Reading between the lines
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
Print Book, English, ©1993
University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wis., ©1993
Criticism, interpretation, etc
x, 339 pages ; 24 cm
9780299135409, 9780299135447, 0299135403, 0299135446
26502637
1. "Just Reading" or Reading Plato's Laws
2. Couples, Canons, and the Uncouth: Spenser-and-Milton
3. A Petitioning Society
4. The Egalitarian Giant: Representations of Justice in History/Literature
5. The Small Cat Massacre: Popular Culture in the 1587 "Holinshed"
6. Quod oportet versus quod convenit: John Donne, Kingsman?
7. The Good Old Cause. The Republican's Library. "The Civil War is not ended": Milton's Modern Readers
8. Sleeping with the Enemy. Milton Uncouples Himself. The Rape of Lucrece. Sleeping with the Enemy
Postscript: The Return from Theory