Reading Between The Lines - Softcover

Patterson, Annabel M.

9780299135447: Reading Between The Lines

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299135446 ISBN 13: 9780299135447

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992

For those exhausted by the highly charged debates and polarized climate of literary studies today, Annabel Patterson’s Reading Between the Lines offers a strategic compromise: a moderate stance between the radical opponents and the zealous protectors of the traditional Western canon. She reconsiders the value of reading the white, male, canonical writers of antiquity and of early modern England, finding in them a set of values different from those supposed by both sides in the Great Books quarrel. Rather than being the unthinking or deliberate promoters of political or cultural uniformity, these writers subjected such conventional notions to critical scrutiny and even promoted alternatives. The key to this revisionary argument is “reading between the lines,” a strategy usually associated with the eccentric conservativism of Leo Strauss, but which, Patterson shows, is not only implicit in all acts of interpretation, but played a particularly important role in an age when writing between the lines was often essential for the writer’s survival.
Patterson argues that, if we learn how to read those old and seemingly alien texts, which themselves responded to rapid and unsettling change in the arenas of religion, politics, and education, they have much that is liberating to tell us about our own expanding culture, including the importance of republican constitutionalism, freedom of speech, and civic and religious toleration. This salutary redefinition of “humanism” arises from Patterson’s essays on Plato, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton; but the book also deals with the “gendered” topics of rape and divorce and with “popular culture” in the sixteenth century and today. These interests are not on opposite sides of some theoretical boundary, but (as Patterson demonstrates from contemporary novels by Joseph Heller and Nancy Price) interdependent.

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About the Author:

Annabel Patterson is professor of English and literature at Duke University. Her other books include Censorship and Interpretation, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

From Library Journal:

In this superbly written contribution to cultural studies, noted critic Patterson (English, Duke Univ.) challenges the implicit censorial tendencies of current ideological readings of the Western canon by proposing a theory of reading that reveals how, in censoring societies, writers have written themselves and their opinions "between the lines" of their texts. Using this strategy, Patterson recovers writers as diverse as Joseph Heller and Plato, Milton and Spenser, Nancy Price and Shakespeare, for cultural conversation. In particular, her readings of Donne's satires, Holinshed's Chronicles , and Milton's divorce pamphlets sparkle with insight into the politics and culture of early modern England. An extremely valuable contribution to the cultural history of early modern English literature. Highly recommended for academic libraries.
- Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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