Tradition A Feeling For The Literary Past

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. Seth Lerer presents an original take on tradition in the literary imagination. He asks how we can have an unironic, affective relationship to the literary past in an age marked by historical self-consciousness, critical distance, and shifts in cultural literacy. Tradition: A Feeling for the Literary Past ranges through a set of fiction, poetry, and criticism that makes up our inherited traditions and that also confronts the question of a literary canon and its personal and historical meaning. How are we taught to have a felt experience of literary objects? How do we make our personal anthologies of reading to shape social selves? Why should we care about what literature does both to and for us? This book affirms the value of close and nuanced reading for our understanding of both past and present. Its larger goal is to explore the ways in which the literary past makes us, and in the process, how we create canons for reading, teaching, and scholarship. The writers discussed here were all great readers. Dickens and Orwell, Rushdie and Bradbury, Dickinson and Frost, Anne Bradstreet and Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Chaucer, Dante, Virgil—they all built their literary structures on the scaffold of their bookshelves. Lerer demonstrates how reading the past generates the literary present, and imagines our literate future.

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities.The category of the literary has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is skeptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. Seth Lerer presents an original take on tradition in the literary imagination. He asks how we can have an unironic, affective relationship to the literary past in an age marked by historical self-consciousness, critical distance, and shifts in cultural literacy. Tradition: A Feeling for the Literary Past ranges through a set of fiction, poetry, and criticism that makes up our inherited traditions and that also confronts the question of a literary canon and its personal and historical meaning. How are we taught to have a felt experience of literary objects? How do we make our personal anthologies of reading to shape social selves? Why should we care about what literature does both to and for us? This book affirms the value of close and nuanced reading for our understanding of both past and present. Its larger goal is to explore the ways in which the literary past makes us, and in the process, how we create canons for reading, teaching, and scholarship. The writers discussed here were all great readers--Dickens and Orwell, Rushdie and Bradbury, Dickinson and Frost, Anne Bradstreet and Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Chaucer, Dante, Virgil--they all built their literary structures on the scaffold of their bookshelves. Lerer demonstrates how reading the past generates the literary present, and imagines our literate future.

With reference to the work of selected English authors, 19th and 20th centuries.

The World-Literary System and the Atlantic grapples with key questions about how American studies, and the Atlantic region in general, engages with new considerations of literary comparativism, international literary space and the world-literary system. The edited collection furthers these discussions by placing them into a relationship with the theory of combined and uneven development – a theory that has a long pedigree in Marxist sociology and political economy and that continues to stimulate debate across the social sciences, but whose implications for culture have received less attention. Drawing on the comparative modes, concepts, and methods being developed in the "new" world-literary studies, the essays cover a diverse range of topics such as, the periodization of world literature, racism and the world-system, singular modernity, critical "irrealism," commodity frontiers, semi-peripherality, and world-ecology. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Atlantic Studies.

As breathing is essential for our life to sustain so is criticism for all types of literature to flourish. It regulates and controls quality production of the literary activities. It links the creators of literature to the readers. It is of various types say for instance theoretical criticism, practical criticism, eco criticism and so on. Critics of the different languages of the world have been contributing to the domain of criticism over a wide span of time period say from BC. to AD. They have set the yard sticks or the principles or parameters or the rules of evaluation of literature and collection of such rules is called as literary theories. The present edition Modern and Ancient Literary Theories is an exhaustive critical commentary on the chosen critics of the world level. We know the writers have been creating literature in almost every language which is written and read but who would keep an account of its worth. It may or may not be up to the standard of quality reading and appreciation so it comes to share of critics to shoulder this responsibility to allow fine quality literature to flourish and worth less literature to sink down and for this process to administer the critics need the literary theories which this book supplies in short, concise and appropriate form. Besides the community of critics, the collection of the literary theories is needed by the young aspirants of literary studies who want to be story writers, poets, dramatists, novelists and the writers of the tales. These guidelines of literary criticism tell them of the basic requirements with the help of which these literary genres can be composed. These critical standards also sharpen their literary craftsmanship and intellectuality. Every year so many college and university students prepare for their examination and they have to lay their hand on different books on literary theories but in this book sincere efforts have been done to induct the study material at one place to minimize the inconvenience that is caused to the community of the students. This book is self-sufficient and self- explanatory to deal with the critical standards of the various critics and it will help those readers pursuing studies in the principles of criticism or literary theories. The author would like to express his sincere thanks to the Publisher HORIZON BOOKS (A DIVISION OF IGNITED MINDS EDUTECH PVT LTD and his friend Mr. Maman Chand for motivating him to write this book and Mr. Sunil Saini and Mr. Nandan Singh for assisting him in the computer work to design this book. Special thanks are also due to the members of the author’s family who fully helped him to write this book. Dr. P. C. Cambodia

Focusing on work by Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee, Literary Cynics explores the relationship between literature and cynicism to consider what happens when authors write themselves into their art, against the rhetoric of authority. Rose takes as his starting point three moments of aesthetic crisis in the careers of these literary cynics: Borges's parables of the 1950s, Beckett's plays of the 1980s, and Coetzee's pedagogic novels of the 2000s. In their transition to 'late style', the works reflect their writers' abiding concern with particular conceptions of rhetoric and aesthetic form. Literary Cynics combines accounts of these 'late' works with classic, lesser known, and archival texts by the three writers, from Coetzee's Disgrace to Beckett's letters, as well as detailed analysis of cynicism, both ancient and modern, as a philosophical and political movement.