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:
“The United States never lost a war or won a conference.”
—Will Rogers (1879–1935)
“No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
“In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American—on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens—of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)