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基本説明
Tests traditional notions of genre by analyzing parallels between works that confound existing categories.
Full Description
In this work, Sharon Cadman Seelig tests traditional notions of genre by analyzing parallels between works that confound existing categories. Seelig pairs three 17th-century prose works with three other works, each of a later century: Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" with Sterne's "Tristram Shandy", Browne's "Religio Medici" with Thoreau's "Walden", and Donne's "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" with Eliot's "Four Quartets". Proceeding from her authors' similarities in method and common sets of assumptions, (such as concern with process and discovery, time and eternity, or the nature of the self), she uncovers parallels showing that genre is not simply a set of formal features but rather a particular way of seeing the world that grows out of authorial attitude, impulse and occasion. Seelig's thesis - that a view of the world generates a rhetorical stance, stylistic mode and literary form - challenges many of the assumptions of traditional genre theory. She shifts attention from general formalist principles to the idiosyncratic and personal qualities of particular works and their marks of being connected - in ways that go beyond allusions of borrowings - to kindred texts.
Her account of how texts generate other texts brings a fresh approach to the study of literary influence and implicitly argues that knowledge of immediate cultural contexts can no longer be viewed as sufficient for understanding important Western texts. In addition to its appeal to students and scholars interested in Sterne, Thoreau, Eliot or 17th-century literature, "Generating Texts" should interest literary sholars and students more generally, particularly those concerned with the interconnections between literary periods and genres.
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