New Historical Literary Study

Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History

Jeffrey N. Cox, Larry J. Reynolds, Jeffrey N. Cox, Larry J. Reynolds

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691015460
  9780691069906
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691233369
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume, growing out of the celebrated turn toward history in literary criticism, showcases some of the best new historical work being done today in textual theory, literary history, and cultural criticism. The collection brings together for the first time key representativesfrom various schools of historicist scholarship, including leading critics whose work has helped define new historicism. The essays illuminate literary periods ranging from Anglo-Saxon to postmodern, a variety of literary texts that includes The Siege of Thebes, Macbeth, The Jazz Singer, and The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, and central issues that have marked new historicism: power, ideology, textuality, othering, marginality, exile, and liberation.


The contributors are Janet Aikins, Lawrence Buell, Ralph Cohen, Margaret Ezell, Stephen Greenblatt, Terence Hoagwood, Jerome McGann, Robert Newman, Katherine O'Keeffe, Lee Patterson, Michael Rogin, Edward Said, and Hortense Spillers. The editors' introduction situates the various essays within contemporary criticism and explores the multiple, contestatory issues at stake within the historicist enterprise.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The Historicist Enterprise - Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds
• Chapter One: Generating Literary Histories - Ralph Cohen
• Chapter Two: Texts and Works: Some Historical Questions on the Editing of Old English Verse - Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe
• Chapter Three: Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate - Lee Patterson
• Chapter Four: Shakespeare Bewitched - Stephen Greenblatt
• Chapter Five: Re-visioning the Restoration: Or, How to Stop Obscuring Early Women Writers - Margaret J. M. Ezell
• Chapter Six: Re-presenting the Body in Pamela II - Janet E. Aikins
• Chapter Seven: Fictions and Freedom: Wordsworth and the Ideology of Romanticism - Terence Allan Hoagwood
• Chapter Eight: Beyond the Valley of Production; or, Defactorum natura: A Dialogue - Jerome J. McGann
• Chapter Nine: Literary History as a Hybrid Genre - Lawrence Buell
• Chapter Ten: Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice - Michael Rogin
• Chapter Eleven: Black, White, and in Color, or Learning How to Paint: Toward an Intramural Protocol of Reading - Hortense J. Spillers
• Chapter Twelve: Exiling History: Hysterical Transgression in Historical Narrative - Robert D. Newman
• Chapter Thirteen: Figures, Configurations, Transfigurations - Edward W. Said
• Index