Studies in English and American Literature and Culture – serie

The first study of the literary criticism on Murdoch's novels.The novels of the late Iris Murdoch have been compared to Shakespeare; her name has been put forward for the Nobel Prize in literature; her works have been translated into 29 languages; and no less a critic than Harold Bloom has said of her 'no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Murdoch's eminence.' Collecting the major critics who have described for the last third of a century the phenomena of Iris Murdoch's fiction, this study analyzes the stories those critics tell about her artistic processes. Murdoch passed away in February 1999 after a long struggle with Alzheimer's Disease, and now it seems time to examine her critical reception. There are three major questions at the heart of this reception and at the heart of the present study: to what extent is Murdoch a philosophical novelist, a realistic novelist, a postmodern novelist? The book also deals with the question of Murdoch's reputation in the literary world: an intriguing question in view of the praise of Bloom and other critics and writers. This is the first full-length work to deal with the literary criticism on Murdoch.Barbara Stevens Heusel isprofessor of English at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri.

Analysis of Whitman's reflection of civil rights legislation in his work, 1865-1876.Walt Whitman's prolific Reconstruction project has remained the most uncultivated decade in Whitman studies for over a century. This first book-length analysis seeks to point the way for a needed recovery of Whitman's 1865-1876 publications by embedding them in the legislative discourse of black emancipation and its stormy aftermath. The supposed absence of race relations in Whitman's post-war texts has recently become a source of curiosity and denunciation. However, from 1865 to 1876, the Congressional 'workshop' was seeking to forge interracial civil rights legislation through surveillance of the implementation of such egalitarianism, as manifested in the Civil War Amendments, the Enforcement Acts of 1870-71, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.The analysis of the hegemonic shift in Whitman's implementation of his democratic poetics constitutes the innovative contribution in these pages. By welcoming ex-slaves into the Union, as well as ex-Rebel states, Whitman's Reconstruction texts enlisted his representations in the federalizing rhetoric of civil rights protection that would lapse for almost a century, before recovery in the Second Reconstruction of the 1950s and 1960s.

A history of the most important scholarly criticism of Emerson from his time down to the present.Since the 1820s, Ralph Waldo Emerson has provoked an unsettled response from his readers and contentiousness among critics. Critics still contest Emerson's position: Was he poet or philosopher? Did he liberate American literatureor narrow it to a one-dimensional idea? Is his signature concept of self-reliance the most profound contribution to democratic individualism or the epitome of capitalism's impoverished thought? But by the mid 20th century the swing between condemnation and celebration of Emerson had given way to the familiar story of his bisected career, which provided a neat structure for viewing his life and work, and shaped our thought about him. Now that story is beingchallenged by the application of poststructuralism and textual editing, and with the publication of an amazing repertoire of editions, the Emerson canon is changing. The result is that Emerson criticism now faces a far more complex group of writings than before. One hundred and fifty years after Emerson styled himself an 'experimenter' who would 'unsettle all things,' this new critical history illustrates the continuing, thought-provoking success of thatexperiment.Sarah Ann Wider is Professor of English at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.

The first detailed study of a major but neglected work by Thoreau.Until very recently, only a handful of Thoreau specialists knew of the existence of 'The Dispersion of Seeds', an ecological treatise written during the last years of Thoreau's life, which has been reconstructed and edited, and was published for the first time in 1993. Thoreau's Late Career and the Dispersion of Seeds, the first full-length study of this important late work by Thoreau, analyzes literary features of 'The Dispersion of Seeds' that make it an accomplished work of the imagination, and applies interdisciplinary scholarship in order to relate Thoreau's prescient ecology to scientific issues of his day and ours. Thus it demonstrates that in his late career Thoreauwas working as scientist and poet simultaneously. Berger further explores how Thoreau managed the philosophical and rhetorical tensions involved in bridging the supposed gap between science and poetry, and how, in his later career, he embraced the empirical method of scientific discovery while challenging the reductive assumptions of scientific materialism. In these specific ways Berger's study advances new understandings of Thoreau's purposes and accomplishments during his post-Walden career. Michael Berger, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English and Communications at The Christ College of Nursing and Health Sciences in Cincinnati. He is on the Board of Directors ofThe Thoreau Society.

New essays providing critical views of Coetzee's major works for the scholar and the general reader.J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the most critically acclaimed bestselling author of imaginative fiction writing in English today. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and is the first writer to have been awarded two BookerPrizes. The present volume makes critical views of this important writer accessible to the general reader as well as the scholar, discussing Coetzee's main works in chronological order and introducing the dominant themes in the academic discussion of his oeuvre.The volume highlights Coetzee's exceptionally nuanced approach to writing as both an exacting craft and a challenging moral-ethical undertaking. It discusses Coetzee's complex relation to apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the land of his birth, and evaluates his complicated responses to the literary canon. Coetzee emerges as both a modernist and a highly self-aware postmodernist - a champion of the truths of aliterary enterprise conducted unrelentingly in the mode of self-confession.Contributors: Chris Ackerley, Derek Attridge, Carrol Clarkson, Simone Drichel, Johan Geertsema, David James, Michelle Kelly, Sue Kossew, MikeMarais, James Meffan, Tim Mehigan, Chris Prentice, Engelhard Weigl, Kim L. Worthington.Tim Mehigan is Professor of Languages in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago, New Zealand and Honorary Professor in the Department of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia.

New essays examining the intellectual allegiances of Coetzee, arguably the most decorated and critically acclaimed writer of fiction in English today and a deeply intellectual and philosophical writer.Arguably the most decorated and critically acclaimed writer of today, J. M. Coetzee is a deeply intellectual writer. Yet while just about everyone who comes to Coetzee's writing is aware that the visible superstructure of his works is moved from below by a vast substructure of ideas, we are still far from grasping Coetzee's intellectual allegiances as a whole. This book sets out to examine these allegiances in ways not attempted before, by bringing leadingfigures in the philosophy of literary fiction and ethics together with leading Coetzee scholars. The book is organized into three parts: the first part evaluates Coetzee with respect to notions of truth and justification. At issue is how the reader is to understand the ground on which Coetzee builds his ethical commitments. The second part considers the problem of language, in which ethics is rooted and on which it depends. The chapters of the third partposition Coetzee's writing with respect to notions of social and moral solidarity, where, in regard to literature as such or experience as such, philosophy and literature together exercise an unrivaled right to be heard.Contributors: Elisa Aaltola, Derek Attridge, David Attwell, Maria Boletsi, Carrol Clarkson, Simon During, Patrick Hayes, Alexander Honold, Anton Leist, Tim Mehigan, Christian Moser, Robert B. Pippin, Robert Stockhammer, Markus Winkler, Martin Woessner.Tim Mehigan is Deputy Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. Christian Moser is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bonn.

An investigation of the phenomenon of the framed formal center in literature of the last 180 years, illuminating both the works and correspondences among works of different genres, periods, and nations.This book concerns the framed center in selected literary works of the 19th to 21st centuries. Such a center involves a critical passage bracketed by two halves of a text that feature language and/or plot that mirror each other. Recognizing the author's formal emphasis on the critical central passage encourages a thoughtful attention to it. Like other literary techniques, including allegory and metaphor, the framed center does not provide a single meaning, but rather makes possible varied meanings depending on the work. And often it features other literary patterns, including parallelism, chiasmus, mise en abyme, and allusion. There have been book-length studies of the framed center in literary works from the Bible through Tristram Shandy, but no such studies have addressed more recent literature. This book's analysis of the framed center in literature of the last 180 years - in works by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Carroll, Joyce, Anderson, Hemingway, Hammett, Chandler, Highsmith, Oates, and Zadie Smith - advances interpretation of the design itself and of the individual works, yielding critical breakthroughs. It alsoreveals hitherto unknown correspondences among works of different genres, periods, and nations. This book is a work of practical criticism with substantial interpretive consequences, and it is accessible to a broad audience.

Details Lawrence's reception of Melville and reveals his underacknowledged role in the Melville Revival, while contributing to the history of the book and the study of the creative process.How Lawrence Read Melville is a highly focused account of D. H. Lawrence's discovery and reception of Herman Melville, from when he first read Moby-Dick as a young man to his final references to Melville in his late works. It shows Lawrence's initial reaction to Moby-Dick; how it led him to other works by Melville, namely Typee and Omoo; and how Melville affected Lawrence's critical and creative writing and shaped his philosophy.This book is a study of the creative process that shows how one great writer inspired another, but it also makes a major contribution to the history of the book and two of its subfields: the history of reading, and reception studies. By his death in 1891, Melville had been forgotten except by a small circle of English enthusiasts. That group put Lawrence onto Melville, whereupon he became a - until now largely unacknowledged - leader of the Melville Revival that rescued the great writer from obscurity. This Swiss army knife of a book will appeal to scholars and booklovers alike.

Breaks new ground by both analyzing the literary qualities of four recent rewritings of the Noah myth and contextualizing their concern with climate change within the wider crises of the Anthropocene.With the rise of concern about global warming in recent years, climate-change fiction, or cli-fi, has become increasingly important both as a publishing phenomenon and as an area of academic study and research. Flood narratives have become a subsection of cli-fi in their own right. This book proposes new readings of four recent rewritings of the Noah myth, Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich, Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy, When the Floods Came by Clare Morrall, and The Flood by Maggie Gee.Helen E. Mundler's book takes into account the wealth of criticism that has appeared on these texts in recent years, acknowledging important contributions from critics including Adam Trexler, Adeline Johns-Putra, and Astrid Bracke. However, her book's strength is that it takes a new approach, going beyond the topicality of the texts and treating them not just as ideological statements but giving them their due as literary artifacts. While the importance of climate change is beyond debate, this book takes a more balanced approach that places it within a wider context of the multiple crises of the Anthropocene.

The first full-length study of the reception of Wordsworth's poetry and theory.William Wordsworth, often regarded as the High Priest of British Romantic Poetry, certainly had the longest career of the Romantics, one extending from his days as a schoolboy almost to the end of his life in 1850, from the Lyrical Ballads and descriptive poetry of 1790s to the late poetry of the 1840s. With this long career came a remarkable history of critical reception: from the reviews of his contemporaries in journals and magazines; to the major statements of Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and others; to the amazing variety of books, essays, and theoretical approaches of the twentieth century. Although there have been a number of studies about the critical receptionof Wordsworth's poetry and critical theory, Professor Mahoney's book is the first full-length study of how critics -- from the earliest reviewers to the major Victorian voices, to the enormous 20th-century response -- have approached the many facets of the great English Romantic's work. Mahoney does not aim primarily at following the course of Wordsworth's life and career, as many admirable and recent biographies have done, but rather follows the course of a critical reputation as it has evolved from the poet's earliest probes to the present day. Thus Wordsworth and the Critics offers an engaging narrative of the reputation of this most prominent of Romantic poets.Professor Mahoney's book offers an engaging narrative of the reputation of a poet.John L. Mahoney is Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English at Boston College and has written extensively on Wordsworth and English Romanticism.