LEADER 03847nam 2200481 450 001 9910813371103321 005 20230421032646.0 010 $a1-5017-3301-X 024 7 $a10.7591/9781501733017 035 $a(CKB)4100000007126991 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC5965046 035 $a(DE-B1597)515101 035 $a(OCoLC)1100893686 035 $a(DE-B1597)9781501733017 035 $a(OCoLC)1148132272 035 $a(MdBmJHUP)muse72098 035 $a(Au-PeEL)EBL5965046 035 $a(EXLCZ)994100000007126991 100 $a20191125d1992 uy 0 101 0 $aeng 135 $aurcnu|||||||| 181 $ctxt$2rdacontent 182 $cc$2rdamedia 183 $acr$2rdacarrier 200 14$aThe meaning of literature /$fTimothy J. Reiss 210 1$aIthaca, New York ;$aLondon :$cCornell University Press,$d[1992] 210 4$dİ1992 215 $a1 online resource (x, 395 pages) 311 $a1-5017-3302-8 311 $a0-8014-2646-4 327 $tFrontmatter -- $tContents -- $tAcknowledgments -- $tIntroduction -- $tChapter I. A Poetics of Cultural Dismay -- $tChapter 2. The Sense of an Ending -- $tChapter 3. The Invention of Literature -- $tChapter 4. Violence and the Humanity of Reason -- $tChapter 5. Literature and Political Choice -- $tChapter 6. Politics and Reason, Ethics and Aesthetics -- $tChapter 7. Critical Quarrels and the Argument of Gender -- $tChapter 8. Inventing the Tradition -- $tChapter 9. Revolution in Bounds -- $tChapter 10. Sublimity and the Ends of Art -- $tEpilogue -- $tBibliography -- $tIndex 330 $aIn this searching and wide-ranging book, Timothy J. Reiss seeks to explain how the concept of literature that we accept today first took shape between the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, a time of cultural transformation. Drawing on literary, political, and philosophical texts from Central and Western Europe, Reiss maintains that by the early eighteenth century divergent views concerning gender, politics, science, taste, and the role of the writer had consolidated, and literature came to be regarded as an embodiment of universal values.During the second half of the sixteenth century, Reiss asserts, conceptual consensus was breaking down, and many Western Europeans found themselves overwhelmed by a sense of social decay. A key element of this feeling of catastrophe, Reiss points out, was the assumption that thought and letters could not affect worldly reality. Demonstrating that a political discourse replaced the no-longer-viable discourse of theology, he looks closely at the functions that letters served in the reestablishment of order. He traces the development of the idea of literature in texts by Montaigne, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes, among others; through seventeenth-century writings by such authors as Davenant, Boileau, Dryden, Rymer, Anne Dacier, Astell, and Leibniz; to eighteenth-century works including those of Addison, Pope, Batteux and Hutcheson, Burke, Lessing, Kant, and Wollstonecraft. Reiss follows key strands of the tradition, particularly the concept of the sublime, into the nineteenth century through a reading of Hegel's Aesthetics.The Meaning of Literature will contribute to current debates concerning cultural dominance and multiculturalism. It will be welcomed by anyone interested in literature and in cultural studies, includingliterary theorists and historians, comparatists, intellectual historians, historical sociologists, and philosophers. 606 $aLiterature$xPhilosophy 615 0$aLiterature$xPhilosophy. 676 $a801 700 $aReiss$b Timothy J.$f1942-$0695599 801 0$bMiAaPQ 801 1$bMiAaPQ 801 2$bMiAaPQ 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910813371103321 996 $aThe meaning of literature$94006863 997 $aUNINA