He argues that the people of Renaissance England believed that the decline of telos resulted in a reified, fetishistic mode of consciousness which manifests itself in such phenomena as religious idolatry, commodity fetishism, and carnal sensuality, and suggests that the resulting early modern critique of the market economy has much to offer postmodern society. With insightful new readings of Western culture from Tristan and Yseut to Seinfeld, Anne Callahan demonstrates that the illusion of heterosexuality is created by a male artist's assumption of a feminine voice to express desire. Although modern English and Irish poetry arises from the different cultures, the poets themselves have shared, throughout this century, the same editors and publishers, competed for the same prizes and been judged, ostensibly, by the same standards. This book examines contexts for these exchanges over four decades, tracing the lineage of Yeats and Hardy from their meeting in 1912 through WWI, the '30s, the '60s, and the '90s, to see what influences and ideas are exchanged and how poetic value accrues. This book examines a key topic in modern literary studies.
Contextual factors shape our perception of how literary texts are made, and how they are read.
Their understanding is fundamental to the study of English. This book contains accessible essays by leading scholars on the contextual understanding of works of literature from Chaucer to the present day.