Literary Historicity explores how eighteenth-century British writers considered the past as an aspect of experience. Mack moves between close examinations of literature, historiography, and recent philosophical writing on history, offering a new view of eighteenth-century philosophies of history in Britain. Such philosophies, she argues, could be important literarily without being focused, as has been assumed, on questions of fact and fiction. Eighteenth-century writers—like many twentieth-century philosophers—often used literary form not in order to exhibit a work's fictional status but in order to consider what the relation between the past and present might be. Literary Historicity portrays a British Enlightenment that both embraces the possibility of historical experience and interrogates the terms for such experience, one deeply engaged with historical consciousness not as an inevitability of the modern world, but as something to be understood within it.

Fran�ois Hartog explores crucial moments of change in societyÕs Òregimes of historicityÓ or its way of relating to the past, present, and future. Inspired by Arendt, Koselleck, and Ricoeur, Hartog analyzes a broad range of texts, positioning the The Odyssey as a work on the threshold of a historical consciousness and then contrasting it against an investigation of the anthropologist Marshall SahlinsÕs concept of Òheroic history.Ó He tracks changing perspectives on time in Ch‰teaubriandÕs Historical Essay and Travels in America, and sets them alongside other writings from the French Revolution. He revisits the insight of the French Annals School and situates Pierre NoraÕs Realms of Memory within a history of heritage and our contemporary presentism. Our presentist present is by no means uniform or clear-cut, and it is experienced very differently depending on oneÕs position in society. There are flows and acceleration, but also what the sociologist Robert Castel calls the Òstatus of casual workers,Ó whose present is languishing before their very eyes and who have no past except in a complicated way (especially in the case of immigrants, exiles, and migrants) and no real future (since the temporality of plans and projects is denied them). Presentism is therefore experienced as either emancipation or enclosure, in some cases with ever greater speed and mobility and in others by living from hand to mouth in a stagnating present. Hartog also accounts for the fact that the future is perceived as a threat and not a promise. We live in a time of catastrophe, one he feels we have brought upon ourselves.

In this collection, Marshall Brown has gathered essays by twenty leading literary scholars and critics to appraise the current state of literary history. Representing a range of disciplinary specialties and approaches, these essays illustrate and debate the issues that confront scholars working on the literary past and its relation to the present. Concerned with both the theory and practice of literary history, these provocative and sometimes combative pieces examine the writing of literary history, the nature of our interest in tradition, and the ways that literary works act in history. Among the numerous issues discussed are the uses of evidence, anachronism, the dialectic of texts and contexts, particularism and the resistance to reductive understanding, the construction of identities, memory, and the endurance of the past. New historicism, nationalism, and gender studies appear in relation to more traditional issues such as textual editing, taste, and literary pedagogy. Combining new and old perspectives, The Uses of Literary History provides a broad view of the field. Contributors. Charles Altieri, Jonathan Arac, R. Howard Bloch, Richard Dellamora, Paul H. Fry, Geoffrey Hartman, Denis Hollier, Donna Landry, Lawrence Lipking, Jerome J. McGann, Walter Benn Michaels, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Virgil Nemoianu, Annabel Patterson, David Perkins, Marjorie Perloff, Meredith Anne Skura, Doris Sommer, Peter Stallybrass, Susan Stewart

Examines the ways in which religion was constructed as a category and region of experience in nineteenth-century literature and culture.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the study of English literature began to be divided into courses that surveyed discrete "periods." Since that time, scholars' definitions of literature and their rationales for teaching it have changed radically. But the periodized structure of the curriculum has remained oddly unshaken, as if the exercise of contrasting one literary period with another has an importance that transcends the content of any individual course. Why Literary Periods Mattered explains how historical contrast became central to literary study, and why it remained institutionally central in spite of critical controversy about literature itself. Organizing literary history around contrast rather than causal continuity helped literature departments separate themselves from departments of history. But critics' long reliance on a rhetoric of contrasted movements and fateful turns has produced important blind spots in the discipline. In the twenty-first century, Underwood argues, literary study may need digital technology in particular to develop new methods of reasoning about gradual, continuous change.

Offers a variety of approaches to incorporating discussions of book history or print culture into graduate and undergraduate classrooms. This work considers the book as a literary, historical, cultural, and aesthetic object. These essays are of interest to university teachers incorporating textual studies and research methods into their courses.

Book history has emerged in the last twenty years as one of the most important new fields of interdisciplinary study. It has produced new interpretations of major historical events, has made possible new approaches to history, literature, media, and culture, and presents a distinctive historical perspective on current debates about the future of the book. The Broadview Introduction to Book History provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to this field. Written in a lively, accessible style, chapters on materiality, textuality, printing and reading, intermediality, and remediation guide readers through numerous key concepts, illustrated with examples from literary texts and historical documents produced across a wide historical range. An ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in book history, it offers a road map to this dynamic inter-disciplinary field.

How did Nordic culture become associated with the fuzzy brand “cool”, as by default? In Exploring NORDIC COOL in Literary History twenty-one scholars in collaboration question the seemingly natural fit between “Nordic” and “Cool” by investigating its variegated trajectories through literary history, from medieval legends to digital poetry. At the same time, the elasticity and polysemy of the word “cool” become a means to explore Nordic literary history afresh. It opens up a rich diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches within a regional framework and reveals hitherto unseen links between familiar and less familiar tracks and sites. Following diverse paths of “Nordic cool” in respect to – among other things – nature, survival, love, whiteness, style, economics, heroism and colonialism, this book challenges all-too-recognisable narratives, and underlines the sheer knowledge potential of literary historical research.

Essays spanning three decades by one of the most rigorous art thinkers of our time grapple with formal and historical paradigms in twentieth century art. These influential essays by the noted critic and art historian Benjamin Buchloh have had a significant impact on the theory and practice of art history. Written over the course of three decades and now collected in one volume, they trace a history of crucial artistic transitions, iterations, and paradigmatic shifts in the twentieth century, considering both the evolution and emergence of artistic forms and the specific historical moment in which they occurred. Buchloh's subject matter ranges through various moments in the history of twentieth-century American and European art, from the moment of the retour à l'ordre of 1915 to developments in the Soviet Union in the 1920s to the beginnings of Conceptual art in the late 1960s to the appropriation artists of the 1980s. He discusses conflicts resulting from historical repetitions (such as the monochrome and collage/montage aesthetics in the 1910s, 1950s, and 1980s), the emergence of crucial neo-avantgarde typologies, and the resuscitation of obsolete genres (including the portrait and landscape, revived by 1980s photography). Although these essays are less monographic than those in Buchloh's earlier collection, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, two essays in this volume are devoted to Marcel Broodthaers, whose work remains central to Buchloh's theoretical concerns. Engaging with both formal and historical paradigms, Buchloh situates himself productively between the force fields of formal theory and historical narrative, embracing the discrepancies and contradictions between them and within individual artistic trajectories. Contents Formalism and Historicity (1977) • Marcel Broodthaers: Allegories of the Avant-Garde (1980) • Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting (1981) • Allegorical Procedures: Appropriations and Montage in Contemporary Art (1982) • The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers (1983) • From Faktura to Factography (1984) • Readymade, Objet Trouvé, Idée Reçue (1985) • The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avantgarde (1986) • Cold War Constructivism (1986) • Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions (1989) • Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture (1994) • Sculpture: Publicity and the Poverty of Experience (1996)

On Literary Worlds develops new strategies and perspectives for understanding aesthetic worlds.