Synopses & Reviews
This volume, growing out of the celebrated turn toward history in literary criticism, showcases some of the best new historical work being done today in textual theory, literary history, and cultural criticism. The collection brings together for the first time key representativesfrom various schools of historicist scholarship, including leading critics whose work has helped define new historicism. The essays illuminate literary periods ranging from Anglo-Saxon to postmodern, a variety of literary texts that includes
The Siege of Thebes,
Macbeth,
The Jazz Singer, and
The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, and central issues that have marked new historicism: power, ideology, textuality, othering, marginality, exile, and liberation.
The contributors are Janet Aikins, Lawrence Buell, Ralph Cohen, Margaret Ezell, Stephen Greenblatt, Terence Hoagwood, Jerome McGann, Robert Newman, Katherine O'Keeffe, Lee Patterson, Michael Rogin, Edward Said, and Hortense Spillers. The editors' introduction situates the various essays within contemporary criticism and explores the multiple, contestatory issues at stake within the historicist enterprise.
Synopsis
This volume, growing out of the celebrated turn toward history in literary criticism, showcases some of the best new historical work being done today in textual theory, literary history, and cultural criticism. The collection brings together for the first time key representativesfrom various schools of historicist scholarship, including leading critics whose work has helped define new historicism. The essays illuminate literary periods ranging from Anglo-Saxon to postmodern, a variety of literary texts that includes
The Siege of Thebes,
Macbeth,
The Jazz Singer, and
The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, and central issues that have marked new historicism: power, ideology, textuality, othering, marginality, exile, and liberation.
The contributors are Janet Aikins, Lawrence Buell, Ralph Cohen, Margaret Ezell, Stephen Greenblatt, Terence Hoagwood, Jerome McGann, Robert Newman, Katherine O'Keeffe, Lee Patterson, Michael Rogin, Edward Said, and Hortense Spillers. The editors' introduction situates the various essays within contemporary criticism and explores the multiple, contestatory issues at stake within the historicist enterprise.
Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | |
| Acknowledgments | |
| List of Contributors | |
| Introduction: The Historicist Enterprise | 3 |
Ch. 1 | Generating Literary Histories | 39 |
Ch. 2 | Texts and Works: Some Historical Questions on the Editing of Old English Verse | 54 |
Ch. 3 | Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate | 69 |
Ch. 4 | Shakespeare Bewitched | 108 |
Ch. 5 | Re-visioning the Restoration: Or, How to Stop Obscuring Early Women Writers | 136 |
Ch. 6 | Re-presenting the Body in Pamela II | 151 |
Ch. 7 | Fictions and Freedom: Wordsworth and the Ideology of Romanticism | 178 |
Ch. 8 | Beyond the Valley of Production; or, De factorum natura: A Dialogue | 198 |
Ch. 9 | Literary History as a Hybrid Genre | 216 |
Ch. 10 | Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice | 230 |
Ch. 11 | Black, White, and in Color, or Learning How to Paint: Toward an Intramural Protocol of Reading | 267 |
Ch. 12 | Exiling History: Hysterical Transgression in Historical Narrative | 292 |
Ch. 13 | Figures, Configurations, Transfigurations | 316 |
| Index | 331 |