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Sir Walter Raleigh's literary legacy consists of a highly fragmented oeuvre including many unprinted or pirated poems and works of disputed authorship. No collection of Raleigh's poetry produced under his own direction or that of a contemporary, either in print or in manuscript, exists. This book is a collection of essays by scholars from Great Britain, the United States, Canada and Taiwan that covers a wide range of topics about Raleigh's diversified career and achievements. Some essays shed light on less familiar facets such as Raleigh as a father and as he is represented in paintings, statues, and in movies. Others re-examine him as poet, historian, as a controversial figure in Ireland during Elizabeth's reign, and looks at his complex relationship with and patronage of Edmund Spenser. The theme of Raleigh's poem is a mutability that is political: i.e., the precariousness of the ageing courtier's estate, as revealed by his fall from eminence and the loss of his privileged position in court. The Cynthia holograph engages in complex ways with idealistic pastoral, a genre predicated upon the pursuit of otium (a longing for the ideal and an escape from the actual). The Nymph's reply offers a reminder of the power of time and death to ensure the failure of that attempt. There were patrilineal imperatives that might have shaped Raleigh's views of sovereignty. Raleigh's story is an actor's story, one crafted by its own maker for the world-as-stage.
potent than any of their predecessors. That delicately formed head was to be the fountain of thoughts that should revolutionize the whole world of letters’ (reprinted in Delafield, 1935: 252). While Brontë’s literary legacy ostensibly provided the rationale for the ‘Charlotte’ cult, her texts did not actually seem to be sufficient for many of her devotees. As Deutsch has noted, the ‘power of the printed text’ is often of limited significance for those committed to ‘author love’, for literary cults usually depend ‘upon the sublimation of an author’s distinctive artifice
works of medieval men and women who subsequently fashioned for it an improbable literary legacy. From Bede’s In Genesin to Werferth’s Dialogues and the translated works of Alfred’s circle, to the documents recording the dissensions and proclaiming the triumphs of Benedictine Reform, to the sermons of Ælfric, and the biblical poetry of the Junius Manuscript, we see how the fall of the angels muscularly crisscrossed literary, theological, and political spheres, revealing the porous boundaries between them. Along the way, I have argued that Anglo-Saxon authors used
of things’. McGahern told one interviewer that literature was ultimately a luxury, but religion was not. Yet he worked with monastic zeal to create luxury goods. More than a decade after his death, his reputation – always high – is still growing, to a point where some of his stories and novels are already regarded as modern classics. It’s hard to know what he would make of this, or of the notion of literary legacy. He used to joke that Patrick Kavanagh’s reputation recovered greatly after his death because he was no longer around to mess it up. (This is the
direct action.59 Literary legacy The contribution of Young Ireland was not confined to politics; their intellectual and literary legacy, both within Ireland and amongst the Irish diaspora, was considerable. Although it only survived for six years in its original form, the Nation revolutionized the way in which Irish literature, history and culture were written and viewed. According to Terry Eagleton, ‘Few groups of intellectuals have had such a spectacular impact on politics as Young Ireland . . . and not many pieces of newsprint have created such historical turmoil as
Introduction EP Thompson was a man of many enthusiasms and wide expertise. Thompson’s scholarly work covers a remarkable range of subjects. He was as comfortable writing about food riots as the manuscripts of William Blake, and he was fascinated by the Soviet Union as much as Wordsworth. Thompson was famous for his books about eighteenthand nineteenth-century England, but late in his career he delved skilfully into the twentieth-century history of the Balkans and India. Up until the 1960s, at least, Thompson considered himself primarily a poet, and his literary
’s Nohow (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2008); Matthew Feldman and Mark Nixon, Beckett’s Literary Legacies (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006). 12 Cohn, A Beckett Canon, p. 241. 13 Denise Riley, ‘But then I wouldn’t be here’, in Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 105–13, pp. 3 and 106. Sigmund Freud, ‘Jokes and their relation to the unconscious’ (1905), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 8 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 57. 14 In this
interact with the legacies that he passes on. Daniela Caselli’s book Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and the Criticism and Matthew Feldman’s and Mark Nixon’s collection Beckett’s Literary Legacies are two examples – from either end as it were – of this new concern with tracing intertextuality and influence in and through Beckett’s work.29 One of the effects of this new development is to suggest ways in which the kind of proximity that Derrida finds so disabling – the closeness which leads reading practices to become one with and negated by the work that
, realised that he had killed his own literary legacy. 28 Sinclair sums up Viereck’s hypocrisy: Somewhere in the deeps of your perverted soul hides a shy and sensitive poet – for you were a real poet, even though you chose to embrace ‘the roses and raptures of vice.’ That poet is sitting in contemplation
, Thoughts on Man, His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries (London: Effingham Wilson, 1831), p. 230. 7 Ibid. 8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 3. Minor literature is not literature written in a minor language but a ‘minor practice of a major language’ and thus it has a ‘high coefficient of deterritorialization’ (p. 16). 9 April Alliston, ‘The Value of a Literary Legacy: Retracing the 124 Sophia Lee’s The Recess Transmission of Value Through Female