Ravishing Tradition : : Cultural Forces and Literary History / / Daniel Cottom.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Cottom, Daniel,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1996
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (240 p.)

Though central to contemporary debates over identity, politics, and culture, the concept of tradition often remains unexamined. In a series of readings that transgress cultural and disciplinary boundaries, Daniel Cottom subjects this concept to close scrutiny. He calls into question conventional accounts of tradition, with their reliance on standard oppositions between dogma and reason, animality and humanity, community and society, religion and science, and modernity and its predecessors. Tradition, as Cottom envisions it, is a complex of cultural forces that moves, divides, and undoes those it touches; it ravishes, is ravished, and is centrally etched with acts of ravishment. Engaging writers from William Shakespeare to John Ashbery and from Phillis Wheatley to Antonin Artaud, Cottom examines literary history within the contexts of war, rape, and slavery; education, technology, and sexuality; repetition, imitation, stereotypy, and travesty; censorship, grief, and ecstasy. He also evaluates the work of various theorists who address questions of tradition, such as Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Adrienne Rich. Cottom draws on works in social and cultural history as well as on literary texts from different eras, nations, and genres. At once using and critiquing contemporary literary and cultural theory, this eloquent book shows why tradition continues to be of compelling interest and importance.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- CHAPTER ONE. Conspiring with Tradition: Jorge Luis Borges and the Question of the Miracle -- CHAPTER TWO. Unpardoning Tradition: Coming to Grief in Shakespeare, Bronte, and Artaud -- CHAPTER THREE. Captioning the Image of Tradition: Phillis Wheatley and Preposterous Authority -- CHAPTER FOUR. Stereotyping Tradition: Charles Dickens and the Book of Fire -- CHAPTER FIVE. The War of Tradition: Virginia Woolf and the Temper of Criticism -- CHAPTER SIX. Getting It: John Ashbery and Colloquial Tradition -- Notes -- Index