Twenty-Five Years New Literary History a Tribute to Ralph Cohen

IWHEN NEW LITERARY HsronRY entered the stage in 1969, there then, no Critical Inquiry, no Diacritics, no new-policy PMLA; there was then no English literary journal devoted to critical theory or to reconsideration of literary history, its nature and possibilities. New Literary History was conceived as move against the critical current; its aim was to inquire into the theoretical bases of practical criticism and, in doing so, to reexamine the relation between past works and present critical and theoretical needs.' This basic thrust has been sustained for the last twenty-five years, making New Literary History into what Ralph Cohen had wished it to become, a journal that is challenge to the profession of letters (421). The very fact thatjournals like Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, and boundary 2 emerged in the wake of New Literary History bears eloquent testimony to Ralph Cohen's heightened awareness of the profession being up for new turn at time when close reading was nothing but a nursery of as Wolfgang Kayser once phrased it. It was Ralph Cohen's editorial policy to raise issues that were not in the orbit of the discipline when the journal was launched, such as: What is Literature, History, Interpretation, Criticism, and to what extent does the exploration of these issues require theoretical approach? Thus basic presuppositions and assumptions of the study of literature came under close scrutiny which, in turn, had to be contextualized in order to trace the provenance of what has been posited in the theoretical approaches concerned. The very focus of the journal made it necessary to branch out into adjacent fields, inspecting ways of thinking in the arts and sciences. The procedures in modern technology and model-building, the basic fabric of social institutions as well as of interpretations, the patterns of culture and everyday life, the interrelation of interpretation and creation were only few of the themes examined in various issues from differing viewpoints and disciplines

Art · Art history · History of literature · Literature · Tribute · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Themes in Literature Analysis

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  Walter Friedrich Veit•New Literary History•2008

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• Comparatismo e Historiografía literaria en América Latina

  Open Access•Eduardo F Coutinho•El Hilo de la Fabula•2021

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• Erecting the Institutional Edifice of Theory

  Gregory Jones-Katz•History of Humanities•2025

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