Life and Times of Cultural Studies

Life and Times of Cultural Studies
Author: Richard E. Lee
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2004-01-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822385120

Moving world-systems analysis into the cultural realm, Richard E. Lee locates the cultural studies movement within a broad historical and geopolitical framework. He illuminates how order and conflict have been reflected and negotiated in the sphere of knowledge production by situating the emergence of cultural studies at the intersection of post–1945 international and British politics and a two-hundred-year history of conservative critical practice. Tracing British criticism from the period of the French Revolution through the 1960s, he describes how cultural studies in its infancy recombined the elite literary critical tradition with the First New Left’s concerns for history and popular culture—just as the liberal consensus began to come apart. Lee tracks the intellectual project of cultural studies as it developed over three decades, beginning with its institutional foundation at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). He links work at the CCCS to the events of 1968 and explores cultural studies’ engagement with theory in the debates on structuralism. He considers the shift within the discipline away from issues of working-class culture toward questions of identity politics in the fields of race and gender. He follows the expansion of the cultural studies project from Britain to Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States. Contextualizing the development and spread of cultural studies within the longue durée structures of knowledge in the modern world-system, Lee assesses its past and future as an agent of political and social change.

Evolution and Literary Theory

Evolution and Literary Theory
Author: Joseph Carroll
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 1096
Release: 1995
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780826209795

Over the past two decades, poststructuralism in its myriad forms has come to dominate literary criticism to the exclusion of virtually any other point of view. Few scholars have escaped the coercive authority of its programmatic radicalism. In Evolution and Literary Theory, Joseph Carroll vigorously attacks the foundational principles of poststructuralism and offers in their stead a bold new theory that situates literary criticism within the matrix of evolutionary theory.

Church and State in Spanish Italy

Church and State in Spanish Italy
Author: Céline Dauverd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2020-03-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108489850

Examines the relation between imperialism and religion through the practice of good government in Spanish Naples. Ideal for courses on the Renaissance, imperialism, the Spanish world, European history, diplomatic-international relations and the general reader interested in cultural history, Renaissance Italy, social minorities, and religious rituals.

Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism

Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism
Author: James Seaton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2014-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139916270

This book offers a history of literary criticism from Plato to the present, arguing that this history can best be seen as a dialogue among three traditions - the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and the humanistic, originated by Aristotle. There are many histories of literary criticism, but this is the first to clarify our understanding of the many seemingly incommensurable approaches employed over the centuries by reference to the three traditions. Making its case by careful analyses of individual critics, the book argues for the relevance of the humanistic tradition in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold
Author: Kate Campbell
Publisher: Northcote House Pub Limited
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2008
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0746309465

Poet, school inspector, civil servant and critic: this study examines the interrelationship of Arnold's different activities in tracing his evolution as a publicist to the publication of Culture and Anarchy in 1869. Kate Campbell shows how his critical concerns and attitudes first appear in his poetry and private writing, even though he reinterprets the 'immense task' of modern poetry as a critical programme. This book demonstrates in particular how his work in education leads to his use of indirect methods of political influence - methods that he has observed in politics, literature and journalism. As a publicist he uses such means to promote his objectives of culture and state. Accordingly, Matthew Arnold overturns the view of Arnoldian detachment as it argues his implication in the new cultural politics of the 1860s.

Leavis and Lonergan

Leavis and Lonergan
Author: Joseph Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2021-02-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0761871381

This book illustrates the value of the cross-fertilisation of literary criticism with philosophy, something Leavis advocated in his later writings. Lonergan’s epistemology of Critical Realism supports Leavis’s account of how we reach a valid judgment concerning the worth of a poem or literary text and his exploration of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity illustrates how close engagement with serious literature can be considered morally beneficial, something Leavis passionately believed in. Leavis and Lonergan are at one in providing convincing arguments against Cartesian dualism and the dominant positivist philosophies of their times. And Leavis’s method and practice as a literary critic, which he developed independently of Lonergan, exemplify Lonergan’s epistemology as applied to literature and, in this way, illustrate its versatility and fruitfulness.

A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation

A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation
Author: Nancy Easterlin
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2012-05-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1421405040

Combining cognitive and evolutionary research with traditional humanist methods, Nancy Easterlin demonstrates how a biocultural perspective in theory and criticism opens up new possibilities for literary interpretation. Easterlin maintains that the practice of literary interpretation is still of central intellectual and social value. Taking an open yet judicious approach, she argues, however, that literary interpretation stands to gain dramatically from a fair-minded and creative application of cognitive and evolutionary research. This work does just that, expounding a biocultural method that charts a middle course between overly reductive approaches to literature and traditionalists who see the sciences as a threat to the humanities. Easterlin develops her biocultural method by comparing it to four major subfields within literary studies: new historicism, ecocriticism, cognitive approaches, and evolutionary approaches. After a thorough review of each subfield, she reconsiders them in light of relevant research in cognitive and evolutionary psychology and provides a textual analysis of literary works from the romantic era to the present, including William Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and the Lucy poems, Mary Robinson’s “Old Barnard,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and Raymond Carver’s “I Could See the Smallest Things.” A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation offers a fresh and reasoned approach to literary studies that at once preserves the central importance that interpretation plays in the humanities and embraces the exciting developments of the cognitive sciences.