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Archeologies of Invective
Contributor(s): Daemmrich, Horst (Other), Eisenhauer, Robert (Author)
ISBN: 1433101645     ISBN-13: 9781433101649
Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publi
OUR PRICE:   $102.42  
Product Type: Hardcover
Published: June 2007
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
- Literary Criticism | European - French
- Literary Criticism | European - German
Dewey: 809.935
LCCN: 2007010582
Series: Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature
Physical Information: 0.56" H x 6" W x 9" (1.06 lbs) 220 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - British Isles
- Cultural Region - French
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Focusing on specimens of discourse where criticism assumes a flagrantly bucolic persona, Archeologies of Invective investigates hitherto little acknowledged contexts of irony, aggressivity, and vilification. After considering briefly Lucilius and Horace, the author evaluates such diverse figures as Poggio Bracciolini, Quevedo, Dunbar, Poe, and Mencken before proceeding to sustained discussion of Goethe's Italian Journey, Werther, and the Invektiven. In terms of prime-time satiric virtuosity, Byron's Don Juan recycles pastoral animus, acting as a rogue-like mirror-text of the Schiller/Goethe Xenien of the late 1790s. Sidney's double sestina and Villon's Ballad of the Women of Paris are seen inaugurating the modern age, while, at the dawn of the avant-garde, Verlaine's Invectives sample Goethean and Villonesque attitude at a new level of recherch vulgarity. Low- and Highbrow, outlaw and Philistine resurface in Wyndham Lewis's Arcadian perspective on the artist-intellectual. Poets Robert Frost and Theodore Enslin are seen reinvigoratoring the edgily agrest scene of invective in America. Archeologies of Invective situates itself also with respect to a psychohistorical terrain - altered states of consciousness reflecting Faustian transition: the dislocation of the peasant class, the empowerment of women as a heterological state within a state, the advent of modern weaponry, and the rise of alcohol - whose genealogy becomes nothing short of a gin-eology. Stable notions of character give way to impersonal, pantomimic terms of art, such as caliber; the hero is displaced by the wanderer, thief, madman, and clown. Not limiting itself to the literary canon, Archeologies includes analyses of gangster films and sports legends in the context of Arcadian motivation. Finally, Eisenhauer places Philip Roth's American Pastoral within the arc of 19th-century pastoral fiction, locating a prosaic Nowadays in which criticism is still inscribed, as evidenced by Fish's explication of pastoral in the context of professional correctness.