Recovering Lost Authority in American Novels
In the 1970s Parker pioneered the study of lost authority in standard American novels by Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer and others. His work on Stephen Crane repeatedly evoked threats of lawsuits from Fredson Bowers for exposing sloppiness in both theory and practice in the Virginia Edition. Parker’s 1984 Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction was the first book systematically to bring biographical evidence to bear on textual theory, literary criticism, and literary theory. Frequently attacked by reviewers trained in the New Criticism as well as by proponents of the New Bibliography of W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons has nevertheless become a classic and has since the late 1980s been applied to their problems by biblical, classical, and medieval scholars as well as by critics of more modern literature. See for example Sally Bushell, Text as Process, John Van Engen, Past and Future of Medieval Studies, Alison M. Jack, Texts Reading Texts Sacred and Secular 2, Robert S. Kawashima, “Comparative Literature and Biblical Studies: The Case of Allusion,” Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts, Michael J. Meyer, Literature and Music, James J. O’Hara, “Trying Not to Cheat: Responses to Inconsistencies in Roman Epic,” and Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age.
Read more about this topic: Hershel Parker
Famous quotes containing the words lost, authority, american and/or novels:
“All this stuff you heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans, traditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle.... Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost—and will never lose—a war, because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.”
—Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939)
“Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomised our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)