Alastair Fowler
Biographic Data
| ID | 3681668 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alastair Fowler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alastair |
| FAMILY NAME | Fowler |
| SIGNATURE | FOWLER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Remembered Words: Essays on Genre, Realism, and Emblems
Georgic and Pastoral: Laws Of Genre in The Seventeenth Century
This chapter addresses the laws of genre in the seventeenth century. The idea of laws of genre, at least in their modern form, was imported into literary theory from linguistics. At a time when literary conventions were thought of as supplementary language rules, genres understandably came to be regarded as coding systems. The genres need to be restored to their settings in history and literary tradition, and to see them once more as diachronic e…
‘Paradise Regained’: Some Problems of Style
This chapter focuses on John Milton’s Paradise Regained , looking at the alleged defects in its style. Several critics have spoken of a barer Miltonic style, found in Paradise Regained and in some other of his works, which contrasts with the grand style of Paradise Lost . This barer style is deliberately plain, and on principle avoids the ornate epic magniloquence of ‘swelling epithets thick-laid’. Indeed, Paradise Regained exhibits some low-styl…
Milton: Paradise Lost
Milton's Paradise Lost is one of the great works of literature, of any time and in any language. Marked by Milton's characteristic erudition it is a work epic both in scale and, notoriously, in ambition. For nearly 350 years it has held generation upon generation of scholars, students and readers in rapt attention and its profound influence can be seen in almost every corner of Western culture. First published in 1968, with John Carey's Complete …
The Title Justified
The Title Justified Alastair Fowler (bio) New Literary History has had an extraordinary run. For my own part, I am glad to acknowledge the great influence both of the journal and of its editor Ralph Cohen. His efforts to delineate the proper subject of the literary theorist and to foster it through conferences and editorial labors deserve to be recognized as strategically important to the subject. For at the 1972 Bellagio conference (and subseque…
The Formation of Genres in the Renaissance and After
Updating the concept of genres as associational complexes, this paper analyzes the key role in formation played by metaphors and other figures. These work to evoke the genre's associational domain. The figures may be deployed by the writer even before the genre has become an explicit convention recognizable by name. Some such figures (like the reed of pastoral) are well known. But the paper shows that the main genres all have their characteristic…
Apology for Rhetoric
From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: An Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England
Stephen L. Collins. From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: An Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. viii + 235 pp. $39.95. - Volume 43 Issue 1
Writing Criticism and Making Poems
Where they cannot contest the truth of the common interpretation, they get themselves room for dissertation by imaginary amphibologies, which they will have to be designed by the author. This disposition of finding out different significations in one thing, may be the effect of either too much, or too little wit: for men of a right understanding generally see at once all that an author can reasonably mean, but others are apt to fancy two meanings…
A History of English Literature
This delightful introduction to English literature, engaging, readable, and wise, is enlivened by the opinions and pleasures of a fine scholar-critic. Historically, it ranges from the Middle Ages to the present, concentrating on British writing but glancing also at selected American and Commonwealth authors, and lingering over the works of key figures such as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dickens
Country House Poems: The Politics of a Genre
Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes
Genre and the Literary Canon
whole. At most we talk about sizable subsets of writers and works of past. This limited field is current literary canon. Some have argued that much same is true of individual works: that in literary artifact permits us to attend now to small samples, now to larger traditions and groupings of which work in its unitary sense forms a mere constituent. This may be true in part, although much has still to be said on side of artifact's integrity. But h…
The Selection of Literary Constructs
T is an unrewarding time for history. The subject has captured new heights the last few decades; yet it loses ground. Even among those interested literature, one senses skepticism as to the possibility of valuable history, at least the traditional sense. On this skepticism F. W. Bateson, himself a historian the best sense, has blown the gaff, speaking openly of a non-subject par excellence.I Other critics, with an equal air of crisis, have called…
Periodization and Interart Analogies
HE GROUNDS for scepticism about interart analogies are extensive. One is the record of self-contradiction and silliness in transferring art historical terms: the best can say about the casual speculations even of Bernard Fehr, Wylie Sypher and Mario Praz is that they leave the hypothesis of analogy substantially untested.1 A more fundamental ground is C. S. Lewis's reason for not joining the search for meanings in historical periods: that the con…
The Life and Death of Literary Forms
HE SUBJECT proposed is the life and death of literary forms, not of literary works (a different subject). We say that the mock epic form has died out but The Rape of the Lock in some sense lives on, that the sonnet continues viable though Constable's Sonnets are moribund, that pastoral persists in fresh guise, even if Googe's Eclogues do not. The historical duration of works need not coincide with the duration of the forms they use. However, I mu…
Conceitful Thought: The Interpretation of English Renaissance Poems
110/ Renaissance and Reformation plays to show his response to an age when "there was not one theatre, but many, and they took to parody and jest of one another, without necessarily feeling rancour."Finally, in place of D.F
Genre and the Literary Canon
whole. At most we talk about sizable subsets of writers and works of past. This limited field is current literary canon. Some have argued that much same is true of individual works: that in literary artifact permits us to attend now to small samples, now to larger traditions and groupings of which work in its unitary sense forms a mere constituent. This may be true in part, although much has still to be said on side of artifact's integrity. But h…
The Life and Death of Literary Forms
HE SUBJECT proposed is the life and death of literary forms, not of literary works (a different subject). We say that the mock epic form has died out but The Rape of the Lock in some sense lives on, that the sonnet continues viable though Constable's Sonnets are moribund, that pastoral persists in fresh guise, even if Googe's Eclogues do not. The historical duration of works need not coincide with the duration of the forms they use. However, I mu…
The Selection of Literary Constructs
T is an unrewarding time for history. The subject has captured new heights the last few decades; yet it loses ground. Even among those interested literature, one senses skepticism as to the possibility of valuable history, at least the traditional sense. On this skepticism F. W. Bateson, himself a historian the best sense, has blown the gaff, speaking openly of a non-subject par excellence.I Other critics, with an equal air of crisis, have called…
Conceitful Thought: The Interpretation of English Renaissance Poems
110/ Renaissance and Reformation plays to show his response to an age when "there was not one theatre, but many, and they took to parody and jest of one another, without necessarily feeling rancour."Finally, in place of D.F
The Life and Death of Literary Forms
HE SUBJECT proposed is the life and death of literary forms, not of literary works (a different subject). We say that the mock epic form has died out but The Rape of the Lock in some sense lives on, that the sonnet continues viable though Constable's Sonnets are moribund, that pastoral persists in fresh guise, even if Googe's Eclogues do not. The historical duration of works need not coincide with the duration of the forms they use. However, I mu…
Periodization and Interart Analogies
HE GROUNDS for scepticism about interart analogies are extensive. One is the record of self-contradiction and silliness in transferring art historical terms: the best can say about the casual speculations even of Bernard Fehr, Wylie Sypher and Mario Praz is that they leave the hypothesis of analogy substantially untested.1 A more fundamental ground is C. S. Lewis's reason for not joining the search for meanings in historical periods: that the con…
The Selection of Literary Constructs
T is an unrewarding time for history. The subject has captured new heights the last few decades; yet it loses ground. Even among those interested literature, one senses skepticism as to the possibility of valuable history, at least the traditional sense. On this skepticism F. W. Bateson, himself a historian the best sense, has blown the gaff, speaking openly of a non-subject par excellence.I Other critics, with an equal air of crisis, have called…
Genre and the Literary Canon
whole. At most we talk about sizable subsets of writers and works of past. This limited field is current literary canon. Some have argued that much same is true of individual works: that in literary artifact permits us to attend now to small samples, now to larger traditions and groupings of which work in its unitary sense forms a mere constituent. This may be true in part, although much has still to be said on side of artifact's integrity. But h…
Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes
Country House Poems: The Politics of a Genre
A History of English Literature
This delightful introduction to English literature, engaging, readable, and wise, is enlivened by the opinions and pleasures of a fine scholar-critic. Historically, it ranges from the Middle Ages to the present, concentrating on British writing but glancing also at selected American and Commonwealth authors, and lingering over the works of key figures such as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dickens
Writing Criticism and Making Poems
Where they cannot contest the truth of the common interpretation, they get themselves room for dissertation by imaginary amphibologies, which they will have to be designed by the author. This disposition of finding out different significations in one thing, may be the effect of either too much, or too little wit: for men of a right understanding generally see at once all that an author can reasonably mean, but others are apt to fancy two meanings…
Apology for Rhetoric
From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: An Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England
Stephen L. Collins. From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: An Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. viii + 235 pp. $39.95. - Volume 43 Issue 1
The Formation of Genres in the Renaissance and After
Updating the concept of genres as associational complexes, this paper analyzes the key role in formation played by metaphors and other figures. These work to evoke the genre's associational domain. The figures may be deployed by the writer even before the genre has become an explicit convention recognizable by name. Some such figures (like the reed of pastoral) are well known. But the paper shows that the main genres all have their characteristic…
The Title Justified
The Title Justified Alastair Fowler (bio) New Literary History has had an extraordinary run. For my own part, I am glad to acknowledge the great influence both of the journal and of its editor Ralph Cohen. His efforts to delineate the proper subject of the literary theorist and to foster it through conferences and editorial labors deserve to be recognized as strategically important to the subject. For at the 1972 Bellagio conference (and subseque…
Milton: Paradise Lost
Milton's Paradise Lost is one of the great works of literature, of any time and in any language. Marked by Milton's characteristic erudition it is a work epic both in scale and, notoriously, in ambition. For nearly 350 years it has held generation upon generation of scholars, students and readers in rapt attention and its profound influence can be seen in almost every corner of Western culture. First published in 1968, with John Carey's Complete …
Remembered Words: Essays on Genre, Realism, and Emblems
Georgic and Pastoral: Laws Of Genre in The Seventeenth Century
This chapter addresses the laws of genre in the seventeenth century. The idea of laws of genre, at least in their modern form, was imported into literary theory from linguistics. At a time when literary conventions were thought of as supplementary language rules, genres understandably came to be regarded as coding systems. The genres need to be restored to their settings in history and literary tradition, and to see them once more as diachronic e…
‘Paradise Regained’: Some Problems of Style
This chapter focuses on John Milton’s Paradise Regained , looking at the alleged defects in its style. Several critics have spoken of a barer Miltonic style, found in Paradise Regained and in some other of his works, which contrasts with the grand style of Paradise Lost . This barer style is deliberately plain, and on principle avoids the ornate epic magniloquence of ‘swelling epithets thick-laid’. Indeed, Paradise Regained exhibits some low-styl…
Art (14 works) · Literature (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · History (9 works) · Art history (6 works) · Linguistics (4 works) · Poetry (4 works) · The Renaissance (4 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · History (3 works)