Persistent Forms
Explorations in Historical Poetics
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Since the mid-1980s, attempts to think history and literature together have produced much exciting work in the humanities. Indeed, some form of historicism can be said to inform most of the current scholarship in literary studies, including work in poetics, yet much of this scholarship remains undertheorized.
Envisioning a revitalized and more expansive historicism, this volume builds on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838–1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg. The volume includes previously untranslated texts of some of the major scholars in this critical tradition, as well as original contributions which place that tradition in dialogue with other thinkers who have approached literature in a globally comparatist and evolutionary-historical spirit. The contributors seek to challenge and complement a historicism that stresses proximate sociopolitical contexts through an engagement with the longue durée of literary forms and institutions. In particular, Historical Poetics aims to uncover deep-historical stratifications and asynchronicities, in which formal solutions may display elective affinities with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous social and political problems.
By recovering the traditional nexus of philology and history, Persistent Forms seeks to reinvigorate poetics as a theoretical discipline that would respond to such critical and intellectual developments as Marxism, New Historicism, the study of world literature, practices of distant reading, and a renewed attention to ritual, oral poetics, and genre.
“Persistent Forms introduces major early exponents [and also offers] new applications that illustrate the continuing vitality [of Historical Poetics]. The juxtaposition of the older and newer essays not only lends interest to the book but also shows Historical Poetics at work, not only in the grander literature that is the authors’ subject matter but also in the world of academic ideas about literature. A nice rhyme that makes for an especially attractive and interesting publication.”---—Emily Klenin, University of California Los Angeles
“This wide-ranging and stimulating volume goes a long way toward introducing English-language scholars to the perspectives opened by Veselovsky’s literary scholarship. The essays contained in the collection are of a uniformly high quality, and they give the reader a keen sense of the legacy and the promise of Historical Poetics.”---—Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University
These chapters are representative of the virtues of a volume that has no qualms about offering a dense and serious engagement with literature. They balance broad historical perception with nuanced interpretations. The editors and authors are astute and dedicated proponents of philology, of the capacity of the scholar to know the complexities of literature, history, and life. They are acutely aware of the persistence of fundamental cultural and artistic qualities that transcend national, linguistic, and even temporal boundaries. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the philologist’s duty is to preserve these phenomena by holding back the forces of forgetting and oblivion.---Slavic Review