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26 books match the query 'Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)'

cover of 12 x 12: Conversations in 21st-Century Poetry and Poetics

12 x 12

Conversations in 21st-Century Poetry and Poetics

Christina Mengert

University of Iowa Press, 2009

Bringing together penetrating conversations between poets of different generations as they explore process and poetics, poetry’s influence on other art forms, and the political and social aspects of their work, 12 × 12 restores poesis to the center of poetry.

Christina Mengert and Joshua Marie Wilkinson have assembled an expansive and searching view of the world through the eyes of twenty-four of our most vital and engaging poets. Punctuated by poems from each contributor, 12 × 12 brings together an unparalleled range of poets and poetries, men and women from around the world, working poets for whom the form vitally matters.

Contributors

Jennifer K. Dick–Laura Mullen
Jon Woodward–Rae Armantrout
Sabrina Orah Mark–Claudia Rankine
Christina Hawkey–Tomaž Šalamun
Christine Hume–Rosemarie Waldrop
Srinkath Reddy–Mark Levine
Karen Volkman–Allen Grossman
Paul Fattaruso–Dara Wier
Mark Yakich–Mary Leader
Michelle Robinson–Paul Auster
Sawako Nakayasu–Carla Harryman
Ben Lerner–Aaron Kunin

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cover of A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary

A Change in the Weather

Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary

Geoffrey Jacques

University of Massachusetts Press, 2009

This book explores the impact of African American culture on modernist poetic language by placing black literature and culture at the center of an inquiry into the genealogy of avant-garde poetics. Geoffrey Jacques looks at how blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, vernacular languages, advertising copy, Freud's idea of the Uncanny, vaudeville, the cliché, and Tin Pan Alley–style song all influenced modernist poetry. In a key insight, Jacques points out that the black urban community in the United States did not live in ghettos during the years before World War I, but in smaller enclaves spread out among the general population. This circumstance helped catalyze African American culture's dramatic and surprising impact on the emergent avant-garde. By using a wide range of theoretical tools, Jacques poses new questions about literary, cultural, and social history, the history and structure of modernist poetic language, canon formation, and the history of criticism.This contribution to the ongoing debate over early twentieth-century culture presents modernism as an interracial, cross-cultural project, arguing for a new appreciation of the central role black culture played within it. Writers and artists whose works are discussed include Marianne Moore, Charles Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, Wallace Stevens, James A. Bland, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, Bert Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, Samuel Beckett, W. C. Handy, Hart Crane, and Clement Greenberg.
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cover of A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors

A Manner of Being

Writers on Their Mentors

Annie Liontas

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

What do the punk singer Henry Rollins, the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa, the American authors Tobias Wolff, Tayari Jones, and George Saunders, the Canadian writer Sheila Heti, and the Russian poet Polina Barskova have in common? At some point they all studied the art of writing deeply with someone.

The nearly seventy short essays in A Manner of Being, by some of the best contemporary writers from around the world, pay homage to mentors—the writers, teachers, nannies, and sages—who enlighten, push, encourage, and sometimes hurt, fail, and limit their protégés. There are mentors encountered in the schoolhouse and on farms, in NYC and in MFA programs; mentors who show up exactly when needed, offering comfort, a steadying hand, a commiseration, a dose of tough love. This collection is rich with anecdotes from the heartfelt to the salacious, gems of writing advice, and guidance for how to live the writing life in a world that all too often doesn't care whether you write or not.

Each contribution is intimate and distinct—yet a common theme is that mentors model a manner of being.

Selections include:

Arthur Flowers on John O'Killens 
James Franco on Harmony Korine
Mary Gaitskill on an Ann Arbor bookstore owner
Noy Holland and Sam Lipsyte on Gordon Lish
Tayari Jones on Ron Carlson
Henry Rollins on Hubert Selby Jr.
Rodrigo Rey Rosa on Paul Bowles
George Saunders on Douglas Unger and Tobias Wolff
Christine Schutt on Elizabeth Hardwick
Tobias Wolff on John L'Heureux
. . . and many more

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cover of A Narrative Compass: Stories that Guide Women's Lives

A Narrative Compass

Stories that Guide Women's Lives

Edited by Betsy Hearne and Roberta Seelinger Trites

University of Illinois Press, 2008

Each of us has a narrative compass, a story that has guided our lifework. In this extraordinary collection, women scholars from a variety of disciplines identify and examine the stories that have inspired them, haunted them, and shaped their research, from Little House on the Prairie to Little Women, from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Nancy Drew, Mary Jane, and even the Chinese memoir Jottings from the Transcendant's Abode at Mt. Youtai. Telling the "story of her story" leads each of the essayists to insights about her own approach to studying narratives and to a deeper, often surprising, understanding of the power of imagination.

Contributors are Deyonne Bryant, Minjie Chen, Cindy L. Christiansen, Beverly Lyon Clark, Karen Coats, Wendy Doniger, Bonnie Glass-Coffin, Betsy Hearne, Joanna Hearne, Ann Hendricks, Rania Huntington, Christine Jenkins, Kimberly Lau, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Maria Tatar, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Roberta Seelinger Trites, Claudia Quintero Ulloa, and Ofelia Zepeda.
 

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cover of Beyond Spoon River: The Legacy of Edgar Lee Masters

Beyond Spoon River

The Legacy of Edgar Lee Masters

By Ronald Primeau

University of Texas Press, 1981

As the first full-length critical study of Edgar Lee Masters, Beyond Spoon River is important not only for its reevaluation of this American poet and his work but also for its valuable insights into central questions of aesthetics, regionalism, and the nature and meaning of literary influence.

The inordinate popularity of Spoon River Anthology has for many years unfairly restricted Masters' reputation as a "one-book phenomenon," although between 1911 and 1942 he wrote over fifty other books—most of which were neglected or misinterpreted precisely because they attempted a large-scale rewriting of what he felt had been obscured or distorted in the Anglo-American tradition. Masters' wide reading in the whole of western literature shaped his own attitudes, themes, and style, and his detailed accounts of that reading and its effect on his work form the basis for this reinterpretation of his place in American poetry in this century.

After reviewing Masters' own statements on literary influence and his role as a critic, Primeau devotes the main body of his study to the major influences on Masters' work—the Greeks, Goethe, Emerson, Whitman, Shelley, and Browning. For Masters, the composite of all these influences provided a corrective to the poetry and criticism of his time, which he little admired. Primeau concludes by exploring Masters' midwestern heritage in the light of recent reinterpretations of regionalism.

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cover of CROSS-CULTURAL VISIONS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN MODERNISM: FROM SPATIAL NARRATIVE TO JAZZ HAIKU

CROSS-CULTURAL VISIONS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN MODERNISM

FROM SPATIAL NARRATIVE TO JAZZ HAIKU

YOSHINOBU HAKUTANI

The Ohio State University Press, 2006

Yoshinobu Hakutani traces the development of African American modernism, which initially gathered momentum with Richard Wright’s literary manifesto “Blueprint for Negro Writing” in 1937. Hakutani dissects and discusses the cross-cultural influences on the then-burgeoning discipline in three stages: American dialogues, European and African cultural visions, and Asian and African American cross-cultural visions.

In writing Black Boy, the centerpiece of the Chicago Renaissance, Wright was inspired by Theodore Dreiser. Because the European and African cultural visions that Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison acquired were buttressed by the universal humanism that is common to all cultures, this ideology is shown to transcend the problems of society. Fascinated by Eastern thought and art, Wright, Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel wrote highly accomplished poetry and prose. Like Ezra Pound, Wright was drawn to classic haiku, as reflected in the 4,000 haiku he wrote at the end of his life. As W. B. Yeats’s symbolism was influenced by his cross-cultural visions of noh theatre and Irish folklore, so is James Emanuel’s jazz haiku energized by his cross-cultural rhythms of Japanese poetry and African American music.

The book demonstrates some of the most visible cultural exchanges in modern and postmodern African American literature. Such a study can be extended to other contemporary African American writers whose works also thrive on their cross-cultural visions, such as Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and haiku poet Lenard Moore.
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cover of Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol

Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism

A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol

Donald Fanger

Northwestern University Press, 1998

Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism is Donald Fanger's groundbreaking study of the art of Dostoevsky and the literary and historical context in which it was created. Through detailed analyses of the work of Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, Fanger identifies romantic realism, the transformative fusion of two generic categories, as a powerful imaginary response to the great modern city. This fusion reaches its aesthetic and metaphysical climax in Dostoevsky, whose vision culminating in Crime and Punishment is seen by Fanger as the final synthesis of romantic realism.
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cover of Edith Wharton in Context: Essays on Intertextuality

Edith Wharton in Context

Essays on Intertextuality

Adeline R. Tintner

University of Alabama Press, 1999

Tintner provides a detailed analysis of the complex interplay between Wharton and James—how they influenced each other and how some of their writings operate as homages or personal jokes. So deeply was James in Wharton’s confidence, Tintner argues, that he provided her with source models for a number of her characters. In addition, Wharton found in his fiction structures for her own, especially for The Age of Innocence.

Tintner also brings her considerable knowledge of art history to bear in her study of art allusions in Wharton’s work. Wharton’s response both to the Italian painters active before Raphael and to the English Pre-Raphaelites of a generation before her own is analyzed here in three essays. These pieces demonstrate Wharton’s sensibility to changes in art tastes and collecting, the inheritance of Rossetti’s revolutionary paintings in the unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, and the importance of home in The Glimpses of the Moon, as demonstrated by Wharton’s use of Tiepolo’s fresco in the church of Scalzi.

Tintner concludes by considering Wharton’s literary legacy and who Wharton has figured in the imaginations of recent writers, including Richard Howard, Louis Auchincloss, and Cathleen Schine. Tintner finds some part of Wharton’s personality or work evoked in a number of contemporary works and argues that this presence signals the beginning of an increasing influence.

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cover of Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the Classical Past

Grafting Helen

The Abduction of the Classical Past

Matthew Gumpert

University of Wisconsin Press, 2001

History is a love story: a tale of desire and jealousy, abandonment and fidelity, abduction and theft, rupture and reconciliation. This contention is central to Grafting Helen, Matthew Gumpert's original and dazzling meditation on Helen of Troy as a crucial anchor for much of Western thought and literature.
Grafting Helen looks at "classicism"—the privileged rhetorical language for describing cultural origins in the West—as a protracted form of cultural embezzlement. No coin in the realm has been more valuable, more circulated, more coveted, or more counterfeited than the one that bears the face of Helen of Troy. Gumpert uncovers Helen as the emblem for the past as something to be stolen, appropriated, imitated, extorted,  and coveted once again.
Tracing the figure of Helen from its classical origins through the Middle Ages, the French Renaissance, and the modern era, Gumpert suggests that the relation of current Western culture to the past is not like the act of coveting; it is the act of coveting, he argues, for it relies on the same strategies, the same defenses, the same denials, and the same delusions.
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cover of Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition

Hawthorne and Women

Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition

John L. Idol

University of Massachusetts Press, 1999

Nathaniel Hawthorne is notorious for complaining in a letter to one of his publishers that a "damn'd mob of scribbling women" was stealing his audience. Elsewhere, he referred to women authors as "ink-stained Amazons" who were "without a single exception, detestable," and once expressed his wish that all women be "forbidden to write, on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster-shell."

This collection of original essays presents a more complex and positive view of Hawthorne's attitudes toward women, demonstrating his recognition of the crucial role that women played--as critics, reviewers, readers, and authors--in building a national readership that made his writing career so successful.

The book begins with an examination of the influence exerted by the women in Hawthorne's immediate family. It goes on to explore his links to a broad range of women writers, as well as his attitudes toward the female characters he created. Among the authors discussed are Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison.
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cover of Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History

Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History

John B. Clayton

University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

This important collection explores and clarifies two of the most contested ideas in literary theory today, influence and intertextuality.  The study of influence tends to center on major authors and canonical works, identifying prior documents as “sources” or “contexts” for a given author.  Intertextuality, on the other hand, is a concept unconcerned with authors as individuals; it treats all texts as part of a network of discourse that includes culture, history, and social practices as well as other literary works.  In thirteen essays drawing on the entire spectrum of English and American literary history, this volume considers the relationship between these two terms—their rivalry, their kinship, their range of uses.

Debates about these two concepts have been crucial to the “new historicism” and the resurgence of interest in literary history.  The essays in this volume employ a refreshing array of examples from that history—poetry of the Renaissance and the twentieth century, novels of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, Old English texts, and postmodernist productions that have served as recurrent “intertexts” for contemporary theory.  The contributors treat such currently vital questions as the role of the author, canon formation, gender, causality, and the social dimension of texts.  They illuminate old assumptions and new ideas about agency that lie behind notions of influence, and they examine models of an anonymous textual field that lie behind notions of intertextuality.

The volume takes much of its character from its own intertextual origin as a group project of the English faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.  Though diverse in their academic interests, concerns, and experience, the contributors particpated in an ongoing intellectual exchange that is a model of how new scholarship can arise from dialogue.

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cover of Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics

Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition

Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics

M. Keith Booker

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Literary studies of James Joyce, perhaps more so than those of any other author, have been enriched by important developments in literary theory in the last twenty-five years. Noting a curious gap in this scholarship, M. Keith Booker brings the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, unquestionably one of the most important literary theorists of this century, to bear on Joyce's relationship to six of his literary predecessors. In clear and readable prose, Booker explores Joyce's dialogues not only with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, his three most obvious predecessors, but with Rabelais, Goethe, and Dostoevsky, three literary figures important in Bakhtin's theoretical work. These six writers provide the opportunity to examine Joyce's work with regard to several of Bakhtin's most important concepts. If Homer represents the authority of epic, Rabelais represents for Bakhtin the subversive multivocal energies of carnivalesque genres. As opposed to his description of Dante's attempts to escape from historicity, Bakhtin figures Goethe as the epitome of engagement with the temporality of everyday history. And Bakhtin's generic denial of polyphony in the works of Shakespeare contrasts with Bakhtin's identification of Dostoevsky as the most polyphonic writer in all the world of literature. Together, Booker's comparative readings suggest a Joyce whose works are politically committed, historically engaged, and socially relevant. In short, they suggest a Joyce whose work differs radically from conventional notions of modernist literature as culturally elitist, historically detached, and more interested in individual psychology than in social reality.
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cover of Mediating Modernisms: Indigenous Artists, Modernist Mediators, Global Networks

Mediating Modernisms

Indigenous Artists, Modernist Mediators, Global Networks

Ruth B. Phillips and Norman Vorano, editors

Duke University Press, 2025

Mediating Modernisms explores the fertile exchanges between Indigenous artists living in colonial societies and the mid-twentieth century mediators who carried ideas of aesthetic modernism and modernist primitivism into these worlds. Spanning South Africa, North America, Australia, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Brazil, Nigeria, and India, the case studies examine the mediators who played the role of mentors, friends, and patrons to Indigenous artists. Their relationships constituted complex mutual exchanges of aesthetic ideas and practices that inspired artists to create new fusions of modernism with Indigenous art traditions and that reflected their negotiations between affiliation with tradition and embrace of technology, newness, and metropolitan patronage. Challenging current understandings of modernist primitivism and elucidating the creation of the “global contemporary” art world, this volume reveals broader historical patterns, shared ideological and aesthetic dynamics, and the structural parallels that link mediators and Indigenous artists to globally circulating artistic ideas and geopolitical forces.

Contributors. Peter Brunt, Roberto Conduru, Hanna Horsberg Hansen, Elizabeth Harney, Jyotindra Jain, Sandra Klopper, Ian McLean, Anitra Nettleton, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Ruth B. Phillips, Una Rey, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Nicholas Thomas, Norman Vorano, Mark Andrew White
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cover of Mirrors of Our Playing: Paradigms and Presences in Modern Drama

Mirrors of Our Playing

Paradigms and Presences in Modern Drama

Thomas R. Whitaker

University of Michigan Press, 1999

For centuries, theater has maintained a central role in the development and preservation of artistic, social, and political themes in society. Yet in recent decades, theater has taken an increasingly marginal role. In this book, Thomas R. Whitaker examines the reasons for the marginalization of this important and influential art form, considering not only histories of various dramatic forms, but also the individual histories of various playwrights and their times. In so doing, he explores the importance of perceiving drama in a different light: as a participatory tool, a mirror that reflects life as it unfolds and plays out before us. Whitaker's unique and comprehensive study of drama poses theater as a collaborative and interactive experience, an experience that involves not only the playwright, the text, and the artists, but the audience as well as the society and culture of that audience.Contrary to the common critical belief that drama can only be theorized as a “performed action,” Whitaker conceptualizes drama as an interaction between a “performed action” and an “action of performance.” The whole of Mirrors of Our Playing is founded on the understanding that a play is a manifold mirror of the “playing” that is our lives; therefore, the play is shaped by a complex interaction between the paradigms that make up our view of the world and the reflection of these paradigms in the “mirror” that is the play.Focusing on both scripts and performance, Mirrors of Our Playing takes a fresh look at modern English-speaking drama, from its Anglo-Irish beginnings to its contemporary cross-fertilizations and international dispersals. It shows how most important English-speaking theater has been shaped in accord with several major paradigms, while it examines four major presences in that theater: Lord Byron, Samuel Beckett, Wole Soyinka, and Peter Brook. Mirrors of Our Playing stands on the borderlands between text-oriented and performanceoriented criticism. It seeks to extend our knowledge of the history of modern drama in English as that drama has engaged certain paradigms of performance. It is therefore grounded in close textual analysis of a great many texts that are understood as scripts for performance. Its several chapters incorporate, as they proceed, a variety of subordinate strategies: the placing of theater in historical context, the comparison of closely related plays, the charting of historical sequences of development within a given genre or paradigm, examination of the influence of a historical figure or of contemporary works, and the tracing of the exploratory development of a major director.
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cover of Ovid's Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the Amores

Ovid's Literary Loves

Influence and Innovation in the Amores

Barbara Weiden Boyd

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Ovid's poetry has in recent years enjoyed a remarkable renaissance: in particular, there has been a surge of interest in the Heroides, the Fasti, and his exile poetry. Ovid's Literary Loves, by Barbara Weiden Boyd, reopens the Amores for the modern reader. The volume establishes a context for the recent reception of the Amores, and proposes an alternative approach to the collection by discussing recent trends in the discussion of imitation in Roman poetry. A premise basic to most Ovidian studies has been that the Amores are not only imitative, but parodic, both of the elegiac genre writ large and of Propertius in particular. In contrast, Boyd emphasizes the many nonelegiac, non-Propertian features of the collection. Ovid's irony and its consequences are also discussed with special attention to the narrative structure of the three books.
Boyd's thoughtful approach to imitation in Latin poetry brings into prominence the formative role played by Virgil in shaping Ovid's "poetic memory," even in the Amores. The detailed examination of Ovidian extended similes shows how the poet exploits the literary past precisely in order to free himself from generic restraint and to expand the narrow horizons of elegy. Boyd argues that this paradox is the essence of Ovidian poetics.
Ovid's Literary Loves is an imaginative approach to imitation in Latin poetry and makes a significant contribution to current discussions of the subject. This is one of the first contemporary scholarly monographs on the Amores, and it will find a large and welcoming audience of Latinists at all levels of study.
Barbara Weiden Boyd is Associate Professor of Classics, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine.
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cover of Paris and the Art of Transposition: Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters

Paris and the Art of Transposition

Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters

Angie Chau

University of Michigan Press, 2023

A brief stay in France was, for many Chinese workers and Chinese Communist Party leaders, a vital stepping stone for their careers during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For the Chinese students who went abroad specifically to study Western art and literature, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the Art of Transposition uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art. 

While previous studies of Chinese modernism have focused on how Western modernist aesthetics were adapted or translated to the Chinese context, Angie Chau does the opposite by turning to Paris in the Chinese imaginary and discussing the literary and visual artwork of five artists who moved between France and China: the painter Chang Yu, the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei, the painter Pan Yuliang, and the writer Xu Xu. Chau draws the idea of transposition from music theory where it refers to shifting music from one key or clef to another, or to adapting a song originally composed for one instrument to be played by another. Transposing transposition to the study of art and literature, Chau uses the term to describe a fluid and strategic art practice that depends on the tension between foreign and familiar, new and old, celebrating both novelty and recognition—a process that occurs when a text gets placed into a fresh context.
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cover of Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics

Professing Poetry

Seamus Heaney’s Poetics

Michael Cavanagh

Catholic University of America Press, 2009

The first full-length study of Heaney's poetics, Professing Poetry explores Heaney's unusual concept of influence and the various ways in which Heaney interacts with other writers
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cover of Reading Virgil and His Texts: Studies in Intertextuality

Reading Virgil and His Texts

Studies in Intertextuality

Richard F. Thomas

University of Michigan Press, 2000

There has long been vital interest in the ways that texts affect each other--through translation, imitation, parody, and other forms of emulation and subversion. Throughout the last two millennia, the Virgilian text has created its own intertextual heritage, persisting in the works of Eliot, Frost, Lowell, and Heaney. Richard F. Thomas's new volume demonstrates that such control and manipulation of the inherited tradition is to be found with great intensity in the very author who, in turn, created his own complex tradition.
The articles and notes included in this volume have been selected for their diachronic aspect in addition to the synchronic status they had in their original context. Dealing with the intricate ways in which Virgil, and in the introductory chapter his predecessor Catullus, manipulated and appropriated their inherited Greek and Roman literary tradition, this book presents a coherent profile, through these detailed studies, of the mechanics of one of the most dynamic periods in the literary history of any culture.
Richard Thomas--one of the most important voices in Latin literary studies today--shows little anxiety about objections to authorial intentionality. Throughout there is a working assumption that intertextual connections can be established and, further, that functions and purposes, even intended ones, may be inferred from those connections.
This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Greek and Latin literature but will also be of great value to students of medieval, Renaissance, and early modern vernacular literatures, most of whose poets see themselves as closely connected to Virgil.
Richard F. Thomas is Professor of Greek and Latin, Harvard University.
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cover of Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition

Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition

Karen L. Kilcup

University of Michigan Press, 1998

In spite of Robert Frost's continuing popularity with the public, the poet remains an outsider in the academy, where more "difficult" and "innovative" poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are presented as the great American modernists. Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition considers the reason for this disparity, exploring the relationship between notions of popularity, masculinity, and greatness. Karen Kilcup reveals Frost's subtle links with earlier "feminine" traditions like "sentimental" poetry and New England regionalist fiction, traditions fostered by such well-known women precursors and contemporaries as Lydia Sigourney, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. She argues that Frost altered and finally obscured these "feminine" voices and values that informed his earlier published work, and that to appreciate his achievement fully, we need to recover and acknowledge the power of his affective, emotional voice in counterpoint and collaboration with his more familiar ironic and humorous tones.Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition also explores the links between cultural femininity and homoeroticism in Frost's work, and investigates the conjunctions and disjunctions between Frost and such modernist women poets as Amy Lowell and Edna St. Vincent Millay. The book contributes to ongoing debates about sentimentalism, regionalism, modernism, and the cultural construction of gender in American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its interest in popular magazines, folktales, gossip, and children's literature, the book also engages elements of cultural studies and popular culture. "Kilcup demonstrates a remarkably thorough understanding of issues raised by feminist critics over the past few decades. . . . Fascinating and convincing." --Jay Parini, Middlebury College
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cover of Soft Canons: American Women Writers

Soft Canons

American Women Writers

Karen L. Kilcup

University of Iowa Press, 1999

Recognizing that masculine literary tradition can include marginalized male writers as well as canonized female writers and that traditions themselves change over time, the essays in this insightful and coherent collection also explore the investment of the writers, as well as ninetieth- and twentieth-century readers, in canon creation. As it reconstructs conversations between these earlier authors and initiates new dialogues for today’s readers, Soft Canons offers provocative reconceptualizations of American literary and cultural history.
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cover of The Afterlife of Plutarch

The Afterlife of Plutarch

Edited by John North and Peter Mack

University of London Press, 2018

Plutarch’s writings have had a varied reception history from when he was writing in the second century BCE down to today. This volume starts from what may be a translation into the Syriac dialect of a lost Plutarch essay; continues with a tribute from a leading scholar of the later Byzantine period; and follows the centuries of sustained enthusiasm from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. This period started once a translation into Latin had become available, and ended when scholars in the nineteenth century lowered Plutarch’s reputation as historian, biographer, philosopher, and stylist. By the end of the century, he came to symbolize in the eyes of Tolstoy precisely what history should not be. Both the causes of the decline and the later recovery of interest raise important new questions about how Plutarch should be assessed in the twenty-first century. This is one of the early volumes in the series of ‘Afterlives’ of the Classics, being produced jointly by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg.  
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cover of The Pipes of Pan: Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton

The Pipes of Pan

Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton

Thomas K. Hubbard

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Departing from conventional views of the pastoral genre as an Arcadian escape from urban sophistication, The Pipes of Pan highlights its genesis in the allusive and polemical literary cultures of Alexandria and Rome. Both cities placed great emphasis upon learned invocation and reformulation of poetic models. The pastoral metaphor provided Theocritus and Vergil with tools for representing the contests and confrontations of poets and genres, the exchange of ideas among poets, and poets' reflections on the efficacy of their works.
Pastoral poetry highlights the didactic relationship of older and younger shepherds, whether as rivals or as patron and successor. As such it is an ideal form for young poets' self-representation vis-à-vis their elders, whose work they simultaneously appropriated and transformed, even as the elder poets were represented in the new texts. This influence is reenacted in every generation: Theocritus vs. his Alexandrian forebears, Vergil vs. Theocritus, Calpurnius vs. Vergil, Nemesianus vs. Vergil and Calpurnius, Petrarch vs. Vergil, Boccaccio vs. Petrarch, Spenser vs. Vergil, along with Chaucer and Milton vs. Spenser.
The Pipes of Pan combines multiple strands of contemporary intertextual theory with reception aesthetics and Harold Bloom's theory of intersubjective conflict between generations of poets. It also provides one of the first systematic studies of intertextual and intersubjective dynamics within a whole genre.
This work will be of interest to classicists, students of literary theory, comparative literature, medieval and Renaissance literature, Italian humanism, and English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All texts are translated.
Thomas Hubbard is Associate Professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin.
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cover of The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism

The Poetics of Transition

Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism

Jonathan Levin

Duke University Press, 1999

The Poetics of Transition examines the connection between American pragmatism and literary modernism by focusing on the concept of transition as a theme common to both movements. Jonathan Levin begins with the Emersonian notion that transition—the movement from one state or condition to another or, alternately, the figural enactment of that movement—is infused with power. He then offers a revisionary reading of the pragmatists’ view of the permeability of subjective and objective realms and of how American literary modernists stage this permeability in the language and form of their writing.
Levin draws on the pragmatist and neopragmatist writings of William James, John Dewey, George Santayana, Richard Rorty, and Cornel West to illuminate the work of modernist literature. In turn, he illuminates the poetic imperatives of pragmatism by tracing the ways in which Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens capture the moment of transition—a paradoxical moment that, once it is represented in language or art, requires its own perpetual overcoming. Throughout, he explores how modernist writers, who are masters at recording such “illegible” moments of transition in their poetry and prose, significantly contribute to an expanded understanding of pragmatism and its underlying aesthetics. By linking Emerson with the progressive philosophy of turn-of-the-century pragmatism and the experimentation of American literary modernism, Levin offers new insight into Emerson’s lasting influence on later American philosophers, novelists, and poets.
The Poetics of Transition will interest scholars and students in the fields of literary criticism, neopragmatism, literary modernism, and American literature.


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cover of The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James

The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James

John Carlos Rowe

University of Wisconsin Press, 1985

Rowe examines James from the perspectives of the psychology of literary influence, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, literary phenomenology and impressionism, and reader-response criticism, transforming a literary monument into the telling point of intersection for modern critical theories.



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cover of Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition

Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition

Lincoln Konkle

University of Missouri Press, 2005

Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition is the first reading of Wilder’s life, fiction, drama, and criticism as a product of American culture. Early American studies by Sacvan Bercovitch, Mason Lowance Jr., Emory Elliott, and others have identified aspects of the American literary tradition stemming from New England Puritan writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lincoln Konkle extends the argument for continuity into both the twentieth century and the profane space of the theater.
            Konkle shows that Thornton Wilder, as a literary descendant of Edward Taylor, inherited the best of the Puritans’ worldview and drew upon those attributes of the Puritan tradition within American literature that would strike a fundamental chord with his American audience. By providing close readings of Wilder’s texts against seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritan culture and literature, Konkle demonstrates that Wilder’s aesthetic was not just generically allegorical but also typically American and his religious sensibility was not just generally Christian, but specifically Calvinist. He alsoemphasizes aspects of Puritan theology, ideology, and aesthetics that have been suppressed or repressed into our cultural unconscious but are manifested in Wilder’s texts in response to various historical or personal stimuli.
             Konkle makes an original contribution to Wilder scholarship by providing the first in-depth readings of the full-length play The Trumpet Shall Sound and of the film Shadow of a Doubt (as a major work of Wilder). Also included are readings of little-known and seldom-discussed dramatic pieces, including Proserpina and the Devil, And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead, and Our Century. With its emphasis on the continuities of thought and form found in American literature from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, this analysis of Wilder’s drama and fiction will reclaim him as an intrinsically American writer, deserving to be read within the context of American literary and cultural traditions.  
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cover of Vision and Textuality

Vision and Textuality

Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, eds.

Duke University Press, 1995

The influence of contemporary literary theory on art history is increasingly evident, but there is little or no agreement about the nature and consequence of this new intersection of the visual and the textual. Vision and Textuality brings together essays by many of the most influential scholars in the field—both young and more established writers from the United States, England, and France—to address the emergent terms and practices of contemporary art history.
With essays by Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Norman Bryson, Victor Burgin, Martin Jay, Louis Marin, Thomas Crow, Griselda Pollock, and others, the volume is organized into sections devoted to the discipline of art history, the implications of semiotics, the new cultural history of art, and the impact of psychoanalysis. The works discussed in these essays range from Rembrandt’s Danae to Jorge Immendorf’s Café Deutschland, from Vauxhall Gardens to Max Ernst, and from the Imagines of Philostratus to William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams. Each section is preceded by a short introduction that offers further contexts for considering the essays that follow, while the editors’ general introduction presents an overall exploration of the relation between vision and textuality in a variety of both institutional and theoretical contexts. Among other issues, it examines the relevance of aesthetics, the current concern with modernism and postmodernism, and the possible development of new disciplinary formations in the humanities.

Contributors. Mieke Bal, John Bender, Norman Bryson, Victor Burgin, Thomas Crow, Peter de Bolla, Hal Foster, Michael Holly, Martin Jay, Rosalind Krauss, Françoise Lucbert, Louis Martin, Stephen Melville, Griselda Pollock, Bill Readings, Irit Rogoff, Bennet Schaber, John Tagg

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