Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté. Image fixe : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Kuskin, William
Titre(s) : Recursive origins [Texte imprimé] : writing at the transition to modernity / William Kuskin
Publication : Notre Dame (Ind.) : University of Notre Dame press, 2013
Description matérielle : 1 vol. (XV-278 p.) : ill. ; 23 cm
Comprend : Machine language: Three implications of recursion for literary history ; The poet:
Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes calender and the construction of modernity ; The dramatic
quarto: recursion in William Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI ; Form: William Caxton's Recuyell
and William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida ; The edition: Assembly programs and
the protocols of canonization.
Note(s) : Includes bibliographical references and index
In Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity, William Kuskin asks
us to reconsider the relationship between literary form and historical period. As
Kuskin observes, most current literary histories of medieval and early modern English
literature hew to period, presenting the Middle Ages and modernity as discrete, separated
by a heterodox and unstable fifteenth century. In contrast, the major writers of the
sixteenth century - Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, the Holinshed
Syndicate, and their editors - were intense readers of the fifteenth century and consciously
looked back to its history and poetry as they shaped their own. Kuskin examines their
work in light of the writings they knew - that of Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, William
Caxton, and the anonymous London Chronicles - to demonstrate that fifteenth-century
textual forms exist within the most significant statements of literary modernity.
In short, by reconsidering the relationship between literary form and temporality,
we can reach across the firewall of 1500 to write a more complex literary history
of reading and writing than has previously been told. Moving beyond his central critique
- that notions of period and progress are poor measures of literary history - Kuskin
develops and demonstrates the hermeneutic power of recursivity as a powerful challenge
to a linear view of literary historical periods. Kuskin appropriates the term
"recursion" from computer science, where it describes a computer program's return
to a subprogram within itself to perform a more complex procedure. Books, for Kuskin,
are recursive: they imagine within themselves a return to an earlier moment of writing,
which, when read, they enact in the present. His is a profound claim for the grip
of the past on the present and, more locally, a reclamation of the importance of the
fifteenth century for any discussion of sixteenth-century literature and of the relationship
between the medieval and the early modern. -- Publisher
Sujet(s) : Littérature anglaise -- 1100-1500 (moyen anglais) -- Théorie littéraire
Littérature médiévale -- Théorie littéraire
Critique historique (littérature) -- Grande-Bretagne
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780268033255 (pbk.) (alk. paper). - ISBN 0268033250 (pbk.) (alk. paper)
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb43819433q
Notice n° :
FRBNF43819433
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)
