What is a book, really? In tracing the passage of a single work from the alleys of Lahore to online retail and the author’s bookshelf, this chapter argues against idealism. In transmission, ideational content sediments within specific material contexts. In this way, ideas become objects. Consequently, the same idea can take shape by drastically different forms, affecting the practice of interpretation. The affordances of the object – what can be done with it, how, and where – affect our practices of interpretation.

The chapter looks at a substantial number of texts outside the boundaries usually placed in Byzantine Studies through conventional taxonomic categories such as genre or antithetic pairs like learned versus vernacular language. Four larger themes are used to explore this varied textual production and offer a proposal for understanding its basic socio-cultural and aesthetic functions for its immediate recipients and later readers. The four themes discussed are education and literature, patronage and literary production, rhetoric and genre in prose and poetry, narrative art from the enormous to the small. Despite the strong presence of ‘Hellenic’ subjects, Komnenian literature owes more to its own dynamism (deriving from a reformed teacherly practice in the schools) than to the imitation of ancient models. At the same time, the role of the patrons in promoting literary production shapes much of both learned and vernacular literary experimentation, while religious literature generously defined is strongly involved in an ongoing experimentation with form and content. Finally, the chapter asks whether any form of change can be traced within the literary production of the Komnenian era.

The avant-garde writers of the Hellenistic period demonstrate an acute sense of literary tradition. In the previous chapter we have already seen some of the ways in which Theocritus develops his distinctive fragmented and polyphonous voice in relation to the past. In the programmatic narrative of Idyll 7, the search for an exemplary voice recedes through a series of lost poets’ songs towards an always already distanced model of excellence. So in Idyll 11, the much-discussed Hellenistic technique of reversing and restructuring the phraseology of earlier writing finds a parallel in the appropriation and manipulation of a Homeric figure: the Cyclops is taken back to a green and loving youth, back to a time before Homer’s writing of him as a paradigm of monstrous brutality. Indeed, in Hellenistic poetry we see again and again a search for an original and originating moment in the past ’before Homer wrote’.

This chapter takes stock of the various definitions and valuations the essay has accrued over the course of the history of American literary theory and criticism. Starting with the historical-materialist criticism of the Great Depression era and moving on to the New Criticism of the 1940s and ’50s, then delving into the myriad structuralisms and poststructuralisms of the Cold War and postcommunist eras, before concluding with contemporary critical trends, it tracks the discipline’s trajectory in the American context, all the while zeroing in on the essay’s shifting position therein. The chapter throws into relief the fundamental dialectic between hermetic formalism and committed social criticism that has shaped literary studies in the United States since its rise early in the twentieth century and teases out the way this perennial vacillation has rendered more or less appealing, and more or less useful, the essay as a form and object of analysis.

After addressing Germaine de Stäel’s ‘invention’ of European Romanticism in On Literature and On Germany, the introductory chapter explains the editorial choices behind the collection, including its expansive time frame, European focus, and comparative method. It then surveys Lord Byron’s continental reception to demonstrate the utility of a pan-European approach. Although extremely familiar, the case of Byron and of Byronism is of central importance to the history of European Romanticism because of the European role that it gave to British literature, but also because it brings to the fore some common problems raised when using Romanticism as a critical category. The next section looks at how literary historians have addressed these problems, then discusses some of the period’s most salient features. The final part provides a chapter by chapter synopsis in order to help readers navigate the volume.

This Introduction surveys the long, inextricable relationship between American politics and the American novel in the twentieth century. After defining twentieth-century “politics” broadly as the theoretical intersection between power, freedom, and justice within the framework of American liberalism, it explains why the American novel is a unique aperture through which to view political conflict and change, arguing that the novel form illuminates how official power relations overlap with personal power relations. While surveying previous scholarship on American politics and the novel, it explains why the volume does not restrict itself to the narrow subgenre of “political fiction.” The Introduction then addresses the rationale for each major section: “Ideologies and Movements,” “The Politics of Genre and Form,” and “Case Studies.” It concludes by considering how a robust engagement with the politics of the twentieth-century American novel can help us make sense of our political present.

Chapter 6 shows how Cicero establishes a normative framework for the writing of literary history. Across the dialogue and through the various speakers he offers a sustained critique of literary historiography. Several fundamental tensions and conflicts emerge: absolute versus relative criteria in assessing literature and building canons; presentism and antiquarianism; formalism and historicism; and the recognition that all literary histories are subject to their crafters’ emphases and agendas.

This essay aims to show how one remarkable practitioner of vernacular scholastic literary theory, Reginald Pecock (d. c. 1361), Bishop of Chichester, deployed it to service diverse orders of worth in his works by at once upending and apparently re-accepting authorised ecclesiastical discourses, including the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed and orthodox definitions of God as creator or as infinite. Focusing especially on the theoretical category of ordinatio, it investigates how Pecock both upsets and re-accommodates such discourses in places where the articulation and control of spiritual authority in this world and the tapping of divine authority from the next were at stake. In both his rejection of standard doctrinal discourses and his (re)accommodation of them in his own new system, Reginald deploys a full repertoire of scholastic terms, practices and attitudes. Pecock’s novel and astoundingly ambitious reconfiguration of Christian knowledge and doctrine was a gargantuan programme, endeavouring to efface and outdo traditional discourses of the Church whilst at the same time taking pains palpably, even anxiously, to be equivalent or answerable to that which it would displace. Pecock, in attempting re-cognition of the familiar, ended up recognising it dissonantly within his own unfamiliar discourse.

What was literary theory in the Middle Ages? What was literary criticism? How did medieval scholars record their interpretations of texts? What forms did those interpretations take? And how do the forms of medieval literary criticism contribute to the shape of medieval literary theory? By teasing out answers to these questions from a series of examples of medieval (chiefly twelfth-century) commentary on classical literature, this chapter offers an introduction to the study of literary texts, its norms, assumptions, sources and priorities in the Latin Middle Ages. It concludes with an overview of the volume as a whole, focusing on how the various chapters relate to three overarching concepts: interpretation, invention and imagination.

Can there be something like a “Wittgensteinian” literary criticism? If so, what could it possibly be, given that Wittgenstein sought to make us give up the craving for generality? Through an analysis of “The Avoidance of Love,” Stanley Cavell’s epochal 1969 essay on King Lear, Toril Moi shows that a reader inspired by Wittgenstein does not have to set out to apply a given theory, or to answer certain “Wittgensteinian” questions. Rather it entails a wish to acknowledge the concerns of the text, and respond to them. For Wittgensteinian critics, the text is not an object to be “approached” but action and expression. The critic sets out to answer questions that matter to her, and stakes herself in her own perceptions and judgments in the act of reading. “The problem of the critic, as of the artist,” Cavell writes, “is not to discount his subjectivity, but to include it; not to overcome it in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways.” To do this requires training. This chapter sets out the implications of all these claims, argues against formalist views of literature and reading, and insists on the fundamental role of human judgment, and acknowledgment in the work of criticism.

We know from the ancient epics that war has been entangled with literature since the earliest times. But war has also had a profound influence on the broader field of literary studies. Indeed, numerous twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary theories have been shaped by warfare, while contemporary critical engagements have given rise to several recurring and emerging concepts that together structure the field of literary war studies. The introductory chapter seeks to inscribe war and literature within the larger frame of the history of knowledge. It traces the emergence of the theory and history of knowledge as a distinct discipline from its French origins in Foucault’s archaeology to the contemporary German Wissensgeschichte and it explores the place of war literature within this tradition. The chapter argues that literature serves as an archive of military knowledges and a distinct form of knowledge in its own right. And it examines war as a disruptive and generative force that at once disturbs established concepts and theories and produces new modes of knowing, thinking, and writing.

This chapter engages various philosophical attempts to define and delimit the essay, and to use the form to do a kind of philosophy that became increasingly urgent in the shadow of twentieth-century atrocities. The author considers theories of the essay by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Walter Pater, and others.

The critical essay emerged in the eighteenth century in writing that described natural and artistic objects, and in the process inspired readers to think about the nature of their experience. This chapter traces the critical essay’s evolution from Joseph Addison’s Pleasures of the Imagination through the work of nineteenth-century essayists like Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt, culminating in the academic literary criticism of New Critics such as I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks and more recent practitioners such as D. A. Miller and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.