The The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold - Softcover

Harrison, Antony H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0821419005 ISBN 13: 9780821419007

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2009

Synopsis

The career of Matthew Arnold as an eminent poet and the preeminent critic of his generation constitutes a remarkable historical spectacle orchestrated by a host of powerful Victorian cultural institutions.

The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold investigates these constructions by situating Arnold’s poetry in a number of contexts that partially shaped it. Such analysis revises our understanding of the formation of the elite (and elitist) male literary-intellectual subject during the 1840s and 1850s, as Arnold attempts self-definition and strives simultaneously to move toward a position of ideological influence upon intellectual institutions that were contested sites of economic, social, and political power in his era.

Antony H. Harrison reopens discussion of selected works by Arnold in order to make visible some of their crucial sociohistorical, intertextual, and political components. Only by doing so can we ultimately view the cultural work of Arnold “steadily and . . . whole,” and in a fashion that actually eschews this mystifying premise of all Arnoldian inquiry which, by the early twentieth century, had become wholly naturalized in the academy as ideology.

About this title

About the Author

Antony H. Harrison is Professor of English at North Carolina State University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0821419005
• ISBN 13: 9780821419007
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160