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Terence Cave
(1938-)
English critic
 1 other title

Michel de Montaigne
(1533-92)
French essayist
 3 other titles

Blaise Pascal
(1623-62)
French philosopher
 1 other title

George Eliot
(1819-80)
English novelist
 3 other titles

Legenda: Oxford, 2009
£45.00 ($89.50 US)  Hardback  210pp
ISBN: 978-1-905981-95-3

Terence Cave’s work has made a major contribution to the rethinking of the relationship between literature, history and culture over the last half-century. Retrospectives brings together substantially revised versions of studies written since 1970: together they constitute a searching methodological investigation of the practice of reading past texts. How do our ways of reading such texts compare with those practised in the periods when they were written? How do we distinguish between what a text meant in its own time and what it has come to mean over time? And how might reading provide access to past experiences? The book’s epicentre is early modern French culture, but it extends to that culture’s ancient Greek and Roman models, its European contexts, and the afterlives of some of its themes, from Pascal via George Eliot to Angela Carter.

Terence Cave is Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Research Fellow at St John’s College; he is also a Fellow of the British Academy. His publications include Pré-histoires and Pré-histoires II (1999 and 2001), Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (1988), and The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (1979). Neil Kenny teaches at the University of Cambridge and Wes Williams at the University of Oxford (and St Edmund Hall). Both specialize in early modern French literature and thought.