by J. Douglas Kneale (1999)
Often Regarded as a turning point in literary history, Romanticism is the period when writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge renounced the common legacy of poets and sought to create a new literature. Despite their emphasis on originality, genius, and spontaneity, the first-generation Romantics manifested a highly intertextual style that, while repressing certain classical and neoclassical literary conventions, revealed a deep dependence on those same rhetorical practices. Combining original and close readings of the texts with a larger sweep of genre studies, Douglas Kneale brings to light new and unexpected convergences in the Romantic tradition.
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
This book explores the appropriation and transformation of classical mythology by French culture from the mid-twelfth century to about 1430. Each of the five chapters focuses on a specific moment in this process and asks: What were the purposes of transforming classical myth? Which techniques did poets use to integrate classical subject matter into their own texts? Was a special interpretive tradition created for vernacular texts?
Willard Spiegelman
"Willard Spiegelman is considered one of the finest critics of poetry writing today. This volume collects his best work on the subject, offering essays that span his entire career and chart his changing relationship to an elusive form. With his trademark perfect pitch, in engaging and stylish prose, Spiegelman takes readers on a tour of the diverse landscape of British, American, and Latin poetry, as he provides nuanced, insightful readings of works by our greatest poets." "Ultimately, Imaginative Transcripts is less a survey of a field than a reflection of one man's literary interests and tastes. It is also an impassioned argument in favor of keeping the close reading of poetry, both in and out of the classroom, at the heart of a literary education."--Jacket.
Kevin J.H. Dettmar
The literary world has in the past two decades celebrated the centenaries of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound, the three pillars of Anglo-American modernism. Only now, Kevin J.H. Dettmar contends, are we starting to appreciate "what was apparent to the Modernists all along - that the monuments of High Modernism already contained within them the seeds of their own de(con)struction." The contributors to Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism argue that we are in the midst of a critical paradigm shift. First literary critics greeted the birth of modernism with outrage, decrying its anarchy; then the New Critics sought to control it with interpretation. Today, critics are beginning to rediscover modernism's inherent anarchy, this time from the postmodernist perspective. The result is the emergence of a new way of reading - and writing about - modernism. The book collects essays by established scholars as well as fresh new voices that provide a variety of perspectives on modernism. The first section, "Inventing Modernism," shows how modernist writers worked together to craft a coherent identity; the second, "Modernist Aesthetics," critiques Lyotard and other theorists on the assumptions underlying modernist texts. In "Modernism and Mass Culture," we see how Stein, Lawrence, and Eliot reacted to a burgeoning mass culture, while "Rereading the New" provides postmodernist readings of Conrad, Woolf, and Djuna Barnes, as well as Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
Kathleen M. Glenn and Janet Pérez
"Cristina Fernandez Cubas is, without question, one of the most important of the Spanish writers who have begun to publish since the end of the Franco dictatorship. Credited with playing a major role in the renaissance of the short story in Spain, she has won national and international acclaim for her fiction. Works by her have been translated into eight languages and have become a staple of university courses on contemporary Peninsular literature. Fernandez Cubas has created a remarkably coherent narrative world, nourished by a core of fundamental concerns. The eleven essays of Mapping the Fiction of Cristina Fernandez Cubas examine the intellectual preoccupations, narrative strategies, and rhetorical devices that distinguish the four volumes of short stories, two novels, the play, and the book of memoirs that she has published to date."--Jacket.