What drives literary change? Does literature merely follow shifts in a culture, or does it play a distinctive role in shaping emergent trends? Michael Fuller explores these questions while examining the changes in Chinese shi poetry from the late Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) to the end of the Southern Song (1127–1279), a period of profound social and cultural transformation.
Shi poetry written in response to events was the dominant literary genre in Song dynasty China, serving as a central form through which literati explored meaning in their encounters with the world. By the late Northern Song, however, old models for meaning were proving inadequate, and Daoxue (Neo-Confucianism) provided an increasingly attractive new ground for understanding the self and the world. Drifting among Rivers and Lakes traces the intertwining of the practice of poetry, writings on poetics, and the debates about Daoxue that led to the cultural synthesis of the final years of the Southern Song and set the pattern for Chinese society for the next six centuries. Examining the writings of major poets and Confucian thinkers of the period, Fuller discovers the slow evolution of a complementarity between poetry and Daoxue in which neither discourse was self-sufficient.
This important collection explores and clarifies two of the most contested ideas in literary theory today, influence and intertextuality. The study of influence tends to center on major authors and canonical works, identifying prior documents as “sources” or “contexts” for a given author. Intertextuality, on the other hand, is a concept unconcerned with authors as individuals; it treats all texts as part of a network of discourse that includes culture, history, and social practices as well as other literary works. In thirteen essays drawing on the entire spectrum of English and American literary history, this volume considers the relationship between these two terms—their rivalry, their kinship, their range of uses.
Debates about these two concepts have been crucial to the “new historicism” and the resurgence of interest in literary history. The essays in this volume employ a refreshing array of examples from that history—poetry of the Renaissance and the twentieth century, novels of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, Old English texts, and postmodernist productions that have served as recurrent “intertexts” for contemporary theory. The contributors treat such currently vital questions as the role of the author, canon formation, gender, causality, and the social dimension of texts. They illuminate old assumptions and new ideas about agency that lie behind notions of influence, and they examine models of an anonymous textual field that lie behind notions of intertextuality.
The volume takes much of its character from its own intertextual origin as a group project of the English faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Though diverse in their academic interests, concerns, and experience, the contributors particpated in an ongoing intellectual exchange that is a model of how new scholarship can arise from dialogue.
A rich literary study of AfroLatinx life writing, this book traces how AfroLatinxs have challenged their erasure in the United States and Latin America over the last century.
Invisibility and Influence demonstrates how a century of AfroLatinx writers in the United States shaped life writing, including memoir, collective autobiography, and other formats, through depictions of a wide range of “Afro-Latinidades.” Using a woman-of-color feminist approach, Regina Marie Mills examines the work of writers and creators often excluded from Latinx literary criticism. She explores the tensions writers experienced in being viewed by others as only either Latinx or Black, rather than as part of their own distinctive communities. Beginning with Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg, who contributed to wider conversations about autobiographical technique, Invisibility and Influence examines a breadth of writers, including Jesús Colón; members of the Young Lords; Piri Thomas; Lukumi santera and scholar Marta Moreno Vega; and Black Mexican American poet Ariana Brown. Mills traces how these writers confront the distorted visions of AfroLatinxs in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and how they created and expressed AfroLatinx spirituality, politics, and self-identity, often amidst violence. Mapping how AfroLatinx writers create their own literary history, Mills reveals how AfroLatinx life writing shapes and complicates discourses on race and colorism in the Western Hemisphere.
Inscribed some time after 264 BCE, the Parian Marble offers a chronological list of events with an exceptional emphasis on literary matters. Literary History in the Parian Marble explores the literary and historiographical qualities of the inscription, the genre to which it belongs, and the emerging patterns of time. Endorsing the hypothesis that the inscription was originally displayed at a Parian shrine honoring Archilochus, Andrea Rotstein argues that literary history was one of its main concerns. Though it may be conventional in its focus on the chronology of poets, their inventions and victories, the Parian Marble is nonetheless idiosyncratic in the range of authors displayed. By reconstructing the methods by which information might have been obtained, Rotstein contributes to an understanding of the way literary history was practiced within the local communities of ancient Greece, away from the major Hellenistic centers of scholarship.
The Parian chronicle has not been the subject of a comprehensive study for almost a century. Literary History in the Parian Marble brings to the English-speaking audience up-to-date information about the inscription, including a revision of Felix Jacoby’s Greek text and a complete translation.
John Frow’s book is a novel contribution to Marxist literary theory, proposing a reconciliation of formalism and historicism in order to establish the basis for a new literary history. Through a critique of his forerunners in Marxist theory (the historicist Marxism of Lukács, the work of Macherey, Eagleton, and Jameson), Frow seeks to define the strengths and the limitations of this tradition and then to extend its possibilities in a radical reworking of the concept of discourse. He develops the notion of literature as a historically specific system within a network of discourses.
Frow goes on to elaborate a number of central theoretical categories and to explore the historical dimension of those categories. Drawing in particular on Russian Formalism, he develops a theory of the dynamics of literary change and of the historical pressures that shape the literary system. He tests and extends his categories through readings of texts by Petronius, Hölderlin, DeLillo, Dickens, Frank Hardy, and others. The final chapter, a reading of Derrida and Foucault, poses the question of the possibility of setting limits to reading and the power of limits to determine literary history.
Essays included in this collection discuss the hesitant response of the American academy to Bourdieu; Bourdieu on Derrida on Kant; “pure poetry,” cultural capital, and the rejection of classicism; and the insight Bourdieu’s work lends to our understanding of the position of eighteenth-century women writers.
Contributors. Marilyn Butler, John Guillory, Elizabeth W. Harries, Jonathan Joesberg, Toril Moi, William Paulson, Trevor Ross
The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that littered the floor of Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine. During the period of the pivotal growth and widespread adoption of word processing as a writing technology, some authors embraced it as a marvel while others decried it as the death of literature. The product of years of archival research and numerous interviews conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary history of word processing.
Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing perceived as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing?
Track Changes balances the stories of individual writers with a consideration of how the seemingly ineffable act of writing is always grounded in particular instruments and media, from quills to keyboards. Along the way, we discover the candidates for the first novel written on a word processor, explore the surprisingly varied reasons why writers of both popular and serious literature adopted the technology, trace the spread of new metaphors and ideas from word processing in fiction and poetry, and consider the fate of literary scholarship and memory in an era when the final remnants of authorship may consist of folders on a hard drive or documents in the cloud.
Taking the form of fact-filled travelogues, stunt-writing spectaculars, or genre-blurring imaginative works, travel writing has never been more popular than it is today. But beyond the self-conscious literary artistry of today’s narratives lies a rich and well-documented history of travel writing, stretching back over several thousand years and incorporating the work of mariners and missionaries, diplomats and dilettantes alike.
Contributors. Charles Altieri, Jonathan Arac, R. Howard Bloch, Richard Dellamora, Paul H. Fry, Geoffrey Hartman, Denis Hollier, Donna Landry, Lawrence Lipking, Jerome J. McGann, Walter Benn Michaels, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Virgil Nemoianu, Annabel Patterson, David Perkins, Marjorie Perloff, Meredith Anne Skura, Doris Sommer, Peter Stallybrass, Susan Stewart
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press