Theories of Memory

Michael Rossington is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published mainly on the writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. He is currently working on his contribution to The Poems of Shelley, Vol. 3, to be published by Longman. Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead co-edited Between the Psyche and the Polis: Refiguring history in literature and theory (Ashgate 2000). Anne Whitehead is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University, UK. She is the author of Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh, 2004) and Memory: New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 2009). She has co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh, 2016), Theories of Memory: A Reader (Edinburgh, 2007) and W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (Edinburgh, 2004), as well as a special issue of Feminist Theory on feminism and affect. She has published articles on contemporary literature in a range of journals, including Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and Contemporary Literature.

This collection provides an extensive historical and theoretical framework for the study of memory. It traces the exciting history of the philosophical problematization of memory as well as its insistent and urgent demand to be recognized and defined.

• Preface; Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; Introduction by Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead; Part I: Beginnings; 1 Classical and Early Modern Ideas of Memory, ed. by Jennifer Richards; Introduction by Jennifer Richards; 1.1 Plato: from 'Theaetetus' and 'Phaedrus'; 1.2 Aristotle: 'De Memoria et Reminiscentia'; 1.3 Cicero: from 'De oratore' ('On the Ideal Orator'); 1.4 [Cicero]: from 'Ad Herennium'; 1.5 Mary J. Carruthers: from