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New historicism and cultural materialism emerged in the early 1980s as prominent literary theories and came to represent a revival of interest in history and in historicising literature. Their proponents rejected both formalist criticism and earlier attempts to read literature in its historical context and defined new ways of thinking about literature in relation to history. This study explains the development of these theories and demonstrates both their uses and weaknesses as critical practices. The potential future direction for the theories is explored and the controversial debates about their validity in literary studies are discussed.>
Sommario
General Editor's Preface
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Literature in History
PART 1: THE TURN TO HISTORY
Key Contexts and Theorists
New Historicism: Representations of History and Power
Cultural Poetics: After the New Historicism?
Cultural Materialism: Literature and Dissident Politics
New Historicism and Cultural Materialism Today
PART 2: APPLICATIONS AND READINGS
'On the Edge of a Black and Incomprehensible Frenzy': An New Historicist Reading of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Producing the Subject: A New Historicist Reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans's The Yellow Wallpaper
Cultural Materialism and Reading Dissidence in(to) the Poetry of Alfred Tennyson
'I Write it out in a Verse': Power, History and Colonialism in W.B.Yeat's Easter 1916
PART 3: AFTERWORDS
After History: Textuality and Historicity in New Historicism
The Importance of Not Concluding
Annotated Bibliography
Bibliography
Index.
Info autore
JOHN BRANNIGAN is Lecturer in Literary Studies and Irish Studies at the University of Luton, UK.
