Recognitions : a study in poetics
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Bibliographic Information
Recognitions : a study in poetics
（Clarendon paperbacks）
Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, 1990, c1988
- : pbk
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Note
Bibliography: p. [505]-521
Includes indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Recognitions is about the most neglected strand of Aristotelian poetics - anagnorisis, or recognition. It is a topic that has conventionally had a bad press: the recognition scene is regarded as an implausible contrivance, a feeble way of resolving a plot the author can no longer control. But why do such scenes occur in every kind of drama and narrative fiction from the Odyssey and Oedipus to thrillers by Le Carre - and how is it they
continue to surprise, amuse, and disturb?
Terence Cave's book first traces the history of the term anagnorisis and explores the ways in which it continues to be a valuable focus for theoretical reflection. Then, in a series of chapters analysing examples of recognition plots from English, French, and German literature, including Shakespeare, James, Conrad, Racine, Corneille, and Goethe, the book demonstrates how recognition must be seen as a topic of the first importance, perhaps the most strictly literary of all topics in
poetics.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Odysseus' Scar
- I: RECOGNITION IN THE HISTORY OF POETICS: Anagnorisis in antiquity
- Renaissance commentaries
- The decline of recognition: French neoclassicism
- The decline of recognition: Eighteenth-century variants
- Plots of the psyche
- Modern commentary and criticism
- Transition
- II: RECOGNITION IN PRACTICE: A Shakespearean prologue
- Corneille: the hero versus Oedipus
- Between Corneille and Racine: La Thebaide
- Racine: after Oedipus
- From drama to narrative: Goethe and Kleist
- Narrating recognition: Balzac and Dickens
- Henry James: the Last Sharpness
- Joseph Conrad: the Revenge of the Unknown
- Conclusion: Beyond recognition
- Translation of verse passages
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