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"This book has a dual purpose. First, it presents a detailed historical record of how the academic discipline of English literary study began in British universities. It traces the process of academic legitimation and autonomy from Adam Smith, who first offered formal university lectures on English literature, between 1748 and 1751, to the formation of the Oxford English School by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1904." "Much of this material is drawn directly from the lives and careers of the prominent professors who were the avatars of the new discipline. The author examines pedagogical practices, programmatic decisions, and shifting political currents of academic fashion. The primary focus is on two institutions, the University of Edinburgh and University College, London. Not only were they in the forefront in the initial disciplinary formation of English literary study, they were both especially sensitive registers of continually changing ideological imperatives and scholarly trends." "The second purpose of the book is to demonstrate, to those who consider the politicization of literary study a contemporary plague, that political ideologies and ethnocentric parochialism have consistently determined the historical development of the discipline, and that the institutional history of English literary study is largely a history of ideological and racial controversy. Though basically historical in its methodology, the book extends into areas of general literary criticism and cultural theory, examining how an interdisciplinary network of relations created the political climates and shaped the scholarly trends that determined the discipline's history." "The record of the genesis of English literary study is in part a record of major institutional commitments, of the publication of definitive critical works, of the shaping of a teachable canon of literary works, and of the vibrant and colorful personalities who left their marks on generations of students. But as this book shows, the full record also includes other traces of the past: salary disputes, professional jealousies and conflicts, conflicting pedagogical visions, British racial distinctions, economic constraints, the marketing of books, committee bureaucracies, degree requirements, political demagoguery, social and religious pressures, and many others."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
In this scholarly text, Vaughan selects some of the best critics of English literature up to his writing (1922) and looks at their work on various types of literature: poetry; dramas; prose. Also unusually he chooses Botticelli, the Italian painter, as one of those critics whom he references.
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre.—Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "The Poet" "[The poet] is a seer.... he is individual... he is complete in himself.... the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not. He is not one of the chorus. "—Walt Whitman, from the preface to Leaves of Grass Poetry has always given rise to interpretation, judgment, and controversy. Indeed, the history of poetry criticism is as rich and varied a journey as the history of poetry itself. But classic writings such as Emerson's essay "The Poet" and Whitman's preface to Leaves of Grass serve as more than a critical "call and response": the works are striking examples of how the finest poets themselves have written on poetics and the works of their peers and predecessors—revealing, in the process, much about the theory and passion behind their own works. Spanning thousands of years and including thirty-three of the most influential critical essays ever written, Classic Writings on Poetry is the first major anthology of criticism devoted exclusively to poetry. Beginning with a survey of the history of poetics and providing an introduction and brief biography for each reading, esteemed poet and critic William Harmon takes readers from Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Poetics to the Norse mythology of Snorri Sturluson's Skáldskaparmál. John Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy and Shelley's A Defence of Poetry are included, as is an excerpt from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh, arriving, finally, at the modernist sensibility of "Poetic Reality and Critical Unreality," by Laura (Riding) Jackson. For anyone interested in the art and artifice of poetry, Classic Writings on Poetry is a journey well worth taking.