As millennium approaches, interpreters of eighteenth-century literature have turned to various versions of cultural poetics, which view texts through lenses of class, race, gender and sexual orientation. Meanwhile literature itself has fallen from its lofty pinnacle within the ordering of the arts, and become merely one discursive practice among many. What has been gained and what lost as literary criticism becomes a branch of cultural history?A dozen renowned scholars discuss each other s work and attempt to come to terms with the central theoretical issues about which the discipline...
As millennium approaches, interpreters of eighteenth-century literature have turned to various versions of cultural poetics, which view texts through ...
In this vigorous response to recent trends in theory and criticism, David H. Richter asks how we can again learn to practice literary history. Despite the watchword "always historicize," comparatively few monographs attempt genuine historical explanations of literary phenomena. Richter theorizes that the contemporary evasion of history may stem from our sense that the modern literary ideas underlying our historical explanations-Marxism, formalism, and reception theory-are unable, by themselves, to inscribe an adequate narrative of the origins, development, and decline of genres and style...
In this vigorous response to recent trends in theory and criticism, David H. Richter asks how we can again learn to practice literary history. Despite...
