Community, Religion, and Literature: Essays

Forsideomslag
University of Missouri Press, 1995 - 334 sider

As the last collection of Cleanth Brooks's essays before his death, Community, Religion, and Literature represents his final, considered views on the reading of literature and the role it plays in our society. He argues that the proper and essential role of literature lies in giving us our sense of community. Yet he denounces the extent to which literature, too, is now being usurped by the critics who see writing as pure language. He believes that just as religion renders truth of another sort, so literature is an expression of the "truth about human beings." More and more in this age of science, literature has "assumed the burden of providing civilization with its values."

Community, Religion, and Literature offers students of literature the opportunity to understand what Cleanth Brooks was actually saying, rather than what others have said he was saying.

 

Indhold

In Search of the New Criticism
1
The Primacy of the Linguistic Medium
16
The Crisis in Culture as Reflected in Southern Literature
32
Religion and Literature
50
Frost and Nature
63
The New Criticism
80
A Prophetic Document
98
Faulkners Criticism of Modern America
113
Science Religion and Literature
199
T S Eliot and the American South
214
The Optimists Daughter
225
The Past Alive in the Present
235
The Primacy of the Reader
244
Literature in a Technological Age
259
Contemporary American Literature
275
Nature and Human Nature in the Poetry of Robert Frost
291

Episode and Anecdote in the Poetry of Robert Penn Warren
126
As I Remember Him
143
The Primacy of the Author
170
A Subject Matter? A Discipline? A Special Amalgam?
184
In Celebration
305
The Real Importance of the Humanities
312
Index
329
Copyright

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Almindelige termer og sætninger

Om forfatteren (1995)

Cleanth Brooks was born in Murray, Kentucky on October 16, 1906. He was educated at Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Oxford universities. From 1932 to 1947, he taught English at Louisiana State University and then moved on to Yale University. At Yale, he helped to articulate the principles of New Criticism, which dominated literary studies in the 1940s and 1950s. He coedited the journal Southern Review with Robert Penn Warren. He also wrote several titles in collaboration with Warren, including Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction. A third work Understanding Drama was written in collaboration with Robert Heilman. His other works included The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry and Modern Poetry and the Tradition. He died on May 10, 1994.

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