BiblioVault - Books about Historicism in literature

The Culture of Violence

Essays on Tragedy and History

Francis Barker

University of Chicago Press, 1993

'Culture' and 'violence' have always been regarded as antithetical terms. In The Culture of Violence, Francis Barker takes a different view.

Central to his argument is the contention that, contrary to post-Enlightenment humanist, liberal and conservative thought, 'culture' does not necessarily stand in opposition to political inequality and social injustice, but may be complicit with the oppressive exercise of power.

The book focuses on Shakespearean tragedy and on the historicism and culturalism of much present-day cultural theory. Barker's analysis moves dialectically backwards and forwards between these two moments in order to illuminate aspects of early modern culture, and to critique the ways in which the complicity between culture and violence has been occluded. Rejecting the tendency of both modernism and post-modernism to homogenise historical time, Barker argues for a genuinely new, 'diacritical' understanding of the violence of history.

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England in 1819

The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism

James Chandler

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Many of the writers from 1819, argues James Chandler, were acutely aware not only of their writing's place in history, but also of its place as history—a realization of a literary "spirit of the age" that resonates strongly with the current "return to history" in literary studies. Chandler explores the ties between Romantic and contemporary historicism and offers a series of cases of his own built around key texts from 1819.

"1819? At first sight, it might not seem a 'hot date'; but as James Chandler argues in his powerful book, it would be a mistake to overlook a year of such exceptional political conflagration and literary pyrotechnics in British history. Chandler's study is a wide-ranging, enormously ambitious, densely packed, closely argued work."—John Brewer, New Republic

"The book's largest argument, and the source of its considerable revelations, is that late twentieth-century practices of cultural history-writing have their roots in the peculiar Romantic historicism born in post-Waterloo Britain."—Jon Klancher, Times Literary Supplement

"A monumental work of scholarship."—Terry Eagleton, The Independent

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Sacrifice Your Love

Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer

L.O. Aranye Fradenburg

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

A long-awaited reevaluation of Chaucer through the lens of sacrifice by a major figure in medieval studies. Historicism and its discontents have long been central to the work of Louise Fradenburg, one of the world's most original and provocative literary medievalists. Sacrifice Your Love brings this interest to bear on Chaucer's writing and his world, rethought in light of a theory of sacrifice and its part in cultural production. Fradenburg writes the "history of the signifier"--a way of reading change in the symbolic order--and its role in making sacrifice enjoyable. Sacrifice Your Love develops the idea that sacrifice is a mode of enjoyment-that our willingness to sacrifice our desire is actually a way of pursuing it. Fradenburg considers the implications of this idea for various problems important in medieval studies today-how to understand the religiosity of cultural forms, particularly chivalry, in the later Middle Ages and how to understand the ethics of Chaucer's famously nondidactic poetry-as well as in other fields of inquiry. A major rethinking of Chaucer, Sacrifice Your Love works in depth as well as across a broad range of topics from medievalism to psychoanalysis, advancing both the theory and practice of a new kind of historicist approach. L. O. Aranye Fradenburg is professor of English, women's studies, and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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