Reading Between the LinesUniversity of Wisconsin Press, 1993 - 339 sivua For those exhausted by the highly charged debates and polarized climate of literary studies today, Annabel Patterson's Reading Between the Lines offers a strategic compromise: a moderate stance between the radical opponents and the zealous protectors of the traditional Western canon. She reconsiders the value of reading the white, male, canonical writers of antiquity and of early modern England, finding in them a set of values different from those supposed by both sides in the Great Books quarrel. Rather than being the unthinking or deliberate promoters of political or cultural uniformity, these writers subjected such conventional notions to critical scrutiny and even promoted alternatives. The key to this revisionary argument is "reading between the lines," a strategy usually associated with the eccentric conservativism of Leo Strauss, but which, Patterson shows, is not only implicit in all acts of interpretation, but played a particularly important role in an age when writing between the lines was often essential for the writer's survival. Patterson argues that, if we learn how to read those old and seemingly alien texts, which themselves responded to rapid and unsettling change in the arenas of religion, politics, and education, they have much that is liberating to tell us about our own expanding culture, including the importance of republican constitutionalism, freedom of speech, and civic and religious toleration. This salutary redefinition of "humanism" arises from Patterson's essays on Plato, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton; but the book also deals with the "gendered" topics of rape and divorce and with "popular culture" in the sixteenth century and today. These interests are not on opposite sides of some theoretical boundary, but (as Patterson demonstrates from contemporary novels by Joseph Heller and Nancy Price) interdependent. |
Sisältö
Just Reading or Reading Platos Laws | 11 |
A Petitioning Society | 59 |
Representations of Justice | 80 |
Tekijänoikeudet | |
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Reading Between the Lines Annabel M. Patterson,Professor Annabel Patterson Rajoitettu esikatselu - 1993 |
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allegory ancient appears argue argument Artegall Brutus Calender canon censorship century Chronicles church cited civil claim common constitutional context Coriolanus criticism debate Doctrine Donne's Dryden early modern edition Edmund Spenser Elizabethan England English essay Essex fact Faerie Queene Fleming Giant hath Holinshed's ical imagine Ireland Irenius Irish italics added Jacobean James John Donne John Stow Justice king Lacan Leo Strauss liberty lines literary literature London Longinus Lord Lucius Junius Brutus Lucrece Martin Marprelate ment metaphor Milton monarch narrative Old Cause Oxford pamphlets Paradise Lost Parliament 1610 petition Petition of Right Plato poem poet Poetical political popular culture prerogative Prose published Rape Rape of Lucrece readers reading rebellion reform reign religion republican rhetorical royal satire Shakespeare Shepheardes Calender social society Spenser statement story Strauss sublime theory Thomas thought Throkmorton tion tradition Tudor uncouth vols words writing wrote