Structure and society in literary history : studies in the history and theory of historical criticism
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Structure and society in literary history : studies in the history and theory of historical criticism
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984
Johns Hopkins paperbacks ed, Expanded ed
- pbk.
Available at 25 libraries
Note
Originally published by the University Press of Virginia, 1976
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In "Structure and Society in Literary History" Robert Weimann, one of Germany's leading literary theoreticians, raises important questions about the social function of literature and sketches the outlines of a new historical criticism. Weinmann's Marxist analysis relates the history of writing and reading to the history of social and economic activities; literature and art are imaginative appropriations of the world, producers as well as products of culture. Aesthetic structures-- texts-- and social function are necessarily interrelated for Weimann as they are not for the followers of the New Criticism or the practitioners of structuralism. Firmly grounded in Anglo-American and Western European criticism, Weimann presents a cogent critique of T. S. Eliot's concept of tradition, analyzes the development of American literary history, and reconsiders the interpretation of Shakespeare's imagery. A new concluding chapter, written especially for the Johns Hopkins edition, presents a coherent and systematically developed survey of those poststructuralist positions most relevant to the placement of "Structure and Society in Literary History" within the critical context of the mid 1980s.
Table of Contents
Preface to the Original Edition
Introduction: Toward a Theory of Literary History
Chapter 1. Past Significance and Present Meaning in Literary History
Chapter 2. The Concept of Tradition Reconsidered
Chapter 3. Past origins and Present Functions in American Literary History
Chapter 4. Structuralism and Literary History
Chapter 5. Metaphor and Historical Criticism: Shakespeare's Imagery Revisited
Chapter 6. Structure and History in Narrative Perspective: The Problem of Point of View Reconsidered
Chapter 7. Text and History: Epilogue, 1984
Index of Names
by "Nielsen BookData"