Description
Book SynopsisThe Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of ''the literary'' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading.Seth Lerer presents an original take on tradition in the literary imagi
Trade Review...you will be hard pressed to find a better model of attentiveness to the matter at hand, of wide-ranging, meticulously observed appreciation, of unpedantic collegial dialogue, of lucid address. * Marshall Brown, Modern Philology *
The real pleasure of Lerers essay lies in his elegant close readings and his fluid mapping of intertextual pathways. Tradition is a quietly affecting book, not least in the way that it encourages readers to reflect on their own archives of the self, and the particular stories that have shaped us along the way. * Keith Hopper, Times Literary Supplement *
Table of ContentsPreface: 'Today, makes Yesterday mean' 1: Traditions of Tradition 2: The Copperfield Experience 3: My 1984 4: 'This Loved Philology': Poems of the Fall 5: The Tears of Odysseus Acknowledgements
