Background
McGann, Jerome John was born on July 22, 1937 in New York City. Son of John Joseph and Marie Violet (Lecouffe) McGann.
(This collection of essays represents twenty-five years of...)
This collection of essays represents twenty-five years of work by a leading critic of Romanticism in general and Byron in particular. It demonstrates McGann's evolution as a scholar, editor, critic, theorist, and historian, and his engagement with the main schools of literary criticism since the advent of structuralism in the 1960s. Many of these essays have previously been available only in specialist scholarly journals. Now for the first time McGann's important and influential work on Byron can be appreciated by new generations of students and scholars.
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( "English literature," Yeats once noted, "has all but co...)
"English literature," Yeats once noted, "has all but completely shaped itself in the printing press." Finding this true particularly of modernist writing, Jerome McGann demonstrates the extraordinary degree to which modernist styles are related to graphic and typographic design, to printed letters--"black riders" on a blank page--that create language for the eye. He sketches the relation of modernist writing to key developments in book design, beginning with the nineteenth-century renaissance of printing, and demonstrates the continued interest of postmodern writers in the "visible language" of modernism. McGann then offers a philosophical investigation into the relation of knowledge and truth to this kind of imaginative writing. Exploring the work of writers like William Morris, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, as well as Laura Riding and Bob Brown, he shows how each exploits the visibilities of language, often by aligning their work with older traditions of so-called Adamic language. McGann argues that in modernist writing, philosophical nominalism emerges as a key aesthetic point of departure. Such writing thus develops a pragmatic and performative "answer to Plato" in the matter of poetry's relation to truth and philosophy.
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(Why did the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti come to domina...)
Why did the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti come to dominate the cultural geography of England between 1850 and 1910? And why, having attained that kind of eminence, did Rossetti's star decline so precipitously with the advent of Modernism? Finally, what is there about Rossetti's work and its historical aftermath that makes these questions important ones to ask? The cultural and aesthetic problems raised by those questions are the subject of this fascinating book. Jerome McGann, an eminent authority on Rossetti, demonstrates the programmatic aims of Rossetti's innovative multimedia work by focusing on two issues, one philosophical and one cultural. First, McGann shows how in Rossetti's work high-order thinking processes are modeled and executed as aesthetic practices. Second, from Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite 'art of the inner standing point' McGann argues that Rossetti forces a revision of the cultural norms commonly used for evaluating artistic success and failure.
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( Over the past decade literary critic and editor Jerome ...)
Over the past decade literary critic and editor Jerome McGann has developed a theory of textuality based in writing and production rather than in reading and interpretation. These new essays extend his investigations of the instability of the physical text. McGann shows how every text enters the world under socio-historical conditions that set the stage for a ceaseless process of textual development and mutation. Arguing that textuality is a matter of inscription and articulation, he explores texts as material and social phenomena, as particular kinds of acts. McGann links his study to contextual and institutional studies of literary works as they are generated over time by authors, editors, typographers, book designers, marketing planners, and other publishing agents. This enables him to examine issues of textual stability and instability in the arenas of textual production and reproduction. Drawing on literary examples from the past two centuries--including works by Byron, Blake, Morris, Yeats, Joyce, and especially Pound--McGann applies his theory to key problems facing anyone who studies texts and textuality.
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(This book examines the function of truth in poetry in an ...)
This book examines the function of truth in poetry in an age when both knowledge and truth have been defined in empirical and scientific terms. Professor McGann argues that for two hundred years imaginative writing has been seen as a literature of power rather than a literature of knowledge - a view standing at the core of all Kantian and Romantic aesthetics, which, throughout that time, have dominated the ideas of Euro-American studies. Emerging from the postmodern critique of those traditions, he considers the work of four writers of the period - Blake, Byron, D. G. Rossetti, and Pound - in discussing ways in which poetry may be seen to possess truth-functions and to constitute a pursuit of knowledge. Towards a Literature of Knowledge was delivered as the Clark Lecture at Trinity College, and as the Carpenter Lecture at the University of Chicago, both in 1988. It is the fifth and final work in a series which began in 1983 with The Romantic Ideology. Among the related works, The Beauty of Inflections (OUP, 1985) is now available in paperback (Clarendon Paperbacks, #12.95).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226558398/?tag=2022091-20
( Claiming that the scholarship and criticism of Romantic...)
Claiming that the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works have for too long been dominated by a Romantic ideology—by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations—Jerome J. McGann presents a new, critical view of the subject that calls for a radically revisionary reading of Romanticism. In the course of his study, McGann analyzes both the predominant theories of Romanticism (those deriving from Coleridge, Hegel, and Heine) and the products of its major English practitioners. Words worth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron are considered in greatest depth, but the entire movement is subjected to a searching critique. Arguing that poetry is produced and reproduced within concrete historical contexts and that criticism must take these contexts into account, McGann shows how the ideologies embodied in Romantic poetry and theory have shaped and distorted contemporary critical activities.
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(With emphasis on the theoretical and methodological, the ...)
With emphasis on the theoretical and methodological, the studies collected here serve a dual purpose: to explore the fault lines that mark various kinds of ahistorical literary studies from New Criticism to Poststructuralism; and to develop a fully elaborated socio-historical criticism for literary works. McGann moves toward his goal by means of four special sets of investigations: the relation between the so-called "autonomous" poem and its political/historical contexts; the relation of reception and history to literary interpretation; the problems of canon and the characterization of period; and the ideological dimensions of both literary works and criticism of such works. Central to his enquiry is the notion that, whether viewed as an experience or as an event, a literary work is a nexus of various concrete social determinations that can be specified as an aesthetic order.
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(Jerome McGann's exciting new work represents the most sig...)
Jerome McGann's exciting new work represents the most significant intervention in Romantic studies since his The Romantic Ideology. It takes as its prime aim the reading of neglected poetry, principally by women, which qualifies as either poetry of sensibility or poetry of sentiment. It is certain to provoke discussion among anyone interested in the hundred years of poetry it considers. Writers discussed include: Ann Batten Cristall, Benardin, Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Gray, Francis Greville, Felicia Hemans, William Jones, Keats, Ossian, Mary Robinson, Schiller, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Ann Yearsley. This newest work by the preeminent critic of Romantic poetry will attract students and scholars of English literature and Women's Studies.
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McGann, Jerome John was born on July 22, 1937 in New York City. Son of John Joseph and Marie Violet (Lecouffe) McGann.
Bachelor of Science, Le Moyne College, 1959. Master of Arts, Syracuse University, 1962. Doctor of Philosophy, Yale University, 1966.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), University Chicago, 1996.
From assistant professor to professor, University of Chicago, 1966-1975; professor, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1975-1980; Dreyfuss professor humanities, California Institute Technology, Pasadena, 1980-1986; John Stewart Bryan university professor, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, since 1987.
(Why did the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti come to domina...)
(With emphasis on the theoretical and methodological, the ...)
( Claiming that the scholarship and criticism of Romantic...)
( Over the past decade literary critic and editor Jerome ...)
(This book examines the function of truth in poetry in an ...)
(This collection of essays represents twenty-five years of...)
(Jerome McGann's exciting new work represents the most sig...)
( "English literature," Yeats once noted, "has all but co...)
(Book by McGann, Jerome J.)
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Fellow: American Academy Arts and Sciences. Member: Modern Language Association.
Married Anne Patricia Lanni, July 26, 1938. Children: Geoffrey, Christopher, Jennifer.