The force of tradition

The force of tradition: Response and Resistance in Literature, Religion, and Cultural Studies is a selection of essays recently published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. The book is edited by Donald G. Marshall.

How do we stand in relation to everything that comes down to us from the past? Is the very idea of tradition still useful in the wake of historical ruptures, such as the Holocaust, changes in the canon, and the end of colonialism? The concept of tradition has gained renewed importance in recent cultural studies. Suspicion of tradition as culturally narrow and oppressive is a persistent theme of modernity and has increased lately with the resurgence of religious traditionalism around the globe. At the same time, various groups demanding recognition for their distinctive cultural identity have reclaimed their traditions.

(...) The essays in this volume offer varying, even disparate analyses of religious, literary, and cultural traditions and both responses and resistance to them in a variety of philosophers, novelists, and theologians. They examine works by Gadamer, Royce, MacIntyre, Plato, Jacques Derrida, Charlotte Brontë, Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edith Wharton, Chinua Achebe, John Fowles, Heinrich Böll, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cotton Mather, Thomas Kuhn, Mikhail Bakhtin, Donald Davidson, Antebellum African-American women preachers, and Christian and Jewish thinkers in the wake of the Holocaust.

The essay that concern us is: Jane Eyre and the Tradition of Self-Assertion; or Brontë's Socialization of Schiller's "Play Aesthetic" by Michael Vander Weele.

This paper appeared previously in the Renassence journal (Fall 2004, Vol. 57, No 1) and is available online.

Categories: Books, Scholar, Charlotte_Brontë