Essays on English and American Literature

Essays on English and American Literature
Author: Olivier Abiteboul
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2018-12-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527523969

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This volume brings together a group of essays on 27 English or American writers contributing to the history of English and American literature, and offers a concise survey of the question of literary understanding. It approaches this question in a specific and systematic way, adopting the framework of structuralist literary criticism. The book proposes a preliminary to the understanding of literature in general, a sort of “philosophy of literature”, as the problems involved in critical reading of course reflect the powerful characteristics of literary language.

Reading America

Reading America
Author: Denis Donoghue
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1988-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780520064249

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Here is a selection by the distinguished critic of his essays and commentaries on American writing and writers, from Emerson and Whitman through Auden and Ashbery. Denis Donoghue examines the canon in the light of what he takes to be the central dynamic of the American enterprise--the imperatives of a powerful national past versus the subversions of an irrevocably anarchic spirit.

Enthusiast!

Enthusiast!
Author: David Herd
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2017-05-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526125110

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This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Enthusiast! is a polemical history of American literature told from the point of view of six of its major enthusiasts. Complaining that his age was ‘retrospective’, Emerson injected enthusiasm into American literature as a way of making it new. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is a man good for without enthusiasm? and what is enthusiasm but the daring of ruin for its object?’ This book takes enthusiasm to be a defining feature of American literature, showing how successive major writers – Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler – have modernized and re-modeled Emerson’s founding sense of enthusiasm. The book presents the writer as enthusiast, showing how enthusiasm is fundamental to the composition and the circulation of literature. Enthusiasm, it is argued, is the way literary value is passed on. Starting with a brief history of enthusiasm from Plato to Kant and Emerson, the book features chapters on each of Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, O’Hara, and Schuyler. Each chapter presents an aspect of the writer as enthusiast, the book as a whole charting the changing sense of literary enthusiasm from Romanticism to the present day. Lucidly written and combatively argued, the book will appeal to readers of American Literature or Modern Poetry, and to all those interested in the circulation of literary work.

The Essay in American Literature

The Essay in American Literature
Author: Adaline May Conway
Publisher:
Total Pages: 156
Release: 1914
Genre: American essays
ISBN:

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Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation

Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation
Author: Michael Davitt Bell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2001
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780226041797

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In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers.

Re-Entering Old Spaces

Re-Entering Old Spaces
Author: Aleksandra Nikcevic-Batricevic
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2016-05-11
Genre:
ISBN: 1443894087

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This book is a product of the XI International Conference on English Language and Literary Studies held in Montenegro in 2014. The “old spaces” were taken as a metaphorical tool for reintroducing a wide range of established topics with new approaches. Space was, thus, understood as physical, mechanical, continuous, linear, as measurable and symbolic, as subjective and relational, and as aesthetic. It was found on maps, in architecture, on theatre stages, in books, in hearts, in one’s identity, in time, and in theses and theories from the Aristotelian topos to Einstein’s construct of space-time. Therefore, the means of travel to these spaces and the forms the journeys take are also multifarious. However, so are the discursive strategies and their limitations when it comes to presenting the journeys and their destinations. The contributors to this volume represent a range of nationalities, and present research that either follows in the footsteps of other authors, in a literal or secondary literary journey to real geographical places, or observes the universal literary and old theoretical issues through new critical lenses. Indeed, they are often on both roads, witnessing how inextricable human efforts are to finding, identifying, and aestheticising oneself in relation to a particular space. Their contributions to this book expose how “spaces” were created and recreated through writing and symbolical representations in general. They also show how the images of these spaces have been changing in consent to the intentions of their visitors, and reveal that persistent and obstinate moment in a space that despite, or in spite of, changing perspectives, itself refuses to be changed. The book will encourage for further contributions to this expanding field in the humanities. In their numerous and distinct ways, the contributions to this particular book maintain that understanding how spaces are conceived and conceptualised is of pronounced importance in the globalized world in which cultures are gradually losing authenticities, while their spaces – geographical, tourist, spiritual, literary, aesthetic – are as reflective of the “visitors” as they are of the “hosts.”

Long Black Song

Long Black Song
Author: Houston A. Baker
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 1990
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813913018

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Houston Baker maintains that black American culture, grounded in a unique historical experience, is distinct from any other, and that it has produced a body of literature that is equally and demonstrably unique in its sources, values, and modes of expression. He argues that black American literature is rooted in black folklore- animal tales, trickster slave tales, religious tales, folk songs, spirituals, and ballads- and that a knowledge of this tradition is essential to the understanding of any individual black author or work. To deomonstrate the continuity of this tradition, Baker examines themes that appear in folklore and persist throughout contemporary black literature. "Freedom and Apocalypse," for example, traces the idea that black Americans are a chosen people who will, by some violent means, overthrow the white man's tyranny. The essays culminate in an examination of the life and work of Richard Wright. Baker's treatment of Wright as a black American artist who recorded the black man's shift from an agrarian to an urban setting places Wright and the tradition of black literature and culture in a fresh perspective.

Essays on American Literature, in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell

Essays on American Literature, in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell
Author: Jay Broadus Hubbell
Publisher: Durham, N.C : Duke University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 1967
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

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A collection of critical essays examining numerous American authors and literary trends since colonial times.