Theories of Memory

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. -- Cathy Caruth, Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Emory University This Reader does a superb job in defining and presenting some of the most interesting work currently being done on the forms and the uses of personal and historical memory. -- Professor John Frow, University of Melbourne 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. This Reader does a superb job in defining and presenting some of the most interesting work currently being done on the forms and the uses of personal and historical 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 Contemporary Literature and Theory at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She is the author of Trauma Fiction and co-editor, with Michael Rossington, of Theories of Memory and of Between the Psyche and the Polis: Refiguring History in Literature and Theory and, with Jonathan Long, of W. G. Sebald.

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