Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

The Nostalgic Imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
English History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Raymond Williams

This unusual book explores the historical assumptions at work in the style of literary criticism that came to dominate English studies in the twentieth century. Stefan Collini shows how the work of critics renowned for their close attention to ‘the words on the page’ was in practice bound up with claims about the nature and direction of historical change, the interpretation of the national past, and the scholarship of earlier historians. Among the major figures examined in detail are T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, William Empson, and Raymond Williams, while there are also original discussions of such figures as Basil Willey, L. C. Knights, Q. D. Leavis, and Richard Hoggart. In the period between Eliot’s The Sacred Wood and Williams’s The Long Revolution, the writings of such critics came to occupy the cultural space left by academic history’s retreat into specialized, archive-bound monographs. Their work challenged the assumptions of the Whig interpretation of English history and entailed a revision of the traditional relations between ‘literary history’ and ‘general history’. Combining close textual analysis with wide-ranging intellectual history, this book both revises the standard story of the history of literary criticism and illuminates a central feature of the cultural history of twentieth-century Britain.

Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
Aesthetic Structure

How did “reading for the message,” a mark of shame among literary critics, yet in many ways an ordinary reading practice, become so marginalized? The origins of this methodological commitment ultimately are intertwined with the birth of literary studies itself . The influential aestheticist notion of “art for art’s sake” has several implications crucial for understanding the intellectual history of literary criticism in the twentieth century: most important was the belief that to “extract” an idea from a text was to dismiss its aesthetic structure. This impulse culminated in the New Critical contention that to paraphrase a text was a “heresy.” Yet this dominant tradition has always co-existed with practical interpretation that was much less formalist in emphasis. A return to the world of American literary criticism in 1947, when Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn was published, shows this clearly: many now-forgotten critics were already practicing a form of criticism that emphasized literary content, and often overly rejecting Brooks’s insistence that reading for the content or meaning of a poem betrayed its aesthetic nature.

The Curious History of Theorizing about the History of the Western Nuclear Family

1993 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Scott Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Family History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Multiple Functions ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Popular Image

The history of the family lacks a history. Sociologists and historians rarely cite interpretative literature written before the last third of the twentieth century. Curiously, at least for the discipline of history, recent scholars have seemingly regarded older perceptions as relics of a prescientific past.This foray into intellectual history will demonstrate that ignoring the history of this field also distorts it. My case study considers what is widely regarded as the largest revision in thinking about the history of the family—the complete overthrow of what William J. Goode, the sociologist most credited with its rejection, has derisively called (1970: 6) “the classical family of Western nostalgia.” Kertzer and Hogan (1988: 84) have aptly summarized the chief elements of the interpretation overturned by the revisionists: “Until recently, the popular image of Western family history pictured people as living in large extended family units that had multiple functions. With the advent of industrialization, it was thought, this system was transformed into one characterized by small, nuclear family units having more specialized functions.”

scholarly journals Kristin Stapleton (2016). Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family.

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-160
Author(s):  
Ronald Torrance
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social And Economic Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Chinese Literary Criticism ◽  
The City

There are few resources amongst contemporary Chinese literary criticism that manage to weave such insightful literary readings and incisive historical research as Kristin Stapleton’s Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family. The book accomplishes three feats, as set out by Stapleton in her introductory chapter, simultaneously incorporating a history of twentieth-century Chengdu (and its relevance to the developments in China during this period, more broadly) alongside the author’s biography of Ba Jin’s formative years in the city and the historiographical context of his novel Family. Such an undertaking by a less skilled author would have, perhaps, produced a work which simplifies the rich historical underpinnings of Ba Jin’s Family to supplementary readings of the novel, coupled with incidental evidence of the political and social machinations of the city in which its author grew up. Not so under Stapleton’s careful guidance. By reading the social and economic development of early twentieth-century Chengdu as much as its fictional counterpart in Ba Jin’s Turbulent Stream trilogy, Stapleton provides a perceptive reading of Family which invites the reader to consider how fiction can enrich and enliven our understanding of history.

Introduction

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter E. Gordon ◽  
John P. McCormick
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Art History ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to bring together a broad range of papers on diverse themes pertaining to the intellectual and cultural history of the Weimar Republic. It includes a great variety of contributions by scholars affiliated with manifold disciplines, including, but not limited to, history, political theory, philosophy, sociology, history of science, film theory, art history, and literary criticism. Few if any single-volume works have succeeded at offering a unified portrait of the rich developments of Weimar thought, and the authors believe the time is right to offer a guidebook to the German interwar era, a compendium focused primarily on the major intellectual trends of the time. The chapter then discusses the unity and diversity of Weimar thought followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

scholarly journals From texts to readers: Literary criticism, sociology of practice and cultural history

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (62) ◽  
pp. 741-756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Chartier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This essay is devoted to two questions. Firstly, it analyzes how reading was conceived by literary criticism, sociology of practices, and cultural history in the end of the twentieth century. What is at stake here is the conceptualization of the relationship between the text and the reader and the process through which meaning is constructed. Secondly, it recalls some fundamental questions raised by the history of reading, not for their own sake but because they can suggest some approaches for the analysis of reading practices in modern times.

scholarly journals The Annihilation of Space: A Bad (Historical) Concept

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Alexis D. Litvine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Cultural Mediation ◽  
Counter Example ◽  
Dead End ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Representations Of Space

Abstract This article is a reminder that the concept of ‘annihilation of space’ or ‘spatial compression’, often used as a shorthand for referring to the cultural or economic consequences of industrial mobility, has a long intellectual history. The concept thus comes loaded with a specific outlook on the experience of modernity, which is – I argue – unsuitable for any cultural or social history of space. This article outlines the etymology of the concept and shows: first, that the historical phenomena it pretends to describe are too complex for such a simplistic signpost; and, second, that the term is never a neutral descriptor but always an engagement with a form of historical and cultural mediation on the nature of modernity in relation to space. In both cases this term obfuscates more than it reveals. As a counter-example, I look at the effect of the railways on popular representations of space and conclude that postmodern geography is a relative dead end for historians interested in the social and cultural history of space.

BANDITS, ELVIS, AND OTHER MYSTICS: An Interview with Paul Vanderwood

2012 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-592
Author(s):  
Eric Van Young
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
San Diego ◽  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
The Political ◽  
State University ◽  
History Of ◽  
San Diego State University ◽  
Power Of God

Paul Vanderwood, Professor Emeritus of History at San Diego State University, died in San Diego onOctober 10, 2011, at the age of 82. A distinguished and innovative historian of modern Mexico, Vanderwood authored or co-authored several books, mostly dealing with the political, social, and cultural history of Mexico between about 1860 and the mid-twentieth century. The four works for which he is best known are Disorder and Progress (1982), The Power of God Against the Guns ofGovernment (1998), Juan Soldado (2004), and Satan's Playground (2010), and they are discussed extensively in this interview.

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