Argues that among the branches of historicism practiced by literary critics today, a branch of New Historicism that is broadly humanistic as opposed to narrowly political is the most illuminating. Describes the development and theoretical premises of this branch. Shows how it may be applied to the analysis of a literary work such as Keats's…

The bifurcation of rhetorical and literary traditions that has impoverished the understanding of disciplinary history as a simultaneously rhetorical and literary event is illustrated. It is demonstrated that defining the sublime experience solely in terms of its aesthetic heritage, and thus obscuring its rhetorical foundations, suppresses those…

Reviews eighteenth and nineteenth century Canadian literature. Notes that despite its cultural significance, this early literature has been dismissed by critics and scholars. (MM)

Frederick Douglass, as a nineteenth-century writer, experimented with all manner of discourses including sentimentality, romance and, more significantly, the vernacular tradition. In his works like "My Bondage" and "Life and Times of Frederick Douglass", the confidence of a writer willing to experiment with contrasting forms and willing to make a…

Explores questions about the use of history in teaching literature and about the relation between academic reading (with its emphasis on form and the objectification of the reading process) and naive reading (which depends on a psychological identification with a character). Illustrates these issues through a discussion of a feminist reader's…

Argues that Anne Bronte, through her novel "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," demonstrates an understanding of the unequal positions of men and women during the 19th century. Suggests that her narrative silences focus the reader's attention on questions of gender, particularly on the manner in which white male authority shapes women's lives.…

Identifies--and labels as elegiac romance"--a group of 19th and 20th century American, English, and European novels in which a narrator relates the story of a heroic, questing figure to whom he is committed in attempting to overcome the effect of loss which results from" the hero's death. (Author/RD)

Argues that Emily Dickinson's gender and genre moved her away from American Transcendentalism and toward pragmatism. Suggests that Dickinson's choice of poetry forced her to formulate a self that the American Transcendental prose writers could evade, and that her gender freed her from the restraints that the Romantic movement placed on women. (TB)

Describes and reports on a survey of 164 U.S. universities to ascertain what is taught as the current canon of British Romantic literature. Asserts that the canon may now include Mary Shelley with the former standard six major male Romantic poets, indicating a significant emergence of a feminist perspective on British Romanticism in the classroom.…

Although it angers feminist critics that Eliot did not deal with liberated females like herself, we still can learn much about the conditions of women from her novels. (JH)

Looks at Melville's narrative construction of "onion-like...layers of truth" that combine romance and textbook, presents critics' discussion and scholars' treatment of the cetological information present in the text, offers an explanation for the lack of recognition due to the nonfictional parts of "Moby Dick." (JK)