Retrospectives: Essays in Literature, Poetics and Cultural History

Terence Cave's work has made a major contribution to the rethinking of the relationship between literature, history and culture over the last half-century. Retrospectives brings together substantially revised versions of studies written since 1970: together they constitute a searching methodological investigation of the practice of reading past texts. How do our ways of reading such texts compare with those practiced in the periods when they were written? How do we distinguish between what a text meant in its own time and what it has come to mean over time? And how might reading provide access to past experiences? The book's epicentre is early modern French culture, but it extends to that culture's ancient Greek and Roman models, its European contexts, and the afterlives of some of its themes, from Pascal via George Eliot to Angela Carter.

Terence Cave is Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Research Fellow at St John's College: he is also a Fellow of the British Academy. His publications include Pr-histories and Pr-histories II (1999 and 2001), Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (1988), and The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (1979). Neil Kenny teahes at the University of Cambridge and Wes Williams of Oxford (and St Edmund Hall). Both specialize in early modern French literature and thought.