Structure and Society in Literary History: Studies in the History and Theory of Historical Criticism

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. Cover Title Preface to the Original Edition Contents Introduction: Toward a Theory of Literary History I. Past Significance and Present Meaning in Literary History Contradictions beyond Formalism New Criticism and Historical Philology Criticism and Present Meaning Toward a Dialectic of Genesis and Function Past and Present Correlated: The Case of Shakespeare Criticism II. The Concept of Tradition Reconsidered The Liberal Tradition from Milton to Arnold The Modernist Revaluation: Past Structure versus Present Function Beyond Bildungserlebnis: The New Function of Criticism Spatial Order: "Culture without Yesterday" III. Past Origins and Present Functions in American Literary History Function and Evaluation: Moments of Early Correlation Progressive Redefinitions of a "Usable" Past Social History versus Aesthetic Structure Beyond Liberalism: The Nietzschean Revolution A Revised American Past: The Dichotomy of Impact and Evaluation History as Myth: American Innocence Then and Now IV. Structuralism and Literary History The Criticism of Function as Structure The Structure of Genesis Anthropology as History Literary History as a System in Motion: Some Counterproposals V. Metaphor and Historical Criticism: Shakespeare's Imagery Revisited Mimesis and Expression in Neoclassical and Romantic Imagery Criticism The Spatial "Pattern" of Modernism Image and Society: Some Links of Vehicle and Consciousness Toward the Historical Context of Shakespeare's Imagery VI. Structure and History in Narrative Perspective: The Problem of Point of View Reconsidered Definitions of Point of View Rhetoric: Structuring Function and Functioning Structure Social and Technical Points of View: Toward Their Integration Structure and Society: A Methodological Epilogue VII. Text and History: Epilogue, 1984 "Tradition" as Closure of History? Textuality and Historicity Representation (I): Vulnerability and Resiliency Representation (II): Collapse of a Dicursive Episteme Mimesis: The Challenge of (Re)Production Mimesis and Representation: Some Counterproposals Index of Names Back Cover