REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature

REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature PDF

Author: Herbert Grabes

Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag

Published: 2015-12-09

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 382337186X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

REAL invites contributions on the relationship between literature and cultural change. The study of culture has to face the difficulty of not being able to observe its object directly. Its only access is via cultural phenomena as observable products of human activity: artefacts, texts, rites, symbols, forms of conduct. If scholars wish to study cultural change, they need to do so by investigating the changing relationships among these phenomena, the changing connections between social structures, mentalities and the material dimension of texts, artefacts and other objects. While some scholars have rejected the concept of culture because of this indirectness, others – from Malinowski to Luhmann – have attempted to make it theoretically more precise and historically more saturated. Societies change as well as cultures, but they are not the same and they evolve at different speeds.

REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Volume 38

REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Volume 38 PDF

Author: Laura Bieger

Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag

Published: 2024-04-29

Total Pages: 632

ISBN-13: 3381108735

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Celebrating the 80th birthday of Winfried Fluck, this volume of REAL gathers leading US-American and European literary scholars from English and American Studies to engage some of his classic essays, covering topics that range from the aesthetics of early American literature to the history of our digital present and from the Americanization of literary studies to the search for American democratic culture. Each of the volume's twelve dialogues consists of a republished essay by Fluck and a response by one his interlocutors, written specifically for this occasion. Contributors include field-defining scholars, long-time companions, and colleagues whose intellectual trajectory has been impacted by Fluck's incisive metacriticism and his reception-oriented approach to literary and cultural history. The twelve dialogues reassess debates that have shaped literary studies in the late twentieth century and they inquire into the paradigmatic shifts that are currently reorganizing the field.

Reading the Canon

Reading the Canon PDF

Author: Philipp Löffler

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 3825367207

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

‘Reading the Canon’ explores the relation between the production of literary value and the problem of periodization, tracing how literary tastes, particular reader communities, and sites of literary learning shape the organization of literature in historical perspective. Rather than suggesting a political critique of the canon, this book shows that the production of literary relevance and its tacit hierarchies of value are necessary consequences of how reading and writing are organized as social practices within different fields of literary activity. ‘Reading the Canon’ offers a comprehensive theoretical account of the conundrums still defining contemporary debates about literary value; the book also features a series of historically-inflected author studies—from classics, such as Shakespeare and Thomas Pynchon, to less likely figures, such as John Neal and Owen Johnson—that illustrate how the idea of literary relevance has been appropriated throughout history and across a variety of national and transnational literary institutions.

Jamesian Cultural Anxiety in the East and West

Jamesian Cultural Anxiety in the East and West PDF

Author: Choon-Hee Kim

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-01-31

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1527546454

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This volume explores the world that shaped Henry James’s work and influenced his legacy through the themes of Jamesian cultural anxiety between and beyond spatio-temporal boundaries. As such, each chapter constructs a mode of reading to map and formulate one’s own cultural perspective in various contexts relying on their unique engagement with James’s and Jamesian creative acts of writing—aesthetics and science, the (auto-)biographical as social aspects, genre as literary-social context, the artistic and the economic, editorship and readership, and Asian perspectives on cultural influences and identities—to generate insights and establish new intercultural understandings. These are the traces of the contributors’ national, social, cultural consciousness that allow the definition of the Jamesian worldview as a particularly universal one in a global context.

Making Literature Now

Making Literature Now PDF

Author: Amy Hungerford

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2016-08-03

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0804799423

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

How does new writing emerge and find readers today? Why does one writer's work become famous while another's remains invisible? Making Literature Now tells the stories of the creators, editors, readers, and critics who make their living by making literature itself come alive. The book shows how various conditions—including gender, education, business dynamics, social networks, money, and the forces of literary tradition—affect the things we can choose, or refuse, to read. Amy Hungerford focuses her discussion on literary bestsellers as well as little-known traditional and digital literature from smaller presses, such as McSweeney's. She deftly matches the particular human stories of the makers with the impersonal structures through which literary reputation is made. Ranging from fine-grained ethnography to polemical argument, this book transforms our sense of how and why new literature appears—and disappears—in contemporary American culture.