Recursive origins : writing at the transition to modernity / William Kuskin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kuskin, William.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Middle English, 1100-1500--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

English literature.

Literature, Medieval--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Literature, Medieval.

Historical criticism (Literature)--England.

Historical criticism (Literature).

Literature and history--England.

Literature and history.

England.

Physical Description:

xv, 278 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2013]

Summary:

In this original study, William Kuskin asks us to reconsider the relationship between literary form and historical period. Kuskin suggests that modernity is far from a distinct historical category but is profoundly contingent on the Middle Ages. He sets out a compelling critique of the modernist literary-history paradigm of linear chronology and rupture, and makes an engaging case for "recursion" as a new principle by which literary historians can trace the presence of the "old" and the "new." 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. Recursive Origins will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval or Renaissance literature, the history of the book, medieval-Renaissance periodization, and theories of literary history. Book jacket.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9780268033255

0268033250

OCLC:

821025219