(Download) "Deborah Elise White. Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History (Book Review)" by Studies in Romanticism ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Deborah Elise White. Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History (Book Review)
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2003
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 194 KB
Description
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. 227. $45.00. As the latest round of historicism retreats into history, it is increasingly apparent that the challenge it presented to the theoretical discourse on literature has missed its mark. To its perpetual embarrassment, historicism, too, has a history, and as it dates the substance of its arguments are inevitably put into question. With the mere passage of time, the claims of criticism are reversed into the deceptions of ideology, and the "critical" position endorsed by the latest historicism is exposed once again as being all too obviously a mere product of its time. It is, of course, at precisely such an historical moment that historicism finally becomes of some theoretical interest: the question of the historicity of historicism restates concisely, in a temporal mode, the question of reflexivity, the central question of any theoretical discourse. The historically (and theoretically) inevitable transition of historicism from a (merely) temporal to a reflexive discourse raises a series of importunate questions, not least of which is the status and function of temporal succession in establishing a critical reflection. In a critically sophisticated historicism, the authority of succession cannot be assumed, with the inevitable result that it is no longer self-evident, in textual interpretation, which text "criticizes" which.