The Cambridge Companion to Prose

This Companion provides an introduction to the craft of prose. It considers the technical aspects of style that contribute to the art of prose, examining the constituent parts of prose through a widening lens, from the smallest details of punctuation and wording to style more broadly conceived. The book is concerned not only with prose fiction but with creative non-fiction, a growing area of interest for readers and aspiring writers. Written by internationally-renowned critics, novelists and biographers, the essays provide readers and writers with ways of understanding the workings of prose. They are exemplary of good critical practice, pleasurable reading for their own sake, and both informative and inspirational for practising writers. The Cambridge Companion to Prose will serve as a key resource for students of English literature and of creative writing.

Γameσσetai/γe Maσσetai: Homer Iliad 9.394 and the Constitutive Role of Irregularity

This paper uses a textual decision at Iliad 9.394 to argue for irregularity as a functional and meaningful principle in the constitution of the Homeric text. In contrast to almost all recent major editions, I argue that the ‘irregular’ MSS γαμέσσεται should be preferred to the Aristarchaean conjecture γε μάσσεται. Aristarchus’ widely adopted emendation, I suggest, is the product of a drive towards standardization that is still operative in Homeric text-critical practice. This paper opposes that standardization with the evidence of ancient, perhaps pre-Alexandrian, responses to Iliad 9.394, in which the ‘irregularity’ of γαμέσσεται is embraced as an interpretive opportunity. The formal disruptions of γαμέσσεται, I propose, can be understood by locating them both within the immediate context of Iliad 9 and within the wider thematics of irregularity that mark the character of Achilles. This paper thus attempts to reframe our approach to the role of irregularity in the Iliad as an integral feature of meaning rather than grounds for suspecting the integrity of the text.

“The Quickening Virtue”: Reiterating the Work of the Literary Text

This article pursues the reiteration of reading as a practice that circumscribes the work of the literary text. In doing so, it responds to particular assertions made in Kate Highman’s “Close(d) Reading and the ‘Potential Space’ of the Literature Classroom.” More pertinently, though, it seeks to reposition the value of reading as a vital attribute in engaging with the humanities and emphasizes that analyzing and the interpreting of the text is the practice indisputably central to the humanistic endeavor. The discussion reiterates that any ways in and through the text are available only by reading, making it necessary to encourage and inculcate it as a central objective so that the work of the text, in accordance with Attridge’s qualification of it, remains productive. Finally, it argues that situating this critical practice as a deliberate objective within the teaching of literature must be reprioritized as a matter of urgency.

Decolonize Practical Criticism?

This article reflects on what it might mean to decolonize practical criticism in the current moment by considering previous responses to the same imperative. It discusses critical and institutional interventions by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Mervyn Morris, Chidi Amuta, and, more recently, Harry Garuba and Benge Okot. In this way, the article demonstrates that the antidote to colonial paradigms of literary criticism has not been a pedagogy that prioritizes context over text but a critical practice oriented to a work’s formal and technical context of intelligibility. Such a practice demands that readers inhabit the literary constraints and possibilities encountered by postcolonial or otherwise peripheral writers.

The “Nature” of American Literature: Race, Place, and Textuality in John Crowe Ransom and Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“The ‘Nature’ of American Literature” explores how John Crowe Ransom and his less-studied contemporary Elizabeth Madox Roberts advanced a theory of literary objects that emerged from nature itself. This theory formed the basis of Ransom’s bid, in “Criticism, Inc.,” for disciplinary stratification and productivity. Through a set of representational practices this article gathers under the terms “natural reading” and “natural writing,” Roberts and Ransom framed valuable aesthetic objects as the product of a carefully cultivated relationship between human observers and landscape. For both, however, this rarified relationship was grounded in and served to reinforce racial hierarchy. Even as the discipline turns away from the cultural elitism associated with New Criticism, Ransom’s understanding of the literary object as natural and thus subject to disciplinary study continues to inform contemporary critical practice. This article thus invites engagement with the often submerged racial politics of the ways we constitute objects and processes of disciplinary literary studies.