Literary Cultures and Public Opinion in the Low Countries, 1450-1650
In the early modern Low Countries, literary culture functioned on several levels simultaneously: it provided learning, pleasure, and entertainment while also shaping public debate. From a ditty in Dutch sung in the streets to a funeral poem in Latin composed to be read for or by intimate friends, from a play performed for a prince to a comedy written for pupils literary texts and performances often dealt with highly controversial topics of religion or politics, on a local or national, but also on a supranational scale.
Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution
In a new approach to interdisciplinary literary theory, Literature, Analytically Speaking integrates literary studies with analytic aesthetics, girded by neo-Darwinian evolution. Scrutinizing narrative fiction through a lens provided by analytic philosophy, revered literary theorist The author puts new life into literary theory while fashioning a set of practical guidelines for critics in the interpretive trenches.
Examining language debates and literary texts from Noah Webster to H.L. Mencken and from Washington Irving to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book demonstrates how gender arose in passionate discussions about language to address concerns about national identity and national citizenship elicited by 19th-century sociopolitical transformations. Together with popular commentary about language in Congressional records, periodicals, grammar books, etiquette manuals, and educational materials, literary products tell stories about how gendered discussions of language worked to deflect nationally divisive debates ....
This book is about the things which could unite, rather than divide, poets during the English Civil Wars: friendship, patronage relations, literary admiration, and anti-clericalism. The central figure is Andrew Marvell, renowned for his "ambivalent" allegiance in the late 1640s. Little is known about Marvell's associations in this period, when many of his best-known lyrics were composed. The London literary circle which formed in 1647 under the patronage of the wealthy royalist Thomas Stanley included "Cavalier" friends of Marvell such as Richard Lovelace but also John Hall, a Parliamentarian propagandist inspired by reading Milton.
This volume presents a wide range of pieces from a world-class Latinist which displays both his diverse interests as a scholar and his consistent concern with Augustan texts, their language and literary texture. The range of articles, written over more than three decades and including one previously unpublished piece, covers the same connected territory - largely Virgil, Horace, and elegy. R. O. A. M. Lyne's consistent approach of close reading means that the articles form a coherent whole, while his compelling style as an engaged literary analyst ensures that these are not dry or forbidding pieces.
