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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Poetics Of Unoriginality: The Case Of Lucretia Davidson, Claudia Stokes
The Poetics Of Unoriginality: The Case Of Lucretia Davidson, Claudia Stokes
English Faculty Research
Literary conventionality and unoriginality have long been presumed to be markers of lesser literary quality. Scholars of women’s literature have argued that this assumption enabled the denigration of nineteenth-century American women writers, many of whose works markedly adhered to literary convention and evaded innovation. Following the work of such critics as Eliza Richards and Virginia Jackson in unearthing the contemporary literary contexts that framed female literary conventionality, this essay argues that the writings of Lucretia Davidson, an enormously popular poet, provides an important data point in our understandings of the social uses of literary unoriginality. Specifically, Davidson’s work suggests that …
Forgiveness And Literature, Michael Fischer
Forgiveness And Literature, Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
Imagine a community where constructive dialogue across political, class, and other differences is rare. Threatened by disagreement, individuals cluster together with like-minded believers, often egging one another on into taking even more extreme positions, usually against their ideological opponents. Sources of information are selected to ratify existing views instead of challenging them. Shielded from external perspectives, individuals stay stuck in anger, opposition, and resentment, recycling grievances against their enemies and spinning out fantasies of revenge.
In Defense Of Genius: Howells And The Limits Of Literary History, Claudia Stokes
In Defense Of Genius: Howells And The Limits Of Literary History, Claudia Stokes
English Faculty Research
In early 1886, William Dean Howells fell into an ugly public debate with the poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman. Carried out in the pages of Harper’s Monthly and the New Princeton Review, this dispute started as a disagreement about the origins of literary craftsmanship but quickly escalated into a heated epistemological squabble about the limits of historical knowledge. It began in March of that year, when Howells gave a mixed review to Stedman’s Poets of America (1885), a history of American poetry. Though Howells conceded the importance of Stedman’s contribution to the emerging discipline of American literary history, …
Joyce's Kaleidoscope: An Invitation To "Finnegans Wake" [Review], David Rando
Joyce's Kaleidoscope: An Invitation To "Finnegans Wake" [Review], David Rando
English Faculty Research
Books about Finnegans Wake announce their forms with unusual regularity: skeleton keys, plot summaries, reader’s guides, first-draft versions, lexicons, gazetteers, censuses, genetic guides, annotations, and more. Every form offers a particular route through the Wake, and we hope our collective efforts add up to a cartography of possibilities. But until now we have never been issued an “invitation” to the Wake. Many readers of this journal will realize that they must have invited themselves uncouthly to the Wake long ago, and some will imagine that it is too late for invitations when one has already been at the party …
Wordsworth And The Recovery Of Hope, Michael Fischer
Wordsworth And The Recovery Of Hope, Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
No abstract provided.
Wordsworth: The Sense Of History [Review], Michael Fischer
Wordsworth: The Sense Of History [Review], Michael Fischer
English Faculty Research
Alan Liu's Wordsworth: The Sense of History is a large book containing a multitude of materials on a wide range of subjects: Napoleon's military tactics, the indebtedness of Lake District weavers, the social history of criminal punishment, the class structure of Lakeland agricultural society, and the floor plans of late eighteenth-century rural cottages (to name only a few). As if all this were not enough, Liu often apologizes for not providing more, as when he admits that "full proof" of one of his hypotheses "opens to view ... a research field not as fully investigated as others and too vast …