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The Suktimuktavali, an anthology compiled in 1258 CE, is by far the most important source of testimonia for Bilhana's biographical mahakavya, the Vikramankadevacarita, composed ca. 1085. While the anthology's value for the primary textual criticism of the kavya is limited, its value for its interpretation is considerable: Bilhana is the anthology's most frequently cited poet, and its selection of his verses amounts to a reading of the poem as a whole. The recovery of this interpretation also provides the opportunity to consider the anthology's complex authorship and to situate it within the late medieval literary cultural history of western India., INTRODUCTION By far the most important primary source for anyone interested in the text or interpretation of the Vikramankadevacarita (VADC) of the Kashmirian poet Bilhana is its sole complete manuscript, [...]

Hasta hace poco, solo se conjeturaba acerca de los contactos iniciales entre Jorge Luis Borges y los escritores mexicanos durante las primeras decadas del siglo XX, principalmente por la resena [...]

Toute desinvolture affirme que seul le silence est efficace. Este trabajo (como su titulo muy simplemente indica) parte de una constatacion; esa constatacion es que Barthes no menciona nunca, en [...]

This essay proposes a new critical approach to modern prairie fiction through a reading of Edward McCourt's self-contradictory criticism and novels. The author re-evaluates McCourt's literary significance and locates his book, The Canadian West in Fiction, at the beginning of a formative and enduring prairie-realist 'school' of criticism with geographical, thematic, and regionalist emphases. This essay suggests that these same theses, ironically, are partly responsible for the neglect of McCourt's own significant fiction, which resists them. These established and influential theses have disconnected prairie writing from larger modern movements and its rarely acknowledged international, psychological, and experimental aspects. Le present article propose une nouvelle facon critique d'examiner la fiction moderne des prairies en lisant les romans et ouvrages critiques contradictoires de Edward McCourt. L'auteur re-evalue l'importance litteraire de McCourt et situe son livre--The Canadian West in Fiction--au tout debut d'une << ecole >> critique formative et persistante de realisme des prairies en mettant l'accent sur ses aspects geographique, thematique et regionaliste. Cet article suggere que ces memes hypotheses sont, ironiquement, en partie responsables de la negligence de l'importante fiction de McCourt lui-meme, laquelle leur resiste. Ces theses acceptees, voire influentes, ont debranche la fiction des prairies, avec ses aspects internationaux, psychologiques et experimentaux rarement reconnus, de plus vastes mouvements modernes.

'Tensions dynamiques: Le rapport sculpture/poetique en France, 1829-1859' Scott's study is the first of a group of essays in this volume that focus on the translation of sculpture into poetic form. He looks at the tensions between classical and Romantic ideals--stasis and movement, beauty and ugliness, impassibility and expressiveness--that began to manifest themselves in both sculpture and critical writing about sculpture during the transitional period following the Revolution. He argues that the opposition between sculpture/ stasis and poetry/movement that was, thanks to Winckelmann and Lessing, aesthetic doxa at the beginning of the nineteenth century, undergoes a change between 1829-1859 in the works of writers who would set the terms for the movement that would later be called 'Parnassianism.' Sculpture is shown to become more animated in works by David d'Angers, Clesinger, or Pradier, amongst others, and writing to acquire the plastic attributes of sculpture in the poetry of Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Banville, and Baudelaire. (In French), La periode post-revolutionnaire en France, ou le neo-classicisme de l'ere napoleonienne commencait a s'affronter au romantisme naissant, etait, on le sait, tres marquee par des tensions--politiques, sociales et culturelles. Au [...]

By most accounts, professional academic scholarship in English grew out of Victorian literary ideology, especially out of what Gerald Graft lightly calls 'cultural tradition in the Matthew Arnold sense.' (1) [...]

IN MARCH 1845, THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW CARRIED A LONG REVIEW ARTICLE by G. H. Lewes on 'Shakspeare and his Editors.' It reads as an extended lament. Over two hundred years [...]

The eighteenth century Chinese novel 'Honglou meng' by Cao Xueqin is usually considered as belonging to the same tradition as previous fictional writings. However, it should also be understood as belonging to a genre of literary criticism that had been established in the previous century.

One of the many ironies in the history of literary theory is that Michael Riffaterre remains known for an idea which he abandoned relatively early in his career. Although his [...]

Joyce's works have been blessed--some might say: burdened--with a vast body of critical writing. While that body of writing is not all academic--it began with a good number of critical [...]

This article discusses the criticism of Reverend John Whitaker, which generally focuses on his negative reviews of Edward Gibbon's 'History of the Roman Empire'; the author focuses however on previously anonymous letters to the 'English Review'. A description of Whitaker's character, education and background as an antiquary are provided; his letters to the journal are believed to reflect his anti-Jacobin political and religious opinions in support of Church-and-King.

This article examines the disruptive reception of the Pardoner's tale of miraculous experience on his fellow pilgrims, focusing on his revelations of his own self-interest and desires in telling the tale. The author discusses criticism of the tale, much of which concentrates on the ambiguous nature of his sexuality as an explanation for his deviance, while trying to place such a reading in the historical context of 14th century readership.

This article examines Thomas Rymer's 1693 'A Short View of Tragedy' and its discussion of the history of tragedy. The author asserts that this work was an appeal for government regulation and support of theater arts in England, and places criticism of Shakespeare on Rymer's view of the playwright as self-serving and unsupervised, and his advocacy of the chorus tradition as an example of a pleasing means of regulation.

Literary criticism 50 years ago was concerned with assessing the value of works and investigating the nature of character, firmly grounded in respect for the literary canon. Contemporary criticism is far wider, interdisciplinary, and disdainful of canons.

This article examines the theatrical criticism of Leigh Hunt, focusing on his volume 'Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres', which was largely based on his work as a theater critic from 1805 to 1807 for 'The News.' The author believes that Hunt was the first Romantic theater critic and changed the style by which plays were reviewed by writing longer articles than was the custom at the time and focusing in greater detail on the performances of the actors, on the scenery, the music, the staging and the costumes; he also insisted on the importance of the readerly imagination as a critical tool.

The Journal of the History of Ideas was first published in 1940 and has retained its commitment to intellectual innocence and enlightened reason. Its board in 2000 includes general and science historians, classicists, philosophers, and scholars in art, music, and literature.

An overview is presented on the history of literary criticism, focusing on the 1957 publication of Ian Watt's 'The Rise of the Novel'. Lasting influences from this work include realism as the defining characteristic of the novel.

Priscilla Gilman is an assistant professor of English at Yale University: She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled 'Beyond the Power of Criticism': Authorial Invulnerability in Later Eighteenth-Century [...]

The author discusses the transformation and possible extinction of practical criticism in modern day English literature education. Topics also include close reading, the metaphysics of literary humanism, student-teacher relations, practical criticism as a purely discursive fragment of English teaching, Leavisian subjectivism, and the theories of Ivor Armstrong Richards.

Karl Marx pursued a double strategy in the 'Eighteenth Brumaire,' representing history as a catastrophic decline from Napoleon to Louis Bonaparte and depicting the notion of a heroic past as unsettling. Marx developed an account of political representation and of repetition as origins through direct and indirect readings of Hamlet as farce.

Intellectual historians Richard Fox and James Kloppenberg emphasize in A Companion to American Thought that many innovations in American studies, such as the dismantling of disciplinary boundaries and the focus [...]

Most literary critics since the 1940s canonized Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as one of the greatest American novels, as well as one of the strongest and most effective condemnations of slavery and racism in American literature. Its quality was often confirmed by contrasting it with Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' which these critics regarded as little more than an abolitionist pamphlet masquerading as a novel. This comparison was unfair because Stowe's work, favorably viewed by earlier critics, was written during the slavery era while Twain's was composed long after.

It is astonishing how most Americans know nothing of their own history. (Allen Tate to Andrew Lytle, 1929) If there's one truth of human relations above all others, it is [...]

Comparison of literary passages is a critical procedure much favoured by Gellius, and is the main theme in several chapters of his Noctes Atticae: ch. 2.23 is dedicated to a [...]

Writers during the Restoration took a stance on literary criticism that ultimately undermined its authority. Writers claimed the only person who could criticize a work was its author, but this position led to two contradictions. First, a poet was forced to write criticism to prevent criticism from other writers and in public discussion, and poets complained this was not their chosen work. Second, the literary market encouraged competition, which led poet/critics to pointless bickering and prevented impartial judgments.

The appearance of Dorothy Richardson Jones's King of Critics signals renewed interest in the career of George Saintsbury, the Victorian critic whose domination of the literary world extended into the [...]

FOR THE MOST PART, Robert Penn Warren has been left out of recent histories of American criticism. 'Warren wrote only a small amount of criticism independently,' Grant Webster observes (343)--and [...]

In 1761 a pious teenager named Hannah More sat down to write a play. As a teacher at her sisters' school, More had noticed that few plays available in English [...]

Since ancient times, allegory works through its demonic primordial agency, having a unique power to act without impediment, following an absolute, single-minded intention of getting and exploiting power. But the allegory without ideas systematically serves to represent power relations with an increasingly secular pragmatic and materialist set of operations, which deliberately constructs its meanings.

Seventy-five years ago in the pages of Books Abroad, the forerunner of World Literature Today: 'Finally at the bottom of the editorial grab-bag, a warning to contributors. Books Abroad is [...]