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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
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 …
Persona Criticism And The Death Of The Author, Cheryl Walker
Persona Criticism And The Death Of The Author, Cheryl Walker
Scripps Faculty Publications and Research
The difficulty with doing biographical criticism today is that the figure of the author has increasingly come under attack, almost as if the author's portrait, which at one time routinely accompanied critical works, were being atomized, dissolved in an acid bath of scorn and distrust. Though "death of the author" critics have made a number of important points about the rigidity and naiveté of certain earlier forms of biographical criticism, I find that in my own practice I am loath to give up all vestiges of the author. The strategy I have chosen is what I would call persona criticism, …