Bru, Sascha; Bruyn, Ben De; Delville, Michel (eds.), Literature Now.
Abstract
Bru, Sascha; Bruyn, Ben De; Delville, Michel (eds.), Literature Now. Key Terms and Methods for Literary History, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 310 pp. ISBN 978-0-7486-9925-4. 19.98 £. Hardcover 80 £.
Literature Now. Key Terms and Methods for Literary History. Notes on Contributors Introduction. 1. Archive. 2. Book. 3. Medium. 4. Translation. 5. Subjects. 6. Senses. 7. Animals. 8. Objects. 9. Politics. 10. Time. 11. Invention. 12. Event. 13. Generation. 14. Period. 15. Beauty. 16. Mimesis. 17. Style. 18. Popular. 19. Genre. Notes. Index.
When entering the world of academia and theory, we learn how words seldom have a single, historically steady meaning, so there is no such thing as a common sense of said words. Now and again it becomes inevitable to get reacquainted with the polysemy of “modernity’s contested lexicon” (as David Glover puts it in his contribution for this volume, on page 238), words that act out as “anti-concepts”, in the coinage of Irving Velody, “which can fruitfully generate the envisioning and revisioning of the world that the human sciences engages with” (“The archive and the human sciences: notes towards a theory of the archive”, in History of the Human Sciences Vol. 11, no 4, 1998, pp. 12).