by Peter Mack (2002)
In this deeply learned contribution to the cultural and educational history of Elizabethan England, Peter Mack examines the impact of humanist training in the use of language on English prose writing. He shows how this training was deployed in both literary genres and in more practical legal and political settings.
Michael West
"Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, America was captivated by a muddled notion of “etymology.” New England Transcendentalism was only one outcropping of a nationwide movement in which schoolmasters across small-town America taught students the roots of words in ways that dramatized religious issues and sparked wordplay."--Publisher's description.
Don H. Bialostosky and Lawrence D. Needham
So successful were the appeals to "genius" by the romantic poets that few critics since have paid much attention to the influence of rhetorical traditions on romantic expression. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, though the status of classical rhetoric declined during the nineteenth century, romantic genius did not sweep away rhetoric. Romantic writers drew upon a number of rhetorical traditions - sophistic, classical, biblical, and enlightenment - in the creation of their art, and interest in various aspects of the art of discourse remained strong. These essays - half of them commissioned for this volume - document the importance of these traditions in shaping the poetry, novels, and criticism of Coleridge, De Quincey, Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, Austen, and Scott. . The contributors are Stephen C. Behrendt, Don H. Bialostosky, Jerome Christensen, Richard W. Clancey, Klaus Dockhorn, James Engell, David Ginsberg, Bruce E. Graver, Scott Harshbarger, Theresa M. Kelley, J. Douglas Kneale, John R. Nabholtz, Lawrence D. Needham, Marie Secor, Nancy S. Struever, Leslie Tannenbaum, and Susan J. Wolfson.
Gillian Beer
This text demonstrates how Darwin overturned fundamental cultural assumptions in his narratives, how George Eliot and other writers pursued and resisted their contradictory implications in their writings.
Wallace Fowlie
Wallace Fowlie provides an uncommonly well-written survey of French Symbolism by way of analyzing key poems in relation to the historical and literary contexts in which they were written. The literary symbol, as it has been used since Baudelaire's time, has in Fowlie's view a closer relationship with the religious spirit of humanity than with any practical or didactic use. Symbolism has been a major focus of literary study since Baudelaire's Correspondances, which can be seen as a succinct manifesto. It has provided an aesthetic basis for works that have elements of both myth and allegory. These are among the most impressive works of literature since 1850, which have reacted strongly against a realistic art of precision in order to reflect preoccupations that are religious and philosophical. After tracing the background of Symbolism from Romanticism to "Art for Art's Sake," Fowlie considers the work of Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Corbiére, and Verlaine. He then recapitulates the major features of Symbolism and illustrates its continuity to our day. Fowlie sees Symbolism and modern poetry not as the art of rules and obstacles, but rather as the art of triumph over obstacles and the transcendence of human adventure and experience. He concludes with penetrating analyses of the poetic practice of Valéry, Claudel, St. John Perse, and René Char.