... LESSING’S FIRST POLEMIC By ROBERTERIC RENTSCHLER Lessing had highly unorthodox opinions about truth. He re- fused to accept any truths whatever, even those presumably handed down by Providence, and he...

... consciousness. All that is rendered in language, including the justifying faith of evangelical description, comes of the common, is the product of publicity. Though his twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics have thought otherwise, More’s contemporaries supposed his polemical contest with the evangelical...

... echo part of Dr. Johnson’s grumble over Lycidas: surely no man could have fancied that he read it with pleasure. ROSEMARYBOSTON California State College, Fullerton Cyrano de Bergerac and the Polemics of Modernity. By ERICAHARTH. New...

...Shuang Shen Hong Kong literary history presents a polemical case study for a contemporary rethinking of national literary history: Is it a local history or a global history? How should we describe the complex connections between the city’s sinophone literature and the literatures of mainland China...

...Ellen Rooney © 2000 University of Washington 2000 MLQ 61.1-02Rooney.ak 6/1/00 2:26 PM Page 17 Form and Contentment Ellen Rooney polemic: [Gr. war] A. adj. of or pertaining to controversy; controversial; disputatious...

... an awareness of how polemically charged the materials of festive mirth became in the course of Stuart rule. The introductory chapter lays out the book’s historical argument, dem- onstrating not simply the association of old holiday pastimes with the court but their active promotion by both James...

... and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. xxx + 184 pp. $12.95. Since these books belong to the genre of critical polemics, they more em- phatically invite a reviewer to take a stand than ask him to explore whatever insights, ideas, or methods they contribute to their field of inquiry...

... for the actual crises, of the 1650’s in particular. Now, pamphlets are good for many things: they provide us with a sense of a period‘s polemic and propaganda; they show, all too often, how incredibly far from the point polemic can lead, wittingly and unwit- tingly; they show us inflammations...

...: LiteraturelDerridalPhiEosophy.By GEOFFREYH. H.4RThlAN. Bal- timore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. xxx + 184 pp. $12.95. Since these books belong to the genre of critical polemics, they more em- phatically invite a reviewer to take a stand than ask him to explore whatever insights, ideas...

...: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. xxx + 184 pp. $12.95. Since these books belong to the genre of critical polemics, they more em- phatically invite a reviewer to take a stand than ask him to explore whatever insights, ideas, or methods they contribute to their field of inquiry...

... his uses of the terms. Concerning poetics, the author readily concedes that there are no theoretical writings from the period, so that the nature of poetics during this time must be deduced from a wide range of material-chiefly sermons, treatises, biographies, and polemical pamphlets. One...

... of his critical insights by subordinating them to an unnecessary polemical framework. For example, a long opening chapter treats Ship of Fools far more fully in terms of what Liberman regards as the critics’ uninformed and mistaken reception of it than in terms of the work itself. Would...

.... The provision of this kind of illumination is a primary aim of the series in which this book appears, for we believe in the importance of restoring history to criticism in a more sophisticated and subtle way than was done in earlier “background” studies or polemical political...

.... $22.00. “Where have the polemic or agonistic drives gone?” Walter Ong asked re- cently, adding, “It is hard to believe that they have simply disappeared from poetics and from academia generally In fact, as this book reveals, they have not disappeared from at least one corner of academia...

... of the book examines how Woolf transmuted her own form of feminist polemic into art. Transue’s chapter epigraphs, for example, generally ex- pand the relevance of her argument. One quotes an exchange between Clive Bell and Virginia Woolf in which he attacks her feminist perspective...

...-Marxist model of bourgeois subjectivity. Popular sermons and polemics, religious autobiogra- phy and jeremiads invaded the gentlemanly precincts of the canon, chang- ing its makeup forever. “Plainness” became an aesthetic and political value, as did the semantic insurgency, the textual...

... of discipline and restraint, always purchasing its insights by acceding to regrettable blindnesses. De Man may be the “most influential figure” in this tradition (31), but he is not alone. In what is for me the book’s best chapter, “Polemics against Presence Edmundson identifies an “anti-visual...

... expansive forms. The realism- versus- modernism polemics waged in the mid- 262 MLQ September 2012 twentieth century by Lukács, Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Wal- ter Benjamin, and others retain their signi cance even now because they were pressed...

... it, retold it for children, used it for polemic, reduced it to moral lessons. She calls the book a “history of Spenser’s readers” (6), who differ greatly in their motives for reading and their attitudes toward the poem, but she argues that even its most wayward critics respond to impulses in the text. While...

... in Eng- land from the 1530s through the Puritan revolution of the 164Os, and then devotes chapters to Spenser, Quarles, Donne, and Milton. A conclusion suggests how the Keformation polemic is a remote antecedent of modern critical debate wherein visually oriented formalism contends with theories...