MacCabe and Tauchert will provide key texts accompanied by accessible but sophisticated critical explication, drawing on best practice in criticism and theory, and supplying a glossary of keywords and terms used as well as a list of selected further reading, after each essay. So that, for example, in her sample critical exploration and explication of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129, Tauchert found herself glossing almost twenty items, from authors' names to historical facts and critical terms, including 'Canonised', 'Formalist', Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, 'Metonym', John Milton, 'New Critics', Ovid, 'Patronage/Deciation', 'Philology', 'Pentameter', 'Puritanism', 'Romance', Philip Sidney, 'Sonnet', Edmud Spenser, 'Structuralism', 'Structure of Feeling' and so on . With only two or three exceptions the texts will mirror choices in the Norton Anthology: the primary teaching survey used almost ubiquitously in the USA and widely in the UK. The book will in effect turn the teaching anthology inside out, by focusing on single texts or parts of texts and bringing to bear on them all the critical resources at the modern critic's disposal to produce highly stimulating expositions, showing students what a 'literary' response might contain.
This work aims to address what has been widely perceived as an ongoing, and now worsening, disjunction between the advanced study of English in undergraduate degree programs, and incoming students' lack of awareness of the range of specialist knowledge, understanding, and skills integral to the productive study of English Literature. It is directed towards the significant markets comprising the annual intake of undergraduate students entering level 1 Higher Education English literature or related degree programmes in the UK and the US especially. Given the continuing, and in some places growing, interest in English as a degree choice, this market is a steady and expanding one. (There is also some incidental potential in the pre-university market.)
Existing degree-level English students would also find this book to provide a useful overview of the arena for research in English Literature and related subjects. This work differs from those already available in aiming to deploy the most advanced literary criticism in action in such a way as to provide examples of key skills and understanding essential to English studies, as well as offering a comprehensive introduction to the field of study itself.
The work will primarily be directed at raising prospective and existing undergraduates' consciousness of the key questions underpinning the continuing study of English Literature in the 21st century. In offering a range of specialist answers to the title question of 'how' to read English Literature, the work will also raise the abiding question of 'why' to read English Literature. Overall, the work will provide working examples of the cultural, aesthetic, and political potential in the 'literary', as well as an engagement with the changing definition of 'Englishness' itself. The work aims at the same time to make a return to the specificity of the study of 'English Literature', following the turn to Cultural Studies in 'English' departments over the last twenty years or so. What is it that the reading of literary texts offers contemporary students of English, and why is it that we must continue to develop and disseminate the very precise skills necessary to the productive reading of English Literature?
The authors plan a work of approximately twenty-four chapters (matching the two- semester model employed in most institutions). Put simply, the book will reproduce a key poem or passage, followed by a complete analysis. The analysis will offer examples of the techniques of close reading in context developed through the history of English Studies, to demonstrate both the activity of critical reading in action, and the important arguments concerning reading and interpretation raised by particular works or passages. The chapters will offer discrete performances of the 'reading' of English Literature at specific moments in literary and cultural history. It will provide the undergraduate with new experiences of advanced analysis and interpretation that will not have been available at pre-university level, but that will be aimed at accessibility for level 1 undergraduates.
The chosen examples will almost without exception derive from texts represented in the latest Norton anthology. One or two exemplary prose passages not in Norton will be added, but only where there is a vital point to be made. The texts will provide a tour of the history of English Literature, and are offered at the same time to present an argument about the role and status of the literary text through history, and a new definition of 'English Literature' as such in the light of contemporary disaffection with the term. Each chapter will be complete in itself, but also offer one working example of an evolving argument, and will be completed by a range of appropriate primary and critical sources for further reading and study. Readers will be introduced to advanced levels of linguistic and generic analysis embedded in biographical and historical material. The question of the canon and of the shifting significatory practices recorded in the literary text will be one of the key concerns of this argument.
