Is the biblical story about Israel’s “United Monarchy” history, fiction, or somewhere in between? This chapter reviews the scholarly discourse about the texts and introduces critical Bible study. Since the inception of critical scholarship, Bible scholars have noted that the narrative contains tensions and even contradictions that demonstrate the impossibility of accepting the details of the biblical narrative as an accurate reporting of events. Nevertheless, researchers long distinguished between the core narrative arc of the Saul and David stories, which was relatively consistent between the sources, and the many contradictions, alternative details, and smaller points, which were understood as attempts at polemic and apologetics, pushing one agenda or another, or simply rhetorical flourish. This meant that while many of the details in these accounts cannot be taken at face value as historical, the same critical reading of the text led biblical scholars to believe – until recently – in the historicity of the bigger picture. The reasons why this consensus has changed are primarily due to broader, “archaeological” considerations that are discussed in Chapter 3.

This book is not an attempt to apply to classical literature the habits of modem literary criticism, but as it might be supposed to be just that, I may as well forestall the supposition at the outset. Despite intermittent efforts in recent times, it is still comparatively rare for practising classicists to attempt such ’applications’ and, if anything, especially rare for Hellenists. But the present work represents something much less fashionable altogether: an attempt by a practising classicist to extend the ’theory’ of an aspect of literature in general in the practical context of the literature of antiquity. But in case the claim should seem unduly immodest, it can be said at once that the ’aspect of literature’ in question is, in itself, a small aspect, although not a trivial one. And by way of glossing the claim, let it be said also that the ’habits of modem literary criticism’ and the theoretical apparatus (if any) that accompanies them are not simply separable from their ’traditional’ counterparts. There is rather, as anyone familiar with the ancestry of modern criticism will know, a developing tradition, complex and many-sided, but continuous, which, in its development, sometimes modifies, sometimes innovates entirely and sometimes reconstitutes, in effect, earlier modes.

An opening chapter that addresses literary issues in the first book of the Bible, along with a review of some major works of influence scholarship that have shaped the field.

The introduction sets out the aims of the book and explains in brief the history of Hopkins’s writing and reception. It begins by discussing Hopkins’s posthumous publication and its distinctive effect upon his early reputation and influence, notably in relation to modernism. The introduction then goes on to relate the more recent historical emphasis in Hopkins scholarship before setting out the approach taken in the book and outlining its contents.

A brief coda situates evolutionary aestheticism within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century debates about aesthetic pleasure and its capacity to facilitate (or hinder) the establishment of a more just society. First, the coda conducts a partial survey of post-1960s critiques of I. A. Richards’s New Criticism and related approaches – critiques in which “aestheticism” often emerges as a byword for solipsism, obscurity, and political quietism. Shifting to more recent work by the literary scholars Isobel Armstrong and Elaine Scarry, the New Left philosopher Kate Soper, and the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, among others, the coda finally suggests that we are witnessing a renewed interest in the transformative potential of taste and the concomitant importance of cultural education.

This chapter concerns Lucian’s presentation of the contemporary display of literate knowledge and the practice of criticism and scholarship. That presentation is often obviously satirical, but Lucian’s tone and purpose also often remain elusive; Lucian’s voice is never easy to capture. Examples include Lucian’s account of the art of reading in On the Ignorant Book-Collector, and the posturing philosophers and ignorant grammarians of the Symposium; this latter case illustrates how Lucian’s concern with ‘the culture of criticism’ is always part of the ever-present negotiation with classical models which is a hallmark of his work, as of any major figure of the Second Sophistic. The same is true of the satire on Atticism in Lexiphanes. The final part of the chapter considers Lucian’s presentation of artistic technai, whether that be that art of writing history or the treatise on pantomime, On the Dance.

Videogames once seemed like they would have a part to play in the future of the book – the natural evolution of literary practice onto more expressly interactive digital platforms. Today, despite numerous compelling examples of videogames that support literary engagement, the comparison can seem strange, clichéd, banal, and beside the point. This chapter attempts to reset the comparison of videogames and literature for the present moment of digital culture. First, it presents a brief history of critical perspectives on videogames as literature. Second, it reflects on the contemporary status of and challenges to videogaming’s literary aspirations following recent shifts in the industry’s design priorities and monetization practices. This chapter does not present an argument regarding the status of games as literature. Rather, its goal is to describe the urgent work of literary studies in continuing to rethink digital gaming in the unfolding digital age.

This chapter examines the British essay in the age of the Internet, a period which has radically reshaped literary culture. Online magazines and journals now outnumber their print precursors, vastly increasing the venues available to budding essayists. But this transformation was predated by a more pivotal online trend: blogging. Beginning in the early years of the new millennium, and ending, effectively, with the rise of social media, the golden age of blogging allowed a wave of self-published writers to revolutionise literary criticism and cultural theory. Free from professional aims and ambitions, experimental and avidly personal, their essays left a lasting impression on both literary journalism and the academy. This chapter explores the underacknowledged possibilities and legacies of blogging, surveying the ways in which prominent bloggers reimagined the essay form.

This chapter shows how epigrams contributed to the formation and dissemination of literary criticism and theories of style, while also expressing ideas about literary history and the development of a given literary genre or τέχνη. These epigrams, which allowed their author to express ideas on literary tradition and style, were often written as pseudo-epitaphs for poets of the past. The use of companion pieces could also allow epigrammatists, such as Posidippus of Pella, Asclepiades of Samos, Dioscorides of Nicopolis and Antipater of Sidon, to comment on pairs of artists or poets who represented different and often opposing aesthetics. Posidippus’ and Dioscorides’ epigrams are of peculiar interest, since they seem to allude to lost treatises that used recurring frameworks to write the history of a given τέχνη, for example one of the visual arts or a literary genre. The ideas initially expressed in these prose treatises appear to have been reworked, in a very creative manner, by epigrammatists who were eager to formulate their own ideas about poetry.

The avant-garde writers of the Hellenistic period demonstrate an acute sense of literary tradition. In the previous chapter we have already seen some of the ways in which Theocritus develops his distinctive fragmented and polyphonous voice in relation to the past. In the programmatic narrative of Idyll 7, the search for an exemplary voice recedes through a series of lost poets’ songs towards an always already distanced model of excellence. So in Idyll 11, the much-discussed Hellenistic technique of reversing and restructuring the phraseology of earlier writing finds a parallel in the appropriation and manipulation of a Homeric figure: the Cyclops is taken back to a green and loving youth, back to a time before Homer’s writing of him as a paradigm of monstrous brutality. Indeed, in Hellenistic poetry we see again and again a search for an original and originating moment in the past ’before Homer wrote’.

The Introduction to this book offers an overview of the literary culture of the 1830s. It explores existing literary-critical approaches to the decade’s culture, and considers why the decade has proved so resistant to absorption in literary genealogies. This is a consequence of the decade’s own uncertainty about and self-conscious analysis of its literary temporality. The Introduction proposes that the 1830s are uniquely placed to direct the future interests of contemporary literary studies.

Following its explosive debut in October 1817, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine reached the heights of its notoriety in the following four years, and while it moderated its ferocity as the 1820s progressed, it continued to exert a powerful influence on British political, literary, and popular culture. Its early assaults on poets such as Percy Shelley and Lord Byron typically combined truculence with insight, and in the early 1830s it took the same approach to the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. Most notably, Blackwood’s writers like John Wilson, William Maginn, and Samuel Warren produced innovative terror fiction that rejected the ominous suggestions and careful evocations of ‘atmosphere’ in the late eighteenth-century Gothic in favour of the precision and the more direct realism of chapbooks, broadsheets, ‘true crime’ narratives, and newspaper accounts of executions, murders, and suicides. These fictions inspired Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and the three Brontë sisters, all of whom emulated and transformed the Blackwood’s tale of terror.

This afterword considers the contribution made by the collection as a whole. It provides a frame for thinking of the 1830s as an ongoing phenomenon, looking at its influence in historical fiction set in the 1830s from George Eliot to Amitav Ghosh and the ways in which literary critics have attempted to understand the varied activity of the decade.