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Full Description
"As opposed to a cultural history of literature," writes David Hill Radcliffe, "'Forms of Reflection' is literary history of culture." In writing a history of meditational writings from Donne to Coleridge, Radcliffe aims to develop a historically-informed account of how one particular genre funtioned as an agent of change in the early modern era - and uses that understanding to challenge the ways in which criticism is practised today. Radcliffe argues that georgic writing, with its emphasis on political economy and material history, did not accord with modernist understandings of culture as the play of disinterested imagination. At the same time, its assessments of commerce and discrimination are equally at odds with recent understandings of culture as a nexus of hegemonic forces. But rather than develop a more sophisticated concept of culture to historicize the differences found in earlier writing, Radcliffe uses those differences to historicize the concept of culture. That is, instead of treating kinds of writing as a product of culture, he describes culture as a product of kinds of writing.
