Literature, Theory, History

This book discusses literature, theory and history in close relation. Its main focus is on comparative literature and history, culture, poetics, rhetoric, theatricality, genre and gender. The method blends my skills as a poet, historian and literary critic, so that there is a balance of close reading with theory and historical context. The enclosed Table of Contents will give an idea of the scope of the book, which begins with a section entitled, “Literature,” including discussions of comparative literature, comparative narratives of European expansion into the New World, and the relation between literature and culture. It not only focuses on primary literary works, but key theoretical and historical texts. In the section on “Theory” questions of otherness, authority, recognition, comparison, possible worlds, imagination, comedy, difference, poetics and stereotyping all addressed in discussions of classical and modern texts and theorists of the past sixty years ranging from Jerome Bruner through George Steiner to Barbara Johnson. The third section, “History,” examines the relation between poetry (literature) and history through a discussion of French and other translations of Bartolome de Las Casas, alternative critiques of colonialism, new historicism and a couple of historians of conquest and globalization. The book examines an array of work in key practical and theoretical areas and should appeal to those interested in literature, theory, culture and history. The audience will be, as is my usual hope with my books with Palgrave Macmillan, a combination of specialists, scholars outside the field, undergraduate and graduate (post-graduate) students and general readers.

Jonathan Hart is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. He has published eight books with Palgrave Macmillan, most recently, Shakespeare: Poetry, History and Culture (2009) and Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2011). He is also a poet and his most recent works are Dreamwork (2010) and Musing (2011), a book of sonnets. He has held visiting appointments at Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, and the Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris III).