Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin

Description

Literature and literary criticism throughout the twentieth century are famous for their proclamations of the death of the author, the eclipse of character and the "nothingness of personality," as Borges put it. Walter Reed investigates the ideas of personhood developed by one of the most influential literary theorists of the last century: Mikhail Bakhtin. He finds in Bakhtin a personalism based on the idea of an ongoing dialogue between authors and their heroes in imaginative literature. Such a model of inter-personality, Reed argues, allows us to appreciate the rich possibilities of personhood set forth in the earlier nineteenth-century period of Romanticism. Elaborating a new general theory and providing close readings of classic works of Romantic poetry and fiction, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin offers a better understanding of the preoccupation with the individual, creative self that lay at the heart of this revolutionary literature that still speaks to readers today.

Walter L. Reed (Ph.D.Yale) is theWilliam Rand Kenan, Jr. University Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts atEmory University, USA. Professor Reed has taught literature at Yale, the University of Texas, Austin, and Emory University. His publications include Dialogues of the Word (1993), An Exemplary History of the Novel (1981) Meditations on the Hero: A Study of the Romantic Hero in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1974).

"The real treasures of Heffernan's book lie in the extraordinary series of readings and close analyses each of its chapters has to offer... For on the whole, this book stands as a great success, and should go a long way in establishing the importance of hospitality within the field of literary studies." --Peter Melville, Review 19 "Can one Russian philosopher of communication help us to explain Romantic literature?...Fortunately for this book, Bakhtin is one of the great original thinkers of the past century, and Reed's ambition to coordinate a theorist and a whole period is matched by his caution. Having taught Romantic writers in a comparative context for four decades, and having produced studies of the novel and of Bakhtin, Reed offers a grand scholarly synthesis in a relatively short study." --Review 19 "In the past half-century Mikhail Bakhtin has been read in many ways, but he has yet to be widely accepted as a Romantic or a Romanticist, or at any rate a critic whom one can use to read Romanticism ... Walter L. Reed's remarkable new book, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin, prompts us to reconsider this view, and in typically Bakhtinian fashion does so from a position of outsidedness ... it firmly establishes the relevance of Bakhtin to discussions of Romanticism and perhaps suggests ways of reading Bakhtin himself in the proper critical spirit, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin should be necessary reading for the respectful and suspicious alike." -Matthew Walker, Stanford University, Slavic and East European Journal