Abstract
In How Tradition Works, I argued that a central problem for understanding literature and its interaction with culture was the problem of tradition, the ways that some kinds of sameness or stability become the background against which figures of innovation or change are visible.1 The problem of tradition in literature is marginally more tractable than that of the challenge of understanding literature as a whole, not only because tradition is a smaller (albeit still massive) subset of the larger cultural phenomenon, but because of the fundamental similarities of both process and dynamics between biological and cultural traditions. Because both literary traditions and biological lineages work in analogous ways, tools developed for understanding one can be adapted to explain the other.
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Notes
Michael D. C. Drout, How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 261 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2006).
Mechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 382–83.
Henry C. Plotkin, “People Do More Than Imitate,” Scientific American 283 (2000): 72.
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 4–5.
Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 207–27.
David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 227–36.
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© 2013 Michael D. C. Drout
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Drout, M.D.C. (2013). Introduction. In: Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Saxon Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324603_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324603_1
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