Literary Revisionism places Bloom, his ally Geoffrey Hartman, and their contemporary literary situation in a borad historical and theoretical context by exploring the provenance of the revisionist stance in the origins of the New Testament canon, in the works of the Sensibility Poets and the great Romantics, and in the emergence of our own secular modernity. The results is an uncanny sense of the wholeness of the tradition, ironically coupled with an awareness that we are cut off from the past by the very insistence with which we employ criticism to maintain the fiction of an isolate modernity. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

The question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Anthony J. Cascardi offers an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject of self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth.

Presents a coherent and accessible historical account of the major phases of British and American Twentieth-century criticism, from 'decadent' aestheticism to feminist, decontsructonist and post-colonial theories. Special attention is given to new perspectives on Shakesperean criticism, theories of the novel and models of the literary canon. The book will help to define and account for the major developments in literary criticism during this century exploring the full diversity of critical work from major critics such as T S Eliot and F R Leavis to minor but fascinating figures and critical schools. Unlike most guides to modern literary theory, its focus is firmly on developments within the English speaking world.

In this venturesome collection, scholars representing a variety of approaches contribute fifteen essays that shed new light not only on the uses of psychoanalysis for reading Cervantes, but also on the relationship between Freud's reading of Cervantes in the summer of 1883 and the very foundation of psychoanalytic paradigms.

Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century. Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.