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5 The uses of literature: Thompson as writer, reader and critic Luke Spencer Introduction My purpose here is to examine in some detail Thompson’s careerlong commitment to literature and to the craft of writing. There already exist studies of his work which include – even foreground – recognition of Thompson’s poetry, fiction, memoirs and critical essays as expressions of his evolving thought. Apart from giving due consideration to the full range of his output and to the crucial role within it of literary references and allusions, I also want to address a
The search for an improving juvenile literature demonstrates perhaps better than any other field the manner in which the core ideology of imperialism solved the many problems which had been identified during the nineteenth century. Anxieties about the extension of literacy and the provision of a distinctively juvenile literature, both in books and in periodicals, were resolved by the
7 Music, language and literature Language and music The divergent interpretations of the relationship between music and language in modernity are inseparable from the main divergences between philosophical conceptions of language. The attempt to explain language in representational terms in the empiricist tradition that eventually leads to analytical philosophy, and the understanding of language as a form of social action and as constitutive of the world we inhabit in the hermeneutic tradition give rise to very different conceptions of music. One paradigmatic
transcribe virtually unaltered for the screen a work whose transcendence he acknowledges a priori) (Bazin 1975 : 82/ 1967 : 54; tr. mod.). Free of the cumbersome ‘equivalents’ and ‘useless liberties’ that characterised literature-to-film adaptations, Bresson’s film strikes Bazin as so unswervingly faithful that it becomes an independent creation which bears little comparison to its source. The same could be said of Rohmer
9 The pilgrimage road in late medieval English literature Shayne Aaron Legassie Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a pilgrimage road. Economic historians concede that the practice of pilgrimage exerted tangible effects on the development of cathedrals, monasteries and towns, but they quickly add that there is no conclusive evidence that pilgrimage was the primary impetus behind the construction or maintenance of any medieval English roads.1 As is the case with most of the important pilgrimage destinations of medieval Christian Europe, English shrines
The construction of ethnic identity can draw on many sources, including traditions, social practices, and written texts. Different groups, of course, utilise these sources differently, and in the case of Norwegian-American ethnicity, Old Norse texts have been particularly influential, whether directed towards scientific, stylistic, populistic, or even political ends. One historical indication of this importance is the fact that the publication of Old Norse literature has sometimes accompanied grand occasions of symbolic ethnic display, perhaps the grandest of
9 Robert Eaglestone Critical knowledge, scientific knowledge and the truth of literature Introduction: criticism has the character of knowledge, but it is not a kind of scientific knowledge At the now-famous conference at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 that introduced both structuralism and what one could call, roughly, ‘post-structuralism’ to the USA, the critic Georges Poulet meditated about the nature of reading: a book is not shut in by its contours, is not walled up as in a fortress. It asks nothing better than to exist outside itself, or to let you
ch a pt e r 8 Literature: Representing Male Same-Sex Erotic Relationships and Desires Literature: Male Edmund Spenser (?1552–99), poet Educated at Cambridge, where he met his dear friend and mentor Gabriel Harvey, Spenser later became the Earl of Leicester’s secretary, and gained the support and patronage of Sir Walter Ralegh and Sir Philip Sidney. Spenser’s works include the immediately popular Shepheardes Calender (1579); the sonnet sequence Amoretti and marriage poem Epithalamion (both 1595); the mythopoetic allegory of Tudor court life Colin Clouts Come