literary and intellectual history

  • Abigail Williams
Chapter
Part of the Palgrave Advances book series (PAD)

Abstract

The relationship between intellectual history and literary history can be understood as reciprocal: as this chapter will demonstrate, practitioners of the history of ideas use literary texts alongside religious, scientific and philosophical writings to map the conceptual currents within an historical period, while literary critics draw on intellectual history when reconstructing the background of literary texts. However, in seeking to position texts within a history of ideas, literary critics must also confront theoretical and methodological questions about the relationship between text and context that lie at the heart of intellectual and literary history.1

Keywords

Literary Critic Literary Text Intellectual History Conflicting Version Early Modern Period 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 1.
    Timothy Bahti, ‘Literary Criticism and the History of Ideas’ in Christa Knellwolf and Christopher Norris, eds, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 9, Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical, and Psychological Perspectives (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 31–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. Richard Macksey, ‘History of Ideas’ in Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth and Imre Suzman, eds, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2nd edn, Baltimore, Md, and London, 2005), pp. 499–504.Google Scholar
  3. 2.
    Donald R. Kelley, ‘What is Happening to the History of Ideas?’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 51 (1990), 1–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  4. 3.
    Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche Welt’ (1901), in Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften III (Leipzig, 1927), pp. 209–68.Google Scholar
  5. Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (2 Vols, Frankfurt am Main, 1936).Google Scholar
  6. Heinz Schlaffer and Hannelore Schlaffer, Studien zum ästhetischen Historismus (1975).Google Scholar
  7. 4.
    Daniel J. Wilson, Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Quest for Intelligibility (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980), p. 191.Google Scholar
  8. 5.
    Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘The Historiography of Ideas’, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948).Google Scholar
  9. 6.
    Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 5.Google Scholar
  10. 8.
    J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975).Google Scholar
  11. George D. Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).Google Scholar
  12. Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington, Ind., 1969).Google Scholar
  13. Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1972).Google Scholar
  14. 14.
    See Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: studies in the thought of the age in relation to poetry and religion (London, 1934).Google Scholar
  15. 15.
    Louis Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor, 1934).Google Scholar
  16. Phillip Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (Chicago, Ill., and London, 1968).Google Scholar
  17. 16.
    David J. Latt and Samuel Holt Monk, John Dryden: a survey and bibliography of critical studies, 1895–1974 (Minneapolis, Minn., 1976), pp. 3–7.Google Scholar
  18. 19.
    Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2001), pp. 168–72.Google Scholar
  19. 24.
    F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry fames, Joseph Conrad (London, 1948), p. 1.Google Scholar
  20. 25.
    Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley, Calif., 1957).Google Scholar
  21. Eleanor Collins, ‘Reading Gender, Choice and Austen Narrative’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2005), chapter 2.Google Scholar
  22. 26.
    See especially Ian Watt, ‘Introduction’ in Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Views (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1986), pp. 2–3.Google Scholar
  23. 27.
    Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford, 1975), p. 3.Google Scholar
  24. 31.
    Seminal works of this period include: Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination: a literary and psychological investigation of women’s writing (London, 1976).Google Scholar
  25. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gilbar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1979).Google Scholar
  26. 32.
    Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (Brighton, 1983).Google Scholar
  27. 33.
    Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: women, politics, and the novel (Chicago and London, 1988).Google Scholar
  28. 37.
    E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943).Google Scholar
  29. 38.
    Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, Ill., and London, 2000), pp. 1–19.Google Scholar
  30. 39.
    Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London, 1980), p. 4.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Abigail Williams 2006

Authors and Affiliations

  • Abigail Williams

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations