Harvard English Studies – serie

Francis James Child, compiler and editor of the monumental English and Scottish Popular Ballads, established the scholarly study of folk ballads in the English-speaking world. His successors at Harvard University, notably George Lyman Kittredge, Milman Parry, and Albert B. Lord, discovered new ways of relating ideas about sung narrative to the study of epic poetry and what has come to be called—though not without controversy—“oral literature.”In this volume, sixteen distinguished scholars from Europe and the United States offer original essays in the spirit of these pioneers. The topics of their studies include well-known “Child Ballads” in their British and American forms; aspects of the oral literatures of France, Ireland, Scandinavia, medieval England, ancient Greece, and modern Egypt; and recent literary ballads and popular songs. Many of the essays evince a concern with the theoretical underpinnings of the study of folklore and literature, orality and literacy; and as a whole the volume reestablishes the European ballad in the wider context of oral literature. Among the contributors are Albert B. Lord, Bengt R. Jonsson, Gregory Nagy, David Buchan, Vesteinn Olason, and Karl Reichl.

Published in the bicentennial year of Samuel Johnson’s death, Johnson and His Age includes contributions by some of the nation’s most eminent scholars of eighteenth-century literature. A section on Johnson’s life and thought presents fresh analyses of Johnson’s friendships with Mrs. Thrale and George Steevens, new information on Johnson’s relations with Smollett and Thomas Hollis, a speculative essay on “Johnson and the Meaning of Life,” and a provocative examination of “Johnson, Traveling Companion, in Fancy and Fact.”Other essays reinterpret basic assumptions in Johnson’s criticism and examine “The Antinomy of Style” in Augustan poetics, Hume’s critique of criticism, and the broad Anglo-Scots inquiry on subjectivity in literature. A section on major figures of the age discusses Gray and the problems of literary transmissions, Hogarth’s book illustrations for friends, Gibbon’s oratorical “silences,” Blake’s concept of God, and Burke’s attempt to forestall Britain’s ruinous policy toward the American colonies. A section on the novel examines that genre from Richardson and Sterne to Austen.Among the contributors are Bertrand H. Bronson, Jean H. Hagstrum, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Robert Haisband, Howard D. Weinbrot, Mary Hyde, Ralph W. Rader, Lawrence Lipking, Gwin J. Kolb, John H. Middendorf, W. B. Carruichan, and Max Byrd.

Published in the bicentennial year of Samuel Johnson’s death, Johnson and His Age includes contributions by some of the nation’s most eminent scholars of eighteenth-century literature. A section on Johnson’s life and thought presents fresh analyses of Johnson’s friendships with Mrs. Thrale and George Steevens, new information on Johnson’s relations with Smollett and Thomas Hollis, a speculative essay on “Johnson and the Meaning of Life,” and a provocative examination of “Johnson, Traveling Companion, in Fancy and Fact.”Other essays reinterpret basic assumptions in Johnson’s criticism and examine “The Antinomy of Style” in Augustan poetics, Hume’s critique of criticism, and the broad Anglo-Scots inquiry on subjectivity in literature. A section on major figures of the age discusses Gray and the problems of literary transmissions, Hogarth’s book illustrations for friends, Gibbon’s oratorical “silences,” Blake’s concept of God, and Burke’s attempt to forestall Britain’s ruinous policy toward the American colonies. A section on the novel examines that genre from Richardson and Sterne to Austen.Among the contributors are Bertrand H. Bronson, Jean H. Hagstrum, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Robert Haisband, Howard D. Weinbrot, Mary Hyde, Ralph W. Rader, Lawrence Lipking, Gwin J. Kolb, John H. Middendorf, W. B. Carruichan, and Max Byrd.

The thirteen essays in this volume range freely over the literature of the modernist period, from about the turn of the century to World War II. The contributors were invited to examine less familiar works—or aspects of the work—of major writers; to reconsider authors not usually thought of as modernist; or to explore received opinions about modernist theories and the assumptions that inform the literature of the time. Collectively the essays demonstrate, in fresh and varied ways, that reconsideration is not recapitulation, and that modernism is a phenomenon more supple, live, and approximate than we had imagined.

Today genre studies are flourishing, and nowhere more vigorously perhaps than in the field of Renaissance literature, given the importance to Renaissance writers of questions of genre. These studies have been nourished, as Barbara Lewalski points out, by the varied insights of contemporary literary theory. More sophisticated conceptions of genre have led to a fuller appreciation of the complex and flexible Renaissance uses of literary forms.The eighteen essays in this volume are striking in their diversity of stance and approach. Three are addressed to genre theory explicitly, and all reveal a concern with theoretical issues. The contributors are James S. Baumlin, Francis C. Blessington, Morton W. Bloomfield, Barbara J. Bono, Mary Thomas Crane, Heather Dubrow, Alastair Fowler, Marjorie Garber, Claudio Guillén, Ann E. Imbrie, John N. King, John Klause, Harry Levin, Earl Miner, Janel M. Mueller, Annabel Patterson, Robert N. Watson, and Steven N. Zwicker.

Today genre studies are flourishing, and nowhere more vigorously perhaps than in the field of Renaissance literature, given the importance to Renaissance writers of questions of genre. These studies have been nourished, as Barbara Lewalski points out, by the varied insights of contemporary literary theory. More sophisticated conceptions of genre have led to a fuller appreciation of the complex and flexible Renaissance uses of literary forms.The eighteen essays in this volume are striking in their diversity of stance and approach. Three are addressed to genre theory explicitly, and all reveal a concern with theoretical issues. The contributors are James S. Baumlin, Francis C. Blessington, Morton W. Bloomfield, Barbara J. Bono, Mary Thomas Crane, Heather Dubrow, Alastair Fowler, Marjorie Garber, Claudio Guillén, Ann E. Imbrie, John N. King, John Klause, Harry Levin, Earl Miner, Janel M. Mueller, Annabel Patterson, Robert N. Watson, and Steven N. Zwicker.

In the glory days of high modernist formalism it was anathema to speak about the content of a work of art. Those days are gone, and critical practice now is largely thematic practice. A focus on the themes of literature informs feminist, new historicist, ethnic, and even second-generation deconstructionist approaches. However, such practice is not always recognized. The specter of theoretically impoverished positivism still haunts thematic analysis, making it the approach to literature that dare not speak its name. This volume brings together for the first time an international group of writers, critics, and theoreticians who have thought deeply about this issue.How can we determine the theme of a given text? May the focus on form be the theme of a certain moment? Can the motif be understood as a formal category? What operations permit us to say that three or four texts constitute variants of the same theme? The contributors challenge the conventional dismissal of “merely” thematic approaches and offer the reader different ways of tackling the issue of what a piece of writing is “about.”The work here comes out of such diverse intellectual traditions as Russian film theory, French phenomenology, Foucault, narratology, the Frankfurt School, intellectual history (Geistesgeschichte), psychoanalytic criticism, linguistics, ideological criticism, Proppian folklore studies, and computerized plot summary models. In addition to a collection of aphorisms from Plato to Robert Coover and a group of general and theoretical essays, this volume contains examples of practical engagement with such topics as literary history, Shakespeare, autumn poetry, anti-Semitism, fading colors, bachelors, Richard Wagner, and the Mexican Revolution. No comparable volume exists.

The eleven essays that make up this volume point to some of the new directions biography and biographical criticism have taken in recent years. Among the subjects treated are the responsibilities of the authorized biographer, the practice of biography as it intersects ethnography, biographies of historians by historians, the eulogy as a biographical form, the challenge of rendering the uneventful life, and the biographical implications of a single piece of writing. The essays range from general discussions of biographical aims to fresh examinations of particular biographical works. Despite the diversity of their topics, the authors suggest—if only inadvertently—why so many scholars and writers are taking a biographical approach to human experience.

Literary history, the dominant form of literary scholarship throughout the nineteenth century, is currently recapturing the imaginations of a new generation of scholars eager to focus on the context of literature after a half-century or more of “close” readings of isolated texts. This book represents current thinking on some of the theoretical issues and dilemmas in the conception and writing of literary history, expressed by a group of scholars from North America, Europe, and Australia. They consider afresh a broad range of topics: the role of literary history in “new” societies, the problem of finding a starting point for literary history, the problem of literary classification, problems of ideology, of institutional mediation, periodization, and the attack on literary history.