The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory
Jerome J. McGann
Abstract
As well as exploring the fault-lines marking the various kinds of historical literary studies from the New Criticism to Post-Structuralism, this book develops a fully elaborated socio-historical criticism for literary works. It achieves this by means of four special sets of investigations: into the relation between the so-called ‘autonomous’ poem and its political/historical contexts; into the relation of reception and history to literary interpretation; into the problems of canon and the characterisation of period; and, finally, into the ideological dimensions of both literary works and the c ... More
As well as exploring the fault-lines marking the various kinds of historical literary studies from the New Criticism to Post-Structuralism, this book develops a fully elaborated socio-historical criticism for literary works. It achieves this by means of four special sets of investigations: into the relation between the so-called ‘autonomous’ poem and its political/historical contexts; into the relation of reception and history to literary interpretation; into the problems of canon and the characterisation of period; and, finally, into the ideological dimensions of both literary works and the criticism of such works. Whilst focusing largely on 19th-century works — among them those of Keats, Byron, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti — its arguments are applicable to literary studies in general, and its emphasis throughout is theoretical and methodological.
Keywords:
New Criticism,
Post-Structuralism,
socio-historical criticism,
autonomous poem,
political/historical contexts,
19th-century literature,
John Keats,
Byron,
Alfred Lord Tennyson,
Christina Rossetti
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 1988 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198117506 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117506.001.0001 |
