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Anders Pettersson - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Transcultural Literary History: Beyond Constricting Notions of World Literature
    New Literary History, 2009
    Co-Authors: Anders Pettersson
    Abstract:

    Literary-History writing has very often stopped at national or cultural borders: it has been French Literary History, or Western, or Arabic, or Chinese Literary History. There is nothing wrong with that, but transcending such boundaries is certainly possible and sometimes important. By "transcultural Literary History," I mean Literary History with no pre determined national or temporal limitations.1 This is a vast field, and it allows for investigations of very many kinds. What I wish to emphasize and defend in this essay is, primarily, the very openness of the field. In my view, many different foci, research agendas, and methods are justified in the transcultural study of Literary History. We should expect research in the area to pose significant questions and to pursue these in an enlightening manner. That aside, however, we should be wary of all general declarations of what transcultural Literary studies "must" be or "cannot" be. One's own research interests will largely determine what Literary historical questions one finds significant. I will begin by explaining what aspects of transcultural Literary History I myself have been occupied with and why, and then point to a number of other types of transcultural lit erary studies following entirely different paths. This is the positive part of my essay: an affirmation of the breadth and interest of transcultural Literary History. What I call transcultural Literary History has often been referred to in terms of world literature and the study of world literature. There is, however, a tendency, which has been rather pronounced over the last decade, to portray the study of world literature, or what I call the study of transcultural Literary History, as something much narrower, in scope or in method, than I have indicated above. The second half of the essay is a reflection on the concept of world literature and, not least, a critical

Lu Sheng-jian - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • A Reflection on the Literary History Research of the Past Hundred Years
    Journal of Nanjing Normal University, 2010
    Co-Authors: Lu Sheng-jian
    Abstract:

    The review of the Literary History research over the past hundred years reveals that we have to pay due attention to the specific works and avoid turning new ideas into rigid modes.We need a concept of Literary History which reflects the actual development of literature and a Literary History which is rich in real ideas.We should attach importance not only to the artistic analysis of works but also to Literary activities as a whole,avoid reducing the Literary History simply to a History of works.As for the individual writers,our Literary History should give a good understanding to the Literary trend reflected in their works and their characteristic Literary contributions rather than remain a chronological collection of the writers' life stories,in which a writer's contribution is proportional to the textual space he is allocated.

Brian Stock - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Toward Interpretive Pluralism: Literary History and the History of Reading
    New Literary History, 2009
    Co-Authors: Brian Stock
    Abstract:

    As a discipline, Literary History is about four centuries old. There is not much Literary History in antiquity or the Middle Ages. Literary History begins to be written seriously in the early modern period. The writing of this kind of History coincides with the appearance of national identity, that is, the sense of identity associated with the nation-state. Literary History is one form of expression of na tional identity. Efforts have been made from time to time to introduce an international perspective into Literary History, but most projects in the field are still conceived within a nationalist framework.

David Perkins - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Literary History and historicism
    The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, 2000
    Co-Authors: David Perkins
    Abstract:

    Literary History was created in the Romantic age. Rene Wellek traces its origins to English and Scottish intellectuals of the eighteenth century – Robert Lowth, Thomas Percy, John Brown, Thomas Warton and many another. They thought their way to the basic concepts of Literary History ( The rise of English Literary History , pp. 200–1). If their contributions are now less remembered, a reason is that in Germany Herder collected their ideas, along with those of Leibniz, Kant, Hamann and Winckelmann, and voiced them more assertively. He is perhaps the father of Literary History – at least of its programme, though he was unready to chew as much straw as is necessary to write it. There were important essays by French writers, such as Madame de Stael's On literature considered in its relations with social institutions (1800) and Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity (1802), but after the 1780s, the development of Literary History proceeded mainly in Germany. Which was the first Literary History? We are speaking, of course, of the first in a modern kind. The older kind was a History of learning, historia litterarum , a project Francis Bacon had recommended: ‘the general state of learning to be described and represented from age to age… without which the History of the world seemeth to me to be as the statua of Polyphemus with his eye out; that part being wanting which doth most show the spirit and life of the person’. As time passed, the histories of learning became more sophisticated, but as late as 1839, in Henry Hallam's impressive volumes, they were still essentially compendia.

  • Discursive Form versus the Past in Literary History
    New Literary History, 1991
    Co-Authors: David Perkins
    Abstract:

    A ENERATION of younger scholars in the United States is returning to Literary History. They are reconsidering its theory, and, as they write it, they are arguing for and providing new models of what it should be, and thus they are responding anew to the imperative, voiced at the very start of modern Literary History by the Schlegel brothers, that History and theory should be one. I have followed these developments with the keenest interest and sympathy, and yet, having tried to write Literary History, I am unconvinced that it can be done. Hence I raise again, with reference to both the new and the traditional Literary History, the very old question, Is it possible to write Literary History?' Literary History is usually considered to be a mode of criticism, but it is also a mode of History. As such, its intention is to represent and organize the past of literature and to explain why the Literary series developed as it did. The genre of Literary History, we might remind ourselves, includes not only works on national and regional literatures, but also on particular "periods," styles, themes, and forms, and on the literature of races, of women, and of political and social groups, such as classes and religions. Thus Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony, Louis O. Martz's The Poetry of Meditation, Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own, and Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land are all Literary History. Literary History has a long History of its own that has not yet been told, but in this essay I ignore the changes that have taken place in the genre, and draw on examples from any time in the last two centuries. My hope is to observe major forms of Literary History that have persisted, essentially unchanged, from the nineteenth century to now, and to assess their strengths and limitations. Whatever leads us to believe that we cannot know the past, or cannot represent it without also distorting it, tends to undermine our faith in Literary History. To traditional reasons for skepticism, familiar from the nineteenth century-the likelihood of bias in

Ato Quayson - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.