family, state, and church. Authorship and agency, genre and genre patterning, imitation and intertextuality, politics and religions, sexuality and gender all become part of the complex template for defining the idea of a literary career. Unique in both scope and topic, this study breaks new ground in current critical theory, allowing for complex interrelations between models of authorial agency and models of social construction.

Come, bright improvement! : the literary societies of nineteenth-century Ontario

Abstract: The forerunner of today's book clubs, nineteenth-century literary societies provided a lively social and intellectual forum where people could gather and discuss books, cultural affairs, and current events. In Come, bright Improvement! Heather Murray explores the literary societies of Ontario between 1820 and 1900 - some of which are still in existence today - and examines the extent to which they mirrored or challenged contemporary social, political, and intellectual trends. Based on a wealth of original research with periodicals and local archival materials, Murray traces the evolution from early political and debating clubs to more dedicated literary and cultural societies, such as Shakespeare or Browning groups. Many people formed literary societies, including workers, women, Black fugitives, and members of religious denominations such as Quakers and Methodists. Murray studies the societies in detail, exploring everything from the reading materials they favoured to the other kinds of social and civic activities in which they participated. Of additional interest to scholars of book history if the book's resource guide, which records the location, history, and archival deposits of several hundred societies. A first in the study of the book club phenomenon, Come, bright Improvement! is a wonderful introduction to nineteenth-century Ontario, the history of book studies, and the history of reading.

Rethinking literary history : a dialogue on theory

Abstract: Preface: Theorizing Literary History in Dialogue 1. Rethinking the National Model 2. Rethinking Literary History and Racial Memory 3. Rethinking the History of Literary History 4. Rethinking the Scale of Literary History 5. Rethinking the Colonial Model Afterword: A Personal Response

Style and Form in Old-Babylonian Literary Texts

Abstract: Basing himself on a careful study of all hitherto published (and some unpublished) Old-Babylonian literary texts - roughly 270 different compositions of all literary genres - Dr. Wasserman systematically leads the reader to a number of insightful conclusions regarding distinctive style and outstanding features of the Old-Babylonian literary system (as opposed to everyday texts, such as letters). The three opening chapters - "Hendiadys, Tamy?z," and "Damqam-?nim" - are mainly concerned with syntax, but also connections with "inalienability," a semantic issue. Chapter four and five, "Merismus" and "Simile," focus on semantics (though also including word order). The last chapter, "Rhyming Couplets," is fully devoted to form, with elaborations on such semantic problems as performative speech acts. The concluding pages delineate the contours of the Old-Babylonian literary system; genres and 'genre-families', the dichotomy between oral and written traditions, and the distinction between learned and popular literature. With a detailed catalogue of all known literary Old-Babylonian compositions.

Creating Commonplaces for Interpretation: Literary Anthropology and Literacy Education Research:

Abstract: This article uses Iser's (1989, 1993) concept of “literary anthropology” to inform methods for textual interpretation that explicitly aim to create relationships among experiences of history, memory, language, and geography. This article presents an interpretive text, which functions as the report of the author's personal engagements with literary fiction and with philosophical, theoretical, and historical writings. In addition, the article provides a theoretical and historical overview of literary anthropology as a research method, with particular attention to how this method is influenced by the hermeneutic philosophic traditions. The article concludes with a discussion of what literary anthropological methods might contribute to literacy education and literacy education research.

The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction

Abstract: "The Chinese Postmodern" is a pioneering study of today's Chinese experimental fiction, exploring the works of such major writers as Can Xue, Ge Fei, Ma Yuan, Mo Yan, Xu Xiaohe, and Yu Hua from the perspective of cultural and literary postmodernity. Focusing on the interplay between historical psychology and representational mode, and between political discourse and literary rhetoric, it examines the problem of Chinese postmodernity against the background of the cultural-political reality of twentieth-century China.The book seeks to redefine Chinese modernity and postmodernity through the analyses of both orthodox and avant-garde works. In doing so, the author draws on a number of theories, psychoanalysis and deconstruction in particular, revealing the hidden connection between the deconstructive mode of writing and the experience of history after trauma and showing how avant-garde literature brings about a varied literary paradigm that defies the dominant, subject-centered one in twentieth-century China.The distinctiveness of "The Chinese Postmodern" is also found in its portrayal of the changes of literary paradigms in modern Chinese literature. By way of characterizing avant-garde fiction, it provides an overview of twentieth-century Chinese literature and offers a theorization of the intellectual history of modern China. Other issues concerning literary theory are explored, including the relationships between postmodernity and totalitarian discourse, between historical trauma and literary writing, and between psychic trauma and rhetorical irony. This book will appeal to readers in the fields of Chinese literature and culture, modern Chinese history, literary theory, and comparative literature.Xiaobin Yang is Croft Assistant Professor, University of Mississippi.

Israel of Alqosh and Joseph of Telkepe : a story in a truthful language : religious poems in vernacular Syriac (North Iraq, 17th century)

Abstract: East-Syrian Christians of Iraqi Kurdistan managed to develop a written literary tradition in Neo-Aramaic, transmitted in manuscripts from the 16th century onwards. A selection of the earliest dated religious poems is now published in a critical edition, with English translation and full concordances to the texts. In the introduction, the salient linguistic and stylistic features of the corpus are placed in their historical context and studied in socio-linguistic, text-critical, literary and anthropological perspectives. The poems are presented as exploring new methods of dealing with the Classical Syriac heritage. Their literary value can only be appreciated as reflecting the aesthetics of a poetic tradition, which is strongly influenced by its oral-aural background. With the work of early vernacular poets as Israel of Alqosh and Joseph of Telkepe, the vernacular language enters the space of liturgical poetry, bringing with it manners and techniques of the folk literary tradition. The multicultural milieu of Iraqi Kurdistan has a certain impact on the transformation of the late East-Syriac literary tradition. Words, motifs and myths, which are shared with the surrounding religious communities - especially Jews and Muslims - are either positively incorporated into Christian poetry or polemically used against those communities.

Reading the House: A Literary Perspective

Abstract: What good is a view of the ocean unless one views it every day for many, many days out of the corner of one’s eye—while hanging clothes, setting the table, picking up toys from the porch? Who can tell what a house is like unless one lives in it, knows its middle-of-the-night creaks, becomes familiar with the geometric patterns made by doors, window frames, light coming through drawn bedroom shades? —Eng 1960, 69

The environmental tradition in English literature

Abstract: Drawing upon the English literary tradition for new perspectives and paradigms, this collection presents a broad range of theoretical and historical approaches to ecocriticism. The first section of the volume offers different theoretical frameworks for ecocritical work, encompassing a range of socio-political, post-modern and multi-disciplinary approaches. In the second section, contributors explore the ways in which ecocriticism allows us to re-think literary history.

Yeats, the Irish literary revival and the politics of print

Abstract: Examines the relationship between Yeats, Irish literary nationalism and the publishing industry during the Irish Literary Revival in the late Nineteenth Century. It highlights the factors that shaped Yeats Irish literary nationalism and examines the way he continually modified his journalism and poetry to accommodate the often antagonistic perspectives of his Catholic, Protestant and Unionist editors and readers on contemporary political and cultural issues.Yeats' texts are read not just as aesthetic artifacts but as documents of their time, caught in the complexities of Irish politics and literary nationalism and influenced by fiercely partisan editorial advocacy and agendas. In doing so it illustrates that the standards bequeathed by Yeats' Celtic nationalism can be radically revised. This books sheds new light on the Irish Literary Revival which was propagated through the periodical press.By reinserting Yeats' texts into their environment of primary publication, and rereading them in the contexts for which they were first written, this study significantly enhances our understanding of that time. It casts an entirely new light on a text's meaning and significance, and poses radical challenges to the established canon.

Psychoanalyzing the Prepsychoanalytic Subject

Abstract: But look more carefully […]. [T]here is something other, some strewn matter, that does not absorb […]. —Adam Thorpe, Ulverton Declaring Psychoanalysis “Finally Dead and buried” is “one of the seasonal rituals of our intellectual life” (Žižek 7). In the latest salvo of this battle, Lee Patterson rehearses the argument that debunking the scientific base of Freudianism renders the theory useless to the humanities, and he objects particularly to the application of psychoanalytic models to medieval texts—an exercise, for him, in anachronistic reasoning. Patterson's claim recalls earlier rounds led by Stephen Greenblatt and, a decade before that, in a more totalizing vein, by Frederick Crews. My title indicates my interest in the dispute: where Patterson calls psychoanalysis an “ambulance” or “hearse” (656), I argue that the theory is less a vehicle to be abandoned or replaced and more something organic and renewable—an evolving body of ideas that provides techniques for reading. However, in this short essay I will not construct an apologia for psychoanalytic theory generally but take on the more limited task of characterizing recent uses of the theory in critical engagements with early modern texts. Salient qualities of this work have been overlooked by those who demonize psychoanalysis (a habit suggested by Žižek's image) or are allergic to anything linked to Freud.

Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein

Abstract: This book explores the relationships between four modernist poets and the museums that helped shape their writing. During the early twentieth century, museums were trying to reach a wider audience and used displayed objects to teach that audience about art, culture, and ecology. Writers such as Yeats, Pound, Moore, and Stein borrowed strategies and techniques from museums in order to create literary modernism. "Poetry in the Museums of Modernism" places these writers' poetry and prose within the context of specific gallery spaces, curatorial practices, displayed objects, and exhibition objectives of the museums that inspired them, exposing the ways in which literary modernism is linked to museums.Although critics have attested to the importance of the visual arts to literary modernists and have begun to explore the relationships between literary production and social institutions, before now no one has examined the particular institutions in which modernist poets found the artworks, specimens, and other artifacts that inspired their literary innovations. Catherine Paul's book offers the reader a fresh encounter with modernism that will interest literary and art historians, literary theorists, critics, and scholars in cultural studies and museum studies.Catherine Paul is Associate Professor of English, Clemson University.

Literary Liaisons: Auto/biographical Appropriations in Modernist Women's Fiction

Abstract: * Unhappy relationships are the stuff of fiction - or so Lynette Felber observes as she examines the lives and fiction of five modernist women writers whose lovers were also literary figures. Focusing on Anais Nin, Rebecca West, Zelda Fitzgerald, Radclyffe Hall, and H.D., she investigates the ways these female authors made use of their relationships in their fiction. Whether heterosexual or lesbian, these women struggled to assert the authority of their own literary voices and to achieve professional recognition distinct from their partners. The modernist period, when British and American women first began to exercise their newly granted political rights, provides a particularly interesting backdrop for this study of literary appropriation. Using feminist and psychoanalytical theory, Felber views these emerging authors' fictionalized struggles as reenactments of the process by which the self differentiates itself from the Other. The literary liaison is the site where the female writer's professional identity is enacted, contested, and finally empowered or suppressed. As she examines the impact of literary relationships on modernist women writers, Felber reveals their preoccupation with attaining the status of "subject." The writers discussed in Literary Liaisons are well known for their various work - Rebecca West for her journalism, Anais Nin for her erotica, H.D. for her imagist poetry - as well as for their associations with such celebrated partners as H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Henry Miller. The conflicts reflected in the five modernist women's writings stir a voyeuristic curiosity about the autobiographical truths that may lurk behind every fiction. Literary Liaisons will appeal to all who are interested in women's fiction, autobiography, and the culture of modernism.

The literary project and representations of anthropology

Abstract: In the 1980s, the publication of three works, `Ethnographies as Texts', Writing Culture, and Anthropology as Cultural Critique, signaled the arrival of a significantly literary project claimed as a critique of anthropology, widely reviewed and discussed at the time (both pro and con). These works have continued to have a major impact on anthropological practice, particularly in the United States. In this article, I return to these `early works' in the literary project, as well as to Geertz's `Thick Description', which I see as seminal to their production. I argue that the `crisis of representation' claimed in these works is a misrepresentation of the core intentions and efforts of the anthropological enterprise. The perspective presented here is one in which the focus on representation is seen as having encumbered rather than enlightened the work of anthropologists, and argues for an anthropology grounded in life, not literature.

Literary Pedagogy in Nursing: A Theory-Based Perspective.

Abstract: Using fictional and autobiographical literature in nursing education is a primary way of understanding patients' lived experiences and fostering development of essential relational and reflective thinking skills. Application of literary theory to this pedagogic practice can expand conceptualization of teaching goals, inform specific teaching strategies, and potentially contribute to socially consequential educational outcomes. This article describes a theoretical schema that focuses on pedagogical goals in terms of the three related skills (i.e., reading, interpretation, criticism) of textual competence.

On Introduction to Literary Criticism

Abstract: introduction" is a kind of criticism advanced by the paper, namely introduction of various factors beyond the works to form explanation of the works Its ontology is based on the open relation of literature with the outside world The introduction offers background to the display of significance about the works and different combination of multi introduction manners is the generative mechanism for various criticisms

The question of literature : the place of the literary in contemporary theory

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. The literary and the ethical: difference as definition - Charles Altieri 3. Singular events: literature, invention, and performance - Derek Attridge 4. The post-literary condition: Sartre, Camus and the question(s) of literature - David Carroll 5. Literary force, institutional values - Timothy Clark 6. The literary as activity in postmodernity - Marianne DeKoven 7. The question concerning literature - Thomas Dochertty 8. Literature as regime (meditiations on an emergence) - John Frow 9. 'Fiction' and the experience of the other - Peggy Kamuf 10. Constructing Xanadu: towards a poetics of hypertext fiction - Adrian Page 11. Pretend what youlike: literature under construction - Bruce Robbins 12. Literature - repeat nothing - Robert Smith

A Handbook of Literary Feminisms

Abstract: Introduction History Early Modern Traditions, 1500-1700 Eighteenth Century Triumphs, 1700-1780 Romantic Revolutions, 1780-1832 Victorian Contradictions, 1832-1895 Modern Experiments, 1895-1945 Late Twentieth-Century Directions, 1945-2000 Approaches to Women's Texts Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory Critical Intersections Sexualities Subjectivities Ideology and Culture Bibliographies Glossary Timelines