Jonathan Brody Kramnick's Books

Making the English Canon

Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770

By: Jonathan Brody Kramnick

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Making the English Canon

Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770

By: Jonathan Brody Kramnick

Jonathan Brody Kramnick's book examines the formation of the English canon over the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century. Kramnick details how the idea of literary tradition emerged out of a prolonged engagement with the institutions of cultural modernity, from the public sphere and national identity to capitalism and the print market. Looking at a wide variety of eighteenth-century critical writing, he analyses the tensions that inhabited the categories of national literature and public culture at the moment of their emergence.

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297

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Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521641276

ISBN 13

9780521641272

Making the English Canon

Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770

By: Jonathan Brody Kramnick

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Making the English Canon

Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770

By: Jonathan Brody Kramnick

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297

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Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521641276

ISBN 13

9780521641272

Tempest in the Caribbean

By: Jonathan Goldberg

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Tempest in the Caribbean

By: Jonathan Goldberg

Shakespeare's The Tempest has long been claimed by colonials and postcolonial thinkers alike as the dramatic work that most enables them to confront their entangled history, recognized as early modernity's most extensive engagement with the vexing issues of colonialism--race, dispossession, language, European displacement and occupation, disregard for native culture. Tempest in the Caribbean reads some of the "classic" anticolonial texts--by Aime Cesaire, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, George Lamming, and Frantz Fanon, for instance--through the lens of feminist and queer analysis exemplified by the theoretical essays of Sylvia Wynter and the work of Michelle Cliff. Extending the Tempest plot, Goldberg considers recent works by Caribbean authors and social theorists, among them Patricia Powell, Jamaica Kincaid, and Hilton Als. These rewritings, he suggests, and the lived conditions to which they testify, present alternatives to the masculinist and heterosexual bias of the legacy that has been derived from The Tempest. By placing gender and sexuality at the center of the debate about the uses of Shakespeare for anticolonial purposes, Goldberg's work points to new possibilities that might be articulated through the nexus of race and sexuality. Place sexuality at the center of Caribbean responses to Shakespeare's play.

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276

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816642605

ISBN 13

9780816642601

Shakespeare's Hand

By: Jonathan Goldberg

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Shakespeare's Hand

By: Jonathan Goldberg

Over the past fifteen years, Jonathan Goldberg's wide-ranging essays have been among the most sophisticated, influential, and controversial writing about Shakespeare. He challenges the critical orthodoxy, provoking scholars to reassess both their own assumptions and those underpinning the field of Shakespeare studies. Collected in one volume for the first time, these essays offer a sustained, energetic, and rigorous examination of issues of gender and sexuality that pervade Shakespeare's plays, as well as a road map of the shifts during the past two decades in our understanding of English literature's most canonical figure. Central to these essays are concerns about textuality as considered from a number of vantage points, including deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, and historicist. Goldberg studies most of Shakespeare's plays, giving particular emphasis to Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and to Romeo and Juliet; he focuses throughout on the relationship between the text as material object and the reality created or reflected by that text. Among the issues he considers are the textual instability of Shakespeare's plays and the historical instabilities of gender and sexuality depicted in those plays, the construction of gender and the dehumanization implicit in treating characters as a textual production, the function of letters and other documents within the Shakespearean texts, and the correlation of sexual politics and textual desire. Tracing a path from characters in the scriptive sense to their embodiment in characters marked by gender and sexuality, Shakespeare's Hand provides a brilliant set of inquiries into the production, critical reception, and conditions of Shakespearean texts.

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398

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816641498

ISBN 13

9780816641499

The Seeds of Things

Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations

By: Jonathan Goldberg

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The Seeds of Things

Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations

By: Jonathan Goldberg

The title of this book translates one of the many ways in which Lucretius names the basic matter from which the world is made in De rerum natura. In Lucretius, and in the strain of thought followed in this study, matter is always in motion, always differing from itself and yet always also made of the same stuff. From the pious Lucy Hutchinson’s all but complete translation of the Roman epic poem to Margaret Cavendish’s repudiation of atomism (but not of its fundamental problematic of sameness and difference), a central concern of this book is how a thoroughgoing materialism can be read alongside other strains in the thought of the early modern period, particularly Christianity. A chapter moves from Milton’s monism to his angels and their insistent corporeality. Milton’s angels have sex, and, throughout, this study emphasizes the consequences for thinking about sexuality offered by Lucretian materialism. Sameness of matter is not simply a question of same-sex sex, and the relations of atoms in Cavendish and Hutchinson are replicated in the terms in which they imagine marriages of partners who are also their doubles. Likewise, Spenser’s knights in the 1590 Faerie Queene pursue the virtues of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity in quests that take the reader on a path of askesis of the kind that Lucretius recommends and that Foucault studied in the final volumes of his history of sexuality. Although English literature is the book’s main concern, it first contemplates relations between Lucretian matter and Pauline flesh by way of Tintoretto’s painting The Conversion of St. Paul. Theoretical issues raised in the work of Agamben and Badiou, among others, lead to a chapter that takes up the role that Lucretius has played in theory, from Bergson and Marx to Foucault and Deleuze. This study should be of concern to students of religion, philosophy, gender, and sexuality, especially as they impinge on questions of representation.

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256

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823230686

ISBN 13

9780823230686

Willa Cather and Others

By: Jonathan Goldberg

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Willa Cather and Others

By: Jonathan Goldberg

After many years as one of the premier scholars of English Renaissance literature, Jonathan Goldberg turns his attention to the work of American novelist Willa Cather. With a focus on Cather’s artistic principle of “the thing not named,” Willa Cather and Others illuminates the contradictions and complexities inherent in notions of identity and shows how her fiction transforms the very categories—regarding gender, sexuality, race, and class—around which most recent Cather scholarship has focused. The “others” referred to in the title are women, for the most part Cather’s contemporaries, whose artistic projects allow for points of comparison with Cather. They include the Wagnerian diva Olive Fremstad, renowned for her category-defying voice; Blair Niles, an ethnographer and novelist of jazz-age Harlem and the prisons of New Guinea; Laura Gilpin, photographer of the American Southwest; and Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy places World War I writers—and questions of sexuality and gender—at its center. In the process of studying these women and their work, Goldberg forms innovative new insights into a wide range of Cather’s celebrated works, from O Pioneers! and My Ántonia to her later books The Song of the Lark, One of Ours, The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl. By applying his unique talent to the study of Cather’s literary genius, Jonathan Goldberg makes a significant and new contribution to the study of American literature and queer studies.

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248

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822380323

ISBN 13

9780822380320

The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism

By: Jonathan Sachs

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The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism

By: Jonathan Sachs

Anxieties about decline were a prominent feature of British public discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These anxieties were borne out repeatedly in books and periodicals, pamphlets and poems. Tracing the reciprocal development of Romantic-era Britain's rapidly expanding literary and market cultures through the lens of decline, Jonathan Sachs offers a fresh way of understanding British Romanticism. The book focuses on three aspects of literary experience - questions of value, the fascination with ruins, and the representation of slow time - to explore how shifting conceptions of progress and change inform a post-enlightenment sense of cultural decline. Combining close readings of Romantic literary texts with an examination of works from political economy, historical writing, classical studies, and media history the book reveals for the first time how anxieties about decline impacted literary form and shaped Romantic debates about poetry and the meaning of literature.

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247

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1108349870

ISBN 13

9781108349871

Desiring Women Writing

English Renaissance Examples

By: Jonathan Goldberg

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Desiring Women Writing

English Renaissance Examples

By: Jonathan Goldberg

In a set of readings ranging from early-sixteenth- through late-seventeenth-century texts, this book aims to resituate womens writing in the English Renaissance by studying the possibilities available to these writers by virtue of their positions in their culture and by their articulation of a variety of desires (including the desire to write) not bound by the usual prescriptions that limited women. The book is in three parts. The first part begins by pursuing linkages between feminine virtue and the canonical status of texts written by women of the period. It then confronts some received opinions and opens up new possibilities of evaluation through readings of Aemelia Lanyers Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and poems, plays, and fiction by Aphra Behn. The second part studies translation as an allowed (and therefore potentially devalued) sphere for womens writing, and offers accounts of Margaret Ropers translation of Erasmus and Mary Sidneys of Petrarch to show ways in which such work makes a central claim in Renaissance culture. In the third part, the author explores the thematics and practices of writing as exemplified in the womens hands in an early Tudor manuscript and through the character of Graphina in Elizabeth Carys Mariam. Throughout, possibilities for these writers are seen to arise from the conjunction of their gender with their status as aristocrats or from their proximity to centers of power, even if this involves the debasement of prostitution for Lanyer or the perils of the marketplace for Behn. The author argues that moves outside the restriction of domesticity opened up opportunities for affirming female sexuality and for a range of desires not confined to marriage and procreationdesires that move across race in Oroonoko; that imagine female same-gender relations, often in proximity to male desires directed at other men; that implicate incestuous desires, even inflecting them anally, as in Ropers Devout Treatise.

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276

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804729832

ISBN 13

9780804729833

Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson

By: Jonathan Kramnick

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Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson

By: Jonathan Kramnick

How do minds cause events in the world? How does wanting to write a letter cause a person's hands to move across the page, or believing something to be true cause a person to make a promise? In Actions and Objects, Jonathan Kramnick examines the literature and philosophy of action during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when philosophers and novelists, poets and scientists were all concerned with the place of the mind in the world. These writers asked whether belief, desire, and emotion were part of nature—and thus subject to laws of cause and effect—or in a special place outside the natural order. Kramnick puts particular emphasis on those who tried to make actions compatible with external determination and to blur the boundary between mind and matter. He follows a long tradition of examining the close relation between literary and philosophical writing during the period, but fundamentally revises the terrain. Rather than emphasizing psychological depth and interiority or asking how literary works were understood as true or fictional, he situates literature alongside philosophy as jointly interested in discovering how minds work.

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354

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804775125

ISBN 13

9780804775120

Paper Minds

Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness

By: Jonathan Kramnick

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Paper Minds

Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness

By: Jonathan Kramnick

How do poems and novels create a sense of mind? What does literary criticism say in conversation with other disciplines that addresses problems of consciousness? In Paper Minds, Jonathan Kramnick takes up these vital questions, exploring the relations between mind and environment, the literary forms that uncover such associations, and the various fields of study that work to illuminate them. Opening with a discussion of how literary scholarship’s particular methods can both complement and remain in tension with corresponding methods particular to the sciences, Paper Minds then turns to a series of sharply defined case studies. Ranging from eighteenth-century poetry and haptic theories of vision, to fiction and contemporary problems of consciousness, to landscapes in which all matter is sentient, to cognitive science and the rise of the novel, Kramnick’s essays are united by a central thematic authority. This unified approach of these essays shows us what distinctive knowledge that literary texts and literary criticism can contribute to discussions of perceptual consciousness, created and natural environments, and skilled engagements with the world.

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209

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022657315X

ISBN 13

9780226573151

Criticism and Truth

On Method in Literary Studies

By: Jonathan Kramnick

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Criticism and Truth

On Method in Literary Studies

By: Jonathan Kramnick

A defense and celebration of the discipline of literary studies and its most distinctive practice—close reading. Does literary criticism offer truths about the world? In Criticism and Truth, Jonathan Kramnick offers a new and surprising account of criticism’s power by zeroing in on its singular method: close reading. Long recognized as the distinctive technique of literary studies, close reading is the critic’s way of pursuing arguments and advancing knowledge, as well as the primary skill taught in the English major. But it is also more than that—a creative, immersive, and transformative writing practice that fosters a unique kind of engagement with the world. Drawing on the rich and varied landscape of contemporary criticism, Kramnick changes how we think about the basic tools of literary analysis, including the art of in-text quotation, summary, and other reading methods, helping us to see them as an invaluable form of humanistic expertise. Criticism and Truth is a call to arms, making a powerful case for the necessity of both literature and criticism within a multidisciplinary university. As the humanities fight for survival in contemporary higher education, the study of literature doesn’t need more plans for reform. Rather, it needs a defense of the work already being done and an account of why it should flourish. This is what Criticism and Truth offers, in vivid and portable form.

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Page Count

138

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226830543

ISBN 13

9780226830544

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain

By: Jonathan Farina

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Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain

By: Jonathan Farina

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an original and innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if' and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, tacit aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Writers recognized these recurrent 'everyday words' as signatures of 'character'. Attending to them reveals how many of the fundamental forms of characterizing fictional characters also turn out to be forms of characterizing objects, natural phenomena and inanimate, abstract things, such as physical laws, the economy and legal practice. Ultimately, this book revises what 'character' meant to nineteenth-century Britons by respecting the overlapping, transdisciplinary connotations of the category.

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Page Count

317

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1316857956

ISBN 13

9781316857953

Book's by Jonathan Brody Kramnick

Making the English Canon

Making the English Canon

Making the English Canon

Making the English Canon

Tempest in the Caribbean

Tempest in the Caribbean

Shakespeare's Hand

Shakespeare's Hand

The Seeds of Things

The Seeds of Things

Willa Cather and Others

Willa Cather and Others

The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism

The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism

Desiring Women Writing

Desiring Women Writing

Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson

Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson

Paper Minds

Paper Minds

Criticism and Truth

Criticism and Truth

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain

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