Volume 33, Number 21 & 22 · January 15, 1987
Monument to the End of an Era
By Oliver Taplin
The Cambridge History of Classical Literature Vol 1: Greek Literature
edited by P.E. Easterling, edited by B.M.W. Knox
Cambridge University Press, 936 pp., $85.00
'The History of Literature as Provocation' or 'Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory' or '…to Literary Scholarship'—these are some of the titles that have been prefixed to Hans Robert Jauss's provocative and now notorious inaugural lecture at the University of Konstanz in 1967.[1] His mission was to rescue literature from various methods of study that were blind to the passage of time and to give it a sense of history. This does not mean he wanted to return to antiquarianism and to the notion that we should cast off the pollution of our present in order to go back in purity to the past. On the contrary Jauss wanted literary history to provoke (as he put it in another essay in 1969)
Review, 3306 words
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