Close and Strange Relations

Michael Davitt Bell. The Development of American Romance : The Sacrifice of Relation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. 291 + xiv pp. Giles Gunn. The Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion, and the American Imagination. New York : Oxford University Press, 1979.250 + x pp. John T. Irwin. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1980.371 + xii pp. These three critical books deal in diverse ways with the reading of American literature, especially the literature of the nineteenth century. At first glance, the approaches of the three critics do not offer a clear common denominator. Irwin writes about hieroglyphics and other linguistic signs, Gunn about religion and "otherness," and Bell about the mode of romance. But all three focus on the major writers of the period (with the exception of one notable novelist), and all three are concerned with the relation of literature to something else: Irwin, with the relation of linguisitc signs to art and to the world in general, as well as to the works of specific writers; Gunn, with the relation of art, and especially literature, to what he calls the "Other"; and Bell, with the "sacrifice of relation" of literature to the common-sense world in the nineteenth century. The first two critics deal with a number of disciplines: linguistics, psychology, music, theology, literary theory and the history of religion. Bell, though he is concerned rather more with purely literary questions, begins the study of American romance by considering the Common Sense and Associationist philosophers of the eighteenth century

Aesthetics · American literature · Art · Haven · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Literature · Period (music · Relation (database · Romance · Sacrifice · Symbol (formal · Theology · Classics · History · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Philosophy

• Anatomy of Criticism

  Northrop Frye•Anatomy of Criticism•1957

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