A Companion to Literary Evaluation (eBook)

RICHARD BRADFORD is Research Professor at Ulster University, UK, and Visiting Professor at the University of Avignon, France. His 40 books cover topics as varied as stylistics, Russian Formalism, crime writing, the history of English poetry, modern fiction, and literary aesthetics. His recent works include literary biographies such as Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith and Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer. MADELENA GONZALEZ is Chair of Anglophone Literature at the University of Avignon, France, where she heads the Master's program in English Studies and the multidisciplinary research group "Cultural Identity, Texts and Theatricality" (ICTT). She has published widely on contemporary Anglophone literature, theater, and culture. She is co-editor of Aesthetics and Ideology in Contemporary Literature and Drama. KEVIN DE ORNELLAS is Lecturer in English Renaissance Literature at Ulster University, UK. He served as Associate Editor for the two-volume Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature and authored The Horse in Early Modern English Culture: Bridled, Curbed, and Tamed. He has published 20 peer-reviewed essays, dozens of book and play reviews, and hundreds of encyclopedia articles.

Notes on Contributors vii

Introduction 1
Richard Bradford

1 Literary Values 8
Peter Lamarque

2 Complexity as a Criterion for the Evaluation of Literature 42
Anja Müller-Wood

3 Schooled Aesthetic Asymmetries: (Back)firing the Canon in Secondary Education 57
D.J. Howells

4 Defining Literature: The Route to Aesthetic Evaluation 76
Paolo Euron

5 Kathleen Raine: The Less Received 92
Andrew Keanie

6 "Is (This) Translation Any Good?": The Evaluation of Literary Translation 110
Giuseppe Sofo

7 The Algorithm of Beauty: Aesthetic Judgment as a Science 120
Madelena Gonzalez

8 Literary Value and the Question of Insight on Humanly Relevant Matters 135
Emanuela Tegla

9 How Books Get Reviewed: Evaluation and the Freelance Journalist 150
D.J. Taylor

10 A Lifetime of Evaluation 156
Penelope Stenning

11 Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice 166
Rafe McGregor

12 "How to Bring So Goode a Matter into a Better Forme": The Value of the Horse in Early Modern Writing 179
Elisabetta Deriu

13 Reading Performance for the Values Underpinning Production 195
Amanda Finch

14 Bridging the Gap between Page and Performance Poetry 212
Karen Simecek

15 Aesthetics and Efficacy in Applied and Community Theater 226
Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill

16 Antonin Artaud Beyond Judgment: A Radio Reading of "To Have Done With The Judgement of God" with Local Prisoners 243
Gary Anderson and Niamh Malone

17 "Chief of the Second Rate": James Shirley and Dramatic Value 259
Heidi Craig

18 "The Glories of our Blood and State" and The Lady of Pleasure: The Genius of [Counterfactual] Britain's National Writer--James Shirley 271
Kevin De Ornellas

19 Evaluating Literary Evaluation 287
Peter Barry

20 The Horrible Legacy of Modernism 299
Richard Bradford

21 Evaluating Poems 331
Amy Burns and Richard Bradford

Index 346