Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity - Paperback

by Jean-Pierre Mileur (Author)

Literary Revisionism places Bloom, his ally Geoffrey Hartman, and their contemporary literary situation in a borad historical and theoretical context by exploring the provenance of the revisionist stance in the origins of the New Testament canon, in the works of the Sensibility Poets and the great Romantics, and in the emergence of our own secular modernity. The results is an uncanny sense of the wholeness of the tradition, ironically coupled with an awareness that we are cut off from the past by the very insistence with which we employ criticism to maintain the fiction of an isolate modernity. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

Back Jacket

This is a brilliant and moving study of perhaps the most brilliant and moving close-reader, theoretician of literary history, and humanist of our time: Harold Bloom. while it is possible to feel towards Bloom 'the debt immense of endless gratitude' just for his infallible ear--his omniscient and merciful reading of the poetic heart and memory--Mileur does more: He takes seriously Boom's 'sorrows of literary history' and interprets this melancholy not just as Bloom's ruling passion but as a central feature of the post-enlightenment poet's motive and message. To read this book is to feel impelled to discriminate more radically between the twentieth century's most creative, critical enlighteners and those evening mists, from the Eliotic to the deconstructionist, who have glided at academic heels and slithered into momentary attention. It is also to understand the truly revisionary character of the Romantic poets themselves, defending against the future, against death, through multifarious fictions of continuity with the past. --Leslie Brisman "I don't see how this brilliant book can fail to gain a very large and very enthusiastic academic audience. Mileur not only explains the provenance of "revisionism--or, more simply put, the current panic of literary criticism at its own validity-but he relates that contemporary phenomenon to the history of Gnostic thought and to the sheer business of teaching literature to the unconverted with remarkable skill and eloquence." --Frank McConnell

Author Biography

Jean-Pierre Mileur is Professor of English, General Literature and Rhetoric at Binghamton University, the State University of New York.