What we seek out and note in earlier literature is what is most prominent, satisfying, and comprehensible to the contemporary imagination. (RB)

Discusses the emergence of a new kind of criticism which has as its philosophical starting point the rejections of mimesis, and traces the process leading up to the development of this critical theory--a process which began in English criticism of the romantic period. (DD)

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…

Focuses on the way sexual excesses inscribed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Oriental discourses served to open up "queer" spaces in Romantic literature, while analyzing the degree to which the master narrative of British colonial domination was in part dependent on narratives of the sexual degeneracy of the Other. Focuses on…

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)

Asserts that rigorous historicism might change the following: (1) American literary study, by dropping the traditional nationalist project; (2) the notion of canon, by abandoning it; (3) and the institutional structure that supports academic literary criticism, by interrogating current critical conversation and, by recuperating its history,…