Medieval English Manuscripts:

Previous articleNext article FreeAnn Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton. Edited by Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. vii+306.William JunkerWilliam JunkerUniversity of St. Thomas Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton, editors Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton gather eleven essays (and an afterword by Nigel Smith) from established and up-and-coming scholars in early modern literary studies. The book opens with three theoretically oriented essays—by Andrew Hadfield, Michael McKeon, and Marshall Grossman—followed by a “series of focused historicist studies” arranged thematically under four subheadings: “Historicism and Theology,” “Dramatic Histories,” “Milton and the Problems of History,” and “Gendering Historicism” (12). As stated in the introduction, the goals of Rethinking Historicism are threefold: “to examine the potential problems of historicism in literary criticism, to provide a brief sense of the history of the practice from its roots in the Renaissance…and to offer examples of historicist work that will not only demonstrate the continuing vitality of this methodology, but also suggest new directions for research” (11). While every one of these essays illumines its object in new and interesting ways, in most cases the essays do not rethink historicism so much as provide exemplary instances of its current period style. A few essays examine “potential problems” in historicism, but only Marshall Grossman’s adopts a truly critical stance toward it, and only one essay—Fulton’s own—argues in sustained fashion for the Renaissance roots of historicism. Rethinking Historicism thus achieves its third goal most ably, while its pursuit of the other goals meets with less success. It is a mark of the volume’s strength, however, that its blind spots no less than its insights convey the “continuing vitality” of historicism, while underscoring two or three issues that continue to vex its methodology and practice.Of course, the realization that there are “potential problems” in historicism is not a new one. Some of the most trenchant criticisms of the New Historicism—a label that this volume tends to eschew in favor of the less contentious but correspondingly more vague “historicism”—had appeared well before the close of the last century. But aside from the occasional reference to Fredric Jameson and Alan Liu, the volume does not engage these earlier criticisms at any length.1 Rethinking Historicism does not respond to those scholars who, while skeptical of historicism, nonetheless claim to be resolutely historical in their own work.2 Nor, for that matter, does it address recent attacks on historical periodization itself.3 Rather, and a bit oddly, the book takes as its main target the New Presentism.At issue between the New Presentists and the historicists is the very availability of the past from the perspective of the present. Where historicists argue that historical difference is real and knowable, New Presentists argue that every discovery of a significant historical difference is motivated by the interests of the present. But as Andrew Hadfield points out in “Has Historicism Gone Too Far; or, Should We Return to Form?,” these claims are not logically exclusive (28–29). This observation, combined with the notorious difficulty in specifying when the present begins and the past ends, has rightly made New Presentism appear problematic to most scholars—even to those who are in other respects critical of historicism. In “The New Presentism and Its Discontents: Listening to Eastward Ho and Shakespeare’s Tempest in Dialogue,” Paul Stevens observes that not even the contributors to Grady and Hawkes’s Presentist Shakespeares are true believers in the movement.4 Presentist Shakespeares, Stevens writes, is “a collection quite extraordinary for the way in which the subversive asides of its contributors routinely deflate the larger claims of its editors” (136).At several points in the volume, though, New Presentist objections to historicism are conflated with the very different objections of Stanley Fish. Unlike the New Presentists, Fish’s objection to historicism is not that it holds historical difference to be real and knowable but that it tends—in theory and in practice—to forget that what literary critics discover about the past should be ancillary to, rather than substitute for, their illumination of the “aesthetic structure” of the text or performance (135). In fact, Fish’s argument is conceptually closer to that of the historian Gabrielle Spiegel, who is quoted in the volume’s introduction. For Spiegel, the fundamental problem in New Historicism is the “refusal to differentiate text from context or to establish an intelligible relation between them that does not lead to their mutual implication in a textually conceived universe” (7).5 In other words, literary critics who repudiate the primacy of aesthetic structures in their pursuit of historical knowledge are likely to approach history itself as though it possessed its own kind of aesthetic structure. Downplaying the poetic integrity of individual texts paradoxically gives rise to the “textually conceived universe” of cultural poetics.Perhaps Rethinking Historicism directs itself against this strange hybrid of New Presentism and Stanley Fish’s brand of formalism because historicist scholarship has already assimilated most of the earlier charges that have been leveled against it. Several of the essays suggest as much. In “Historicizing Satisfaction in Shakespeare’s Othello,” for example, Heather Hirschfield begins by arguing that a classic complaint about the New Historicism—its “neglect of the role of religion in the daily life as well as in the politics of the period” (113)—is belied by the “recent cottage industry of studies on literature and religion” that have emerged over the past two decades (114). In the remainder of her insightful essay, Hirschfield proceeds in supererogatory fashion to show how Reformation controversies over the theological concept of satisfaction inform the language and plot of Shakespeare’s Othello. Likewise, essays by Martin Dzelzainis and Michael McKeon show that contemporary historicist practice has moved beyond the old contention that New Historicism depends on a synchronous or structuralist depiction of history in which social energies are circulated but change is never made. In his provocative essay, “Milton, Foucault, and the New Historicism,” Dzelzainis acknowledges the partial truth of this contention but argues, following Catherine Belsey, that it reflects the influence of Talcott Parsons and Clifford Geertz rather than, as is usually maintained, the Foucault of The Order of Things (1973) and Discipline and Punish (1977).6 And Michael McKeon, whose “Theory and Practice in Historical Method” is the most challenging of the volume’s essays and one of its best, offers a subtle reconstruction of Marx’s own historical method in which “diachronic and synchronic analyses are not ‘absolute’ but dialectically intertwined” (59).Finally, the two most intellectually rewarding essays of the volume show that historicist literary scholarship does not preclude, but draws strength from, plain old-fashioned close reading—what Reuben Brower called “reading in slow motion.”7 Thomas Fulton’s piece, “The Politics of Renaissance Historicism: Valla, Erasmus, Colet, and More,” traces the fascinating process whereby the humanist reception of classical authors, and Seneca in particular, gave rise to a series of novel interpretations of Romans and other politically sensitive biblical texts that, in turn, informed Erasmus’s and More’s theorization of panegyric. And Sharon Achinstein’s “Medea’s Dilemma: Politics and Passion in Milton’s Divorce Tracts” looks to “the rhetoric of citation in one of Milton’s polemical title pages” (182). The passage from Euripides’s Medea that precedes Milton’s Tetrachordon, she argues, implies an entire “aesthetic of citation” that bears directly on Milton’s passionate defense of human freedom (182).These two essays impress not only because of the analytic pressure that Fulton and Achinstein bring to bear on their texts. Additionally—and relatedly—both authors stretch the temporal boundaries of these texts’ “historical context,” a phrase that the volume as a whole might have subjected to greater scrutiny. We discover that Paul, Nero, and Seneca are as much a part of Erasmus’s world as are Henry VIII and Thomas More and that Euripides’s words weigh as heavily on Milton’s mind as do those of his more temporally proximate opponents. The radical extension of context in these two essays never loses sight of the contemporary pressures of the early sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Instead, Fulton and Achinstein persuasively demonstrate the complexity and range of ideas communicated by authors of the caliber of Erasmus, More, and Milton. And so when Fulton, in an obvious rejoinder to Fish, claims near the end of his essay that “neither historicism nor politics is guilty of diminishing the value of the text as an interpretive object,” it is hard to disagree with him, at least in theory (105).In practice, however, the truth of Fulton’s assertion is less certain. For a historicism that emphasizes “the text as an interpretable object” to the extent that Fulton’s and Achinstein’s does lays bare the inadequacy of what, in other historicist scholarship, continues to pass for the historical context of the text itself. Fundamentally, this tension within historicism arises from two different approaches to literary or poetic form, which Michael McKeon helpfully defines as “the more or less ostensible patterning of…language” within a text (44). To be sure, one of historicism’s chief accomplishments has been to alert us to the ways in which a text’s form registers and responds to the historical pressures surrounding its time of composition. But, as Fulton and Achinstein illustrate, it sometimes happens that closely attending to the form of a text results in our having to alter, rather than simply appeal to, what we thought we knew about its context. On the basis of the essays collected in Rethinking Historicism, though, I think it is fair to say that mainstream historicist scholarship continues to privilege the explanatory resources of context over the formal capacity of texts to test its adequacy. Why should this be the case?The volume suggests that an adequate response to this question requires that we understand contemporary historicist scholarship both in light of its own methodological development and in light of the disciplinary and institutional contexts within which its practice is embedded. I will treat each in turn. As has often been noted, the ambitious claims of New Historicist work in the 1980s and 1990s depended on a constriction of both the temporal and ideational aspects of context. This allowed the New Historicists to discover a small but compelling set of issues that, at a given moment in time, were said to have structured the cultural productions of a society at every level. Later, in response to criticism issuing from within and without the field, New Historicism limited the scope of its argument and gradually abandoned its theoretical basis in the historiography of early Foucault (pace Dzelzainis). The earlier New Historicist conception of con-text as formally indistinguishable from text came to be replaced with a much weaker, but simultaneously more determinative, conception of context as the set of conditions that preexists the text and yet is temporally contiguous with the moment of its creation—what used to be called its background. Contemporary historicism is thus marked by recurring attempts to specify a conception of context that neither is overly determined by a particular theory of historiography—structuralist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, queer, feminist, and so on—nor reduces to a naive appeal to the brute facts.Something of the resulting dynamic is captured in Paul Stevens’s nimble discussion of the interplay between theory and fact in recent interpretations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest—a play that looks very different when read through a historicism informed by Edward Said’s Orientalism rather than through one informed by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British travelogues. Stevens’s essay excellently models what he calls the “dialogic relationship between historical research and theory,” in which each is employed to offset the limitations of the other (153). However, without minimizing his achievement, I think it bears noting that it is only after Stevens adjudicates the claims of theoretical sophistication and historical fact that he mentions “the rhetorical constitution or ‘literariness’ of texts,” which, it turns out, is also important for our discipline (153). Stevens’s essay reaffirms “what makes our discipline so distinctive” at the same time that it relegates—not, I think, intentionally—the problems posed for historicism by the “‘literariness’ of texts” to second place.Indeed, in the current volume only McKeon seems fully to acknowledge that the methodological problem of context is both intrinsic to and yet potentially debilitating for historicist literary scholarship. He admits, for example, that there exists within literary studies a burgeoning dissatisfaction with “the reifying tendencies of periodization,” but he responds by attributing such dissatisfaction to a misconception of historical contextualization or categorization, which—he explains—is not a “dogmatic strategy for closing down understanding” but is rather “the first step in opening it up to questions that otherwise would never be asked” (60). McKeon’s summation of the important role of contextualization is as good as we are likely to get, but it might itself be accused of idealizing the professional context within which historicist scholarship actually takes place.This point is brought home in Andrew Hadfield’s realist assessment of the disciplinary pressures at work in historicism’s continuing dominance over the field. Some opponents of historicism, Hadfield notes, claim that the ongoing production of narrowly historicist scholarship is a function of junior academics’ “anxious quest for intellectual honors and preferment” (24). After all, part of the power of historicist methodology is that “it can be learned, repeated, and endlessly reproduced,” so that anybody needing another publication on her curriculum vitae might, for example, “rea[d] through The Faerie Queene one more time to find yet another possible allusion to kern, gallowglasses, or a crannog in Coleraine that Spenser might once have seen when he possibly traveled north with Lord Grey who might have taken him with him” (24–25). This wonderfully absurd hypothetical concludes with an equally wonderful quip: “The logic of the past conditional can become very wearying” (25). But is Hadfield here speaking in the voice of his opponents or in his own voice? It is difficult to tell.Hadfield presents the opposition as holding that “young academics” trained by historicists “realize that they should not rock the boat if they desire a foot on the lowest rung of the ladder, let alone professional success” (24). And yet, on the next page, we encounter a much bolder set of academics: “The need to find obscure allusions in texts in order to get published, the need to specialize too narrowly, and the absence of the bigger picture has led many to revolt against what they see as the prevailing professional ethos in the present” (25). The tension between these two sentences resolves itself in the realization that those who are in “revolt” against “the prevailing professional ethos” are a different class of scholars from those “young academics” who—the revolutionaries claim—realize they should not rock the boat. Those in revolt are themselves senior members of the profession, scholars who at least approximate the status that Hadfield (rightly) enjoys. On the one hand, it is not surprising that the battles waged over historicism should be fought by senior scholars—for these scholars are, all things considered, better equipped to fight them. On the other hand, though, the instability of Hadfield’s voice over these pages might suggest that, whether or not those senior scholars who are in revolt against historicism are right about its methodological limitations, their perception of the institutional conditions that reinforce its present influence—especially on younger academics—is truer than we would like to admit. The conservative effects of professionalization combined with the ever-increasing expectations of scholarly production might very well ensure the continuing relevance of historicism regardless of whatever problems it faces or avoids having to face.As I noted above, the single essay in the volume that does not end up defending historicism is penned by Marshall Grossman, who passed away before Rethinking Historicism was published. It seems fitting, then, to conclude by acknowledging the challenge posed by Grossman’s “Limiting History” for contemporary historicist scholarship. In large part a development and refinement of “the ethics of reading” Grossman has long championed, “Limiting History” posits a qualitative distinction between “understanding the historical nature of literary texts”—a task that requires placing “renewed emphasis on an artistic hearing of literature that attends to the exigent and nonsystematic experiences of writing and reading”—and “the recent preoccupation with historicizing literary texts,” which, Grossman states, “renders art documentary and instrumental when it should be proactive” (66).8 This distinction turns, finally, on the question of agency: understanding the “historical nature of literary texts” requires that we affirm their capacity to act on us in the present, whereas “historicizing” a literary text requires that we bracket the capacity of the text to so act. The historicized text is reduced to an “instrument” or “document” that “witnesses, records, and pretends to transparency” but that is no longer proactive for us readers (70).One of Grossman’s concerns is that a pedagogy dominated by historicist concerns is self-defeating. As he puts it, “helping students become aware of” Paradise Lost’s deep investment in seventeenth-century political and religious controversy is “part of the substance and pleasure of teaching them, but the case for them taking the trouble to learn these things must stand on the premise that, embedded though the poem may be in the time and place of its production, there remains also a poem to be read in our time and place” (68). Why should students bother learning to read Milton in the first place, in other words, if all that his poetry does is “witness the context of its own creation” (68)?More important, though, is Grossman’s argument that historicist methodology often ignores what is perhaps the central mystery of a literary text’s actual “historical nature.” The mystery is that texts like Paradise Lost and the Odyssey continue to move us when we read them in the present and that they do so even if we have no particular stake in the controversies of seventeenth-century European Christianity or in the development of archaic Greek paganism. “What is it,” Grossman asks, “about literary works that remains active and potent after the historical facts have been naturalized?” (69). To ask such a question is not, for Grossman, to seek out an ahistorical formalism; quite the opposite, it is to inquire after the conditions—in the literary work, in us, and in the history of each—that make possible our experience of being moved, intellectually and emotionally, by a piece of writing from the past. To do this is to practice an ethics of reading: “What I am proposing as the proper work of literary criticism makes an ethical turn toward understanding the mechanisms that facilitate the transfer of the seductions of the will at the limit of history, from writer to text to reader and to writer as reader” (77). Grossman’s own account of these “mechanisms,” which emerges through his microanalysis of Milton’s language, is not always fully persuasive. But in a volume in which the project of rethinking historicism often becomes the project of it, Grossman’s essay out simply for having posed a question that no one thought to Liu, “The of The New Historicism,” The argument of this essay is in on Historicism and the of Press, Fredric of the New Historicism may be in or, The of York: and Renaissance of Press, in Renaissance and Its York: For a discussion of the issues by and see “What New “The in After and of and is the most of the many essays in this issue of the of and also and and Renaissance in University Press, Grady and Presentist Shakespeares, on Shakespeare York: editors from Gabrielle Spiegel, Historicism, and the of the Text in the “Historicizing New Historicism,” in Grady and Presentist Shakespeares, in in In of A to Reuben Brower and York: Marshall Grossman, Renaissance in Renaissance Marshall Grossman York: Previous articleNext article by on this For to no articles this

This study aims at examining the use of metadiscourse markers in literary criticism texts to identify the role of the reader and how these markers are used to produce more persuasive essays. The data of 72,727 words from 17 texts were written by three well-known authors, namely, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Stanley Fish. Hyland’s (2005) model of interpersonal metadiscourse markers was used to analyze the data. The analysis revealed that metadiscourse markers are used by literary critics to create coherent and persuasive texts. It was found out that the theory of criticism adopted by the literary critics does not affect the use of metadiscourse markers only maybe in terms of relying more on logos, ethos or pathos. The results of this study comply with those of previous research showing that metadiscourse markers are frequently used in literary criticism texts. This study will contribute to both the literary genre and the genre of critical essays by identifying the linguistic features to be used to produce more effective and convincing literary criticism texts. It will also help future critics to write more persuasive texts by highlighting the means that enable them to influence their readers and to produce more coherent and convincing texts. Keywords metadiscourse; persuasion; literary criticism; essays; critical theory

Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum on olnud teerajajaid digihumanitaaria valdkonnas juba 1990. aastatest, alates arvutikultuuri laiemast levikust. Väärtuslike andmekogude haldamisel on olnud missiooniks nende kättesaadavaks tegemine avalikkusele. Kultuuripärand avati laiemale kasutajale kahes suunas: sisupõhised otsitavad andmebaasid ning suhtepõhised andmekeskkonnad. Siinse artikli eesmärgiks on näidata arvutusliku kirjandusteaduse tänapäevaseid võimalusi ja nendega seotud kirjanduslike keeleressursside loomist koostöös korpuslingvistidega. Artiklis analüüsin kultuuripärandi sisukeskkondade ja andmekoguside kasutusvõimalusi masinloetava keeleressursina. Esimeste selliste katsetena on valminud kirjavahetuse ja kriitika märgendatud keelekorpused päringusüsteemis KORP. Käesolev uurimus toob on 20. sajandi alguse mõjukriitika probleemi näitel välja kirjanduslike keelekorpuste potentsiaali kultuuripärandi uurimisel.
 
 Estonia can soon expect an explosive growth in digital heritage and text resources due to the current project of mass digitisation of national cultural heritage (printed books, archival documents, photos, art, audiovisual, and ethnographic artifacts) (2019–2023). This will give new opportunities for different fields of digital humanities and make digitised heritage accessible to everyone in the form of open data. The project will focus on the usage of the heritage, on the needs of education, e-learning, and the creative industry, including digital creative arts.
 The aim of this article is to examine some research possibilities that opened up for literary history due to the digitisation of literary works and archival sources and to put them in the general context of digital humanities.
 Although the field of digital humanities is broad, the meaning of DH is often reduced to methods of computational language-centered analyses, mainly based on using different tools and software languages (R, Stylo, Phyton, Gephy, Top Modelling etc.). While the corpus-based research is already a professional standard in linguistics, literary scholars are still more used to working with traditional methods. This article introduces two digital literary history projects belonging to the field of digital humanities and analyses them as language resources for creating texts corpora, and introduces some results of the case study of Estonian criticism from the Young Estonia movement up to the 1920s, carried out using the literary texts corpora in the corpus query system KORP (https://korp.keeleressursid.ee) by the Centre of Estonian Language Resources.
 During the past twenty years, I have mainly focussed on developing large-scale implementation projects for digital representation of Estonian literary history. The objective of these experimental projects has been to develop principally new non-linear models of Estonian literary history for the digital environment. These activities were based on my research of the intertextual relations between authors, literary works, and critical texts using traditional methods.
 The first content-based literary history project “ERNI. Estonian Literary History in Texts 1924–1925” (www2.kirmus.ee/erni) was based on a hypertextual network of literary source texts and reviews. We re-conceptualised literary history as a non-linear narrative and a gallery with many entrances. The task of the project was also to ensure its usability in education: a significant number of study materials has been added in cooperation with schoolteachers.
 In 2004, we initiated our long-term and still running project “Kreutzwald’s Century: the Estonian Cultural History Web” (http://kreutzwald.kirmus.ee) at the Estonian Literary Museum. The objective of this project was to make literary sources of the period accessible as the dynamic, interactive information environment. This was a hybrid project which synthesised the classical study of Estonian literary history, the needs of the digital media user, and the expanding digital resources from different memory institutions; its underlying idea was to link together all the works of fiction of an author, as well as their biography, manuscripts, and photos and to make them visible for the user on five interactive time axes. The project uses a specially created platform. Today, this platform is extensively used by schoolteachers: in 2020 (Jan.–Dec.) it had about 8, 986.555 million clicks and during seven years (2013 Dec.–2020 Dec.) it has collected 64, 627.380 million clicks.
 To find out how we can fit such content-based models of literary heritage into the context of Digital Humanities we need to compare the previous modelling practices with our current experimental project in the corpus query system KORP. Our interdisciplinary project “Literary Studies Meet Corpus Linguistics” (2017–2020) concentrated on studying literary history sources with linguistic methods. As the result of the project two literary text corpora were created: “Epistolary text corpus of Estonian writers Johannes Semper and Johannes Vares-Barbarus” and “Corpus of the Estonian literary criticism, Noor-Eesti and the 1920s”. Both of them were pilot projects in the field, started with converting the digitalised archival and printed sources into machine-readable format before text and data mining for corpus creation.
 Query system KORP allows us to organise the language data by all the categories used in the corpus, for example, to learn who and in what context mentioned the name of the French writer André Gide. The second currently running project is the morphologically annotated corpus of literary criticism. This corpus contains texts of literary reviews and criticism in different genres, drawn from the projects ERNI and “Kreutzwald’s Century”. The first results in studying the dynamics of literary values can already be seen.
 A query in KORP about the word ‘mõju’ (‘influence’) revealed that the manifesto “More of European culture!”of the group Young Estonia, voiced in 1905, was during the independent Estonian Republic replaced by the valuing of a specific national character. Corpus query showed a change in the meaning of the word: in the criticism contemporary to Young Estonia, the word ‘mõju’ was only associated with the historical pressure from Russian and German cultures. The foundation for modern comparative linguistics at the University of Tartu was laid in the 1920s by the professorship in Estonian literature.

appreciative comments on actions and heroes, focussed on “worship,” but this does not quite amount to a satisfactory “knitting up of a great matter.” This collection achieves to a high degree a homogeneous assembly of great scholarly competence, lucid general informativeness, and intelligent readings. It almost persuaded this reviewer that Malory may really have known what he was doing. Jo h n f i n l a y s o n / Queen’s University Murray J. Evans, Rereading Middle English Romance: Manuscript Layout, Decoration, and the Rhetoric of Composite Structure (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995). xvii, 203. $44.95 cloth. As Murray Evans points out in his preface, this examination of medieval English manuscript collections containing romances responds to an increas­ ing interest in manuscript studies in general. The work of scholars such as Derek Pearsall, A.S.G. Edwards, Sylvia Huot, Alastair Minnis, and many others, has brought manuscript format and book production to the forefront of reading medieval literature. Textual criticism is no longer confined to the establishing of the “best” text for the creation of an apparently definitive critical edition. At the very least, modern readers are becoming aware of the constructed nature of such editions as the famous Riverside Chaucer or Vinaver’s edition of Malory. As a result, more and more literary critics are turning to manuscript evidence to discover the cultural context of a lit­ erary work and possible readings by its original contemporary audience or audiences. These efforts have been facilitated by the greater availability of facsimile editions, either in book form, c d - r o m , or on the Internet, and by the ap­ plication of computer technology to the analysis of complex physical data. Evans’ book exemplifies the “new” manuscript studies both by its pioneering use of computer analysis and by its focus on the structure of manuscripts to determine issues of genre and reader response. The first chapter begins with a brief but clear overview of compilatio (the arrangement of a manuscript codex) as it affects interpretation of a com­ posite manuscript’s contents. Evans shows how investigation of the physical layout of a manuscript can provide increased understanding of such a ba­ sic question as to whether one is dealing with a single narrative or three independent narratives. Having introduced his basic methodology, Evans proceeds in the next chapter to a painstaking identification of distinguish­ ing features present in a “representative sample” of fifteen Middle English romance manuscripts. Four manuscripts contain the majority of surviving ME romances; the rest have fewer romances, including three that have one romance each. The manuscripts date from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Each feature is defined and the number of its occurrences in each manuscript compared across the whole database. For example, the use of ini­ tials to punctuate new items in the manuscripts is compared in terms of size and the presence of colour. We find that in 166 (47.6%) instances no initials are used whereas in 80 instances (14.6%) some display script and/or decora­ tion is present. Such technical “bean counting” is not very exciting to read (although the pie charts and graphs do help), unless one is looking for spe­ cific information about a particular manuscript. It is an essential corrective, however, to generalisations about manuscripts that are often made on the basis of broad and somewhat vague “impressions.” One can have more confi­ dence in Evans’s conclusion “that romances are generally decorated and laid out more generously than, and thus distinctively from, nonromance items” (43). The sheer convenience of such detailed descriptions of the manuscripts should not be discounted either, because obtaining such information usually requires an expensive visit to a manuscript library in Europe or a lengthy correspondence with a curator. The appendix continues this very practical aspect of the study by summarising features and contents of each manuscript in tabular form. The remaining chapters of the book address themselves to the applica­ tion of such data to the interpretation of specific romances in terms of two subgenres: homiletic romance and the Middle English lay. Manuscripts con­ taining the romance Sir Isumbras would seem to complicate a simple reading...

The crucial point of Brill's study is that of fit: which critical methods prove most useful towards opening up which texts? Close investigations into the parameters of the language games of texts, critics, and methods enable us to determine which paths to take towards more complete descriptive analyses and critique. Such an emphasis on the philosophical method of Ludwig Wittgenstein reorients literary criticism to involve a conjoint responsibility to both reader and text as the literary critic assumes the humbler role of a guide who assists a reader in/to diverse literary texts. Wittgenstein's philosophical approach provides us with a strong means of developing such a method for literary criticism-a method that points the way forward beyond postmodern criticisms and to a categorically new approach to literary texts. Brill's work discusses at length the implications of Wittgenstein for literary criticism and theory. The volume specifically investigates the implications of Wittgenstein's work for a number of contemporary critical orientations (notably poststructualism, feminism, and psychology). In addition, the research includes actual applications of Wittgenstein for literary criticism: diverse literary texts (including a number of poems and stories by Native American authors) are approached via a Wittgensteinian method as a means of discerning which critical approaches might be more or less efficacious. Not only does the book provide a solid introduction to Wittgensteinian philosophy for the critical scholars, but it also provides a clear methodology useful to critics seeking a means to navigate through the entanglement of contemporary criticism and theory. Brill argues that a reliance upon the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein can enable literary critics to escape the seemingly endless dialectic between modern and postmodern theory. Instead of debating which theory is theoretically best, we need to describe when theories work-and when they do not.

This paper discusses the characteristics of ancient literary criticism, including imagery criticism, intuitive thinking, and dialectical thinking, and explores the oneness of literary criticism and creation and its revelations in the study of modern critical history. The process of ancient literary creation is studied in depth, including using LSTM and BERT models to decode the formalized data of poems and control the metre. Meanwhile, the study of ancient literary criticism based on structuralist semiotics is introduced, exploring the operation mode of narrative grammar and two-layer narrative structure. Finally, old literary creation and criticism are discussed in depth through example analysis. By analyzing the course Appreciation of Ancient Poetry, the article demonstrates how literary criticism can enhance the understanding and evaluation of literary works from aesthetic and cultural dimensions. Overall, the article deeply analyzes the methods and theories of ancient literary creation and criticism and explores their application and development in the information age, providing valuable perspectives and tools for understanding and advancing the field.

Not many of us ever get to see an actual papyrus roll, codex, or manuscript of a Greek or Latin literary text, though increasingly we are able to see digital copies of them online. The differences of format between any of the above and the texts we are accustomed to seeing are striking. This article is concerned with the effect that the format of a text had on the reception, written or aural, of word order as a literary device in the ancient world. We pay great attention to word order, but our reception of it is based on the format of the modern text, not on the format of the text as it was experienced in the ancient world.

<i>Jennifer Summit</i>, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England<i>Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England</i>. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.

Medieval manuscripts are our shared inheritance, and today they are more accessible than ever—thanks to digital copies online. Yet for all that widespread digitization has fundamentally transformed how we connect with the medieval past, we understand very little about what these digital objects really are. We rarely consider how they are made or who makes them. This case-study rich book demystifies digitization, revealing what it's like to remake medieval books online and connecting modern digital manuscripts to their much longer media history, from print, to photography, to the rise of the internet. Examining classic late-1990s projects like Digital Scriptorium 1.0 alongside late-2010s initiatives like Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, and world-famous projects created by the British Library, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Stanford University, and the Walters Art Museum against in-house digitizations performed in lesser-studied libraries, Whearty tells never-before-published narratives about globally important digital manuscript archives. Drawing together medieval literature, manuscript studies, digital humanities, and imaging sciences, Whearty shines a spotlight on the hidden expert labor responsible for today's revolutionary digital access to medieval culture. Ultimately, this book argues that centering the modern labor and laborers at the heart of digital cultural heritage fosters a more just and more rigorous future for medieval, manuscript, and media studies.

This study examines the impact of artificial intelligence on Arabic criticism in the context of modernity shock, focusing on the cybersecurity challenges affecting language and literary texts. The research explores how Arabic criticism interacts with modern technological advancements and the extent to which AI can analyze or generate literary texts, and its influence on the concept of literary and critical creativity. It also discusses the risks that threaten text integrity, such as forgery and plagiarism, emphasizing the need to enhance cybersecurity to protect literary and critical production. The study employs an analytical critical approach, reviewing previous studies and analyzing AI’s influence on literary criticism. It also uses a comparative methodology to examine the differences between traditional criticism and AI-driven criticism while evaluating AI applications in literary text analysis and composition. The findings reveal that AI can serve as a valuable tool in literary criticism but cannot replace human critics due to its lack of intuition and aesthetic sensitivity. The study also highlights the urgent need for cybersecurity measures to safeguard literary texts from manipulation and intellectual theft. Ultimately, the research concludes that the future of Arabic criticism depends on balancing digital modernity with the preservation of its authentic critical identity.

Since the emergence of the modern criticism theories, the aim of these theories was the focus on research and the analysis of literary texts scientifically and academically and according to specific data. The historical criticism theory is one of the first modern criticism theories adopted by many of pioneers of literature and has a group of scientific constituents that investigate the relationship between the text and its external aspects. Generally, there are three stages of criticism theories: the first stage deals with the external aspects of the text .For example writer's life, social situation, conditions and historical events. These external aspects are tools for structuralists and formalists. The second stage deals with the internal context of the literary text. This stage appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century as constructional criticism, modern criticism and structuralism. The last stage pays attention to the readers' role as semiology criticism, deconstruction criticism, reception theory …..etc. This theory is connected to external aspects of the text and it takes historical, political and social events as a means to analyze the literary text. According to this theory, the literary text is reflection of writer's life conditions and the writer is a mirror for the social situations predominant during his era and education emerges from environment which is a part of the history. Therefore, the theory of historical criticism in the process of criticism emphasizes the writer's life, predominant conditions and the environment that the literary text is their outcome. The present study focuses on two collections of poems, namely "The songs and Snow and Fire " by Muaaed Taeeb and "I will not retreat " by Rekesh Amedy . The two collections were analyzed according to the three bases of historical criticism (Time, Environment, and Race). The aim of this study is the explanation of the historical dimension of two collections of poems namely "The songs and Snow and Fire " by Muaaed Taeeb and "I will not retreat " by Rekesh Amedy . As a result of the analysis conducted on these two collections, it turned out that the historical criticism was one of the essential pillars of the creation of the theme and ideology of those poems.

The term bliaut appeared suddenly in costume history in 1874 with the publication of the third volume of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire Raisonne du Mobilier Francais . Not only did Viollet-le-Duc use the Old French term that we find in literary works dating from the twelfth through the early thirteenth centuries to discuss the sartorial practices of that age, but he also firmly identified the bliaut as the garment worn by the subjects of the statuary on the Royal Portal of Notre-Dame de Chartres. These statues, which are attenuated to fit on the narrow columns of the portal, depict Old Testament figures, both male and female, in elongated proportions. Their attire is depicted as highly ornamented and appears to fall into narrow elaborate pleats, even on garments worn under the outer gown; this pleating is primarily vertical, except for the pleats around some figures’ waists and wrists, where it runs laterally across the body. A year later Jules Quicherat repeated this identification in his Histoire du Costume en France . Both Viollet-le-Duc and Quicherat identified the dress seen in other statues and visual sources as bliauts , but it has been the association of the term with the Chartres statues that would become the best known and the most often repeated. Viollet-le-Duc was innovative in that he sought out evidence for garment terms in Old French literary texts contemporary to the period, and Quicherat continued this practice. It is for this reason that the term bliaut emerges in such an abrupt manner in costume history. The term had not, and indeed could not have, made its way into earlier costume histories, simply because very few medieval manuscripts containing literary texts had been edited and published before the 1830s. The term bliaut had fallen into disuse and out of memory for all but etymologists and philologists, and it would be these scholars of old words and old texts who began the process of editing manuscripts for publication. For costume historians to cite literary sources before these editions existed, they would have had to read the texts of manuscripts, none of which were indexed, instead of consulting manuscripts simply to examine the illuminations. The illuminations themselves would have shed no light on garments of the twelfth century because the extant manuscripts of twelfth-century literature date to later centuries and therefore depict later clothing styles.

How a literacy work becomes a masterpiece: On the threefold selection practised by literary criticism

The closure of educational and cultural institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to changes in the traditional teaching model and the transition to online teaching. Since access to textbooks and professional literature was significantly difficult in completely new conditions, the resources of information and communication technologies were included in the teaching process, among which the e-book took an important place. The authors examine the experiences of students of teacher training faculties and faculties of education (N = 394) in relation to (a) the use of e-book for study purposes; (b) the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of e-book for study purposes and (c) the factors that initiated the use of e-book. Research results show that two thirds of the respond- ents use this book format. According to the experience of more than a third of students, the current health crisis has contributed to the use of e-books to a greater extent than before, while a quarter of the respondents were motivated to start using it. The use of e-books was initiated mostly under the influence of professors and by independent internet search. Future class teachers and preschool teachers from the Western Balkans are open to the use of modern technologies, and the current pandemic has intensified the use of e-books for the purpose of their education, which has contributed to overcoming the dif- ficulties caused by the health crisis, as well as to gaining competence in efficient work with future generations of readers of various forms of text.

Although the study of ḥadīth (the Prophet’s speech) has advanced significantly in recent decades, several of its literary aspects remain unexplored within Euro-American scholarship. The epistemological status of ḥadīth within balāghah, the premodern Islamic theory of literary analysis, has received little scholarly attention. Drawing on Inimitability and Conciseness (Kitāb al-Iʿjāz wa al-Ījāz), written by the literary critic, Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī (d. 1038 CE), I show how during the oral stages of its development, ḥadīth was a living tradition that was highly flexible in terms of its wording and content. I empirically explore the interface and interactions between oral and written media in the employment of individual ḥadīths as literary texts, showing how an in-depth exploration of the oral nature of ḥadīth illuminates the approaches of modern literary criticism to appreciate literary texts of oral origin. In conclusion, I suggest that the early Arabic discourse of literary criticism offers an emic (culture-specific) perspective that fosters recognition of the literary reception of ḥadīth and its profound integration into the Islamic literary culture.