ABSTRACT

First published in 1989, this collection of essays brings into focus the history of a specific form of violence – that of representation. The contributors identify representations of self and other that empower a particular class, gender, nation, or race, constructing a history of the west as the history of changing modes of subjugation. The essays bring together a wide range of literary and historical work to show how writing became an increasingly important mode of domination during the modern period as ruling ideas became a form of violence in their own right. This reissue will be of particular value to literature students with an interest in the concept of violence, and the boundaries and capacity of discourse.

chapter |26 pages

Introduction

Representing violence, or “how the west was won”

part |90 pages

Early Modern Culture: Putting the Politics Back into Poetics

chapter |16 pages

The scene of tyranny

Violence and the humanistic tradition

chapter |32 pages

“Drunk with the Cup of Liberty”

Robin Hood, the carnivalesque, and the rhetoric of violence in early modern England

part |77 pages

Modern Culture: The Triumph of Depth

chapter |14 pages

Hysteria and the end of carnival

Festivity and bourgeois neurosis

chapter |23 pages

Violence and the liberal imagination

The representation of Hellenism in Matthew Arnold

part |64 pages

Contemporary Culture: The Art of Politics

chapter |22 pages

“Bringing it all back home”

American recyclings of the Vietnam War

chapter |20 pages

Figures of violence

Philologists, witches, and Stalinistas

chapter |20 pages

The violence of rhetoric

Considerations on representation and gender