Structure and Society in Literary History

Studies in the History and Theory of Historical Criticism
Erscheinungsjahr 1984
ISBN: 978-0-8018-3122-5
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 344 Seiten, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 486 g

In Structure and Society in Literary History Robert Weimann, one of Germany's leading literary theoreticians, raises important questions about the social function of literature and sketches the outlines of a new historical criticism.

Weinmann's Marxist analysis relates the history of writing and reading to the history of social and economic activities; literature and art are imaginative appropriations of the world, producers as well as products of culture. Aesthetic structures— texts— and social function are necessarily interrelated for Weimann as they are not for the followers of the New Criticism or the practitioners of structuralism.

Firmly grounded in Anglo-American and Western European criticism, Weimann presents a cogent critique of T. S. Eliot's concept of tradition, analyzes the development of American literary history, and reconsiders the interpretation of Shakespeare's imagery. A new concluding chapter, written especially for the Johns Hopkins edition, presents a coherent and systematically developed survey of those poststructuralist positions most relevant to the placement of "Structure and Society in Literary History" within the critical context of the mid 1980s.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weimann, Robert

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Semiotik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface to the Original Edition
Introduction: Toward a Theory of Literary History
Chapter 1. Past Significance and Present Meaning in Literary History
Chapter 2. The Concept of Tradition Reconsidered
Chapter 3. Past origins and Present Functions in American Literary History
Chapter 4. Structuralism and Literary History
Chapter 5. Metaphor and Historical Criticism: Shakespeare's Imagery Revisited
Chapter 6. Structure and History in Narrative Perspective: The Problem of Point of View Reconsidered
Chapter 7. Text and History: Epilogue, 1984
Index of Names

Über Autor(innen)

Weimann, Robert
Robert Weimann is professor of literature at the Academy of Arts of the German Democratic Republic in Berlin. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater and Structure and Society in Literary History.

Robert Weimann is professor of literature at the Academy of Arts of the German Democratic Republic in Berlin. The English translation of his Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater is also published by Johns Hopkins.