Best Introduction To . . . Part II

Because the sight of the unbroken "Best Introduction To" list inspires vertigo, I've decided to chop it up into smaller disciplinary units and repost an updated version of it.  I also want to request that if you think this project worthy, please post a link to this post and a brief explanation of my rationale on your site.  (I want to thank John, Richard, Sharon, Lance, Ralph and the New Kid for doing so already.)  Or if you're an academic and your departmental listserv isn't too particular about the nature of the emails shot across it, maybe drop your colleagues a line and see if they have any suggestions.  Because at this point I've probably exhausted the patience and expertise of my regular 500 readers. 

I want to reiterate my desire to expand the number and types of categories I have here.  For example, I have a numerous medieval categories, but they're almost exclusively English.  What's the best book out there on the Provençal troubadours or Andalucían Spain?  What about Asia?  Or the Indian subcontinent?  What about genre?

Now for a quick rearticulation of the project:

Within every discipline and sub-discipline there is a Book X which most professors recommends to students seeking an intelligent introduction to Subject Y.  These are not necessarily books designed to be introductions—The Oxford Companion to Metagrobolism or Introductory Essays on Scandanavian Goregrind and Circumadjacent Genres: A Festschrift in Honor of Bjarni Herjólfsson III—but books recognized by those of requisite expertise as the most comprehensive peek at a particular field.  Yes "comprehensive peek" is oxymoronic.  That's the point.

These books allow any student or autodidact who wishes to acquire functional working knowledge of a field and they come credentialed by scholars in a non-blurby fashion.  A beginner who scans book jackets quickly learns that every book "is not merely a genealogy and a critical reassessment of the legacy of everything, but a provocation to our sense of our history and our selves and God and the definitive explanation on why every snowflake is unique and special."  If this beginner thumbs through a scholarly bibliography instead, she may as well be preparing for qualifying exams for all the good that obsessive scholarly comprehensiveness will do her.  Too little information and she'll miss the point; too much and she'll be overwhelmed.  A solid introductory text of the sort faculty members already assign on a regular basis seems to me a happy medium.

So without further ado, I present the new and improved "Best Introduction To" list:

__________________________________________

Classics & Church Fathers:

• Homeric: The Best of the Achaeans, Gregory Nagy
  
• Presocratic:
  
• Aristotelian:
• Platonic: Images of Excellence, Christopher Janaway
• Horatian:
• Augustinian:
• Patristic:

Medieval England:

• Anglo-Saxon:
• Early Medieval:
• Twelfth Century Renaissance: The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200, C. Stephen Jaeger
• Medieval: The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, David Wallace, ed.
• Late Medieval: Hochon's Arrow, Paul Strohm

Early Modern England:

• Early Modern:  
• English Renaissance: Renaissance Self-Fashioning : From More to Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt  
• Elizabethan:  
• Jacobean:  
• Caroline:  
• Commonwealth Period: Writing the English Republic : Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660, David Norbrook  
• Metaphyiscal Poetry:

Enlightenment & Victorian England

• Neoclassical:
• Enlightenment:
• Age of Johnson:
• Restoration:
• Augustun:
• Gothic:
• Picaresque:
• Pre-Raphaelite:
• Victorian: The Victorian Frame of Mind, Walter Houghton
• Domestic Fiction: Domestic Individualism, Gillian Brown
• Sentimental: Sensational Designs, Jane Tompkins

Modern English and Irish:

• British Modernist:
• Irish Modernist:

Early American:

• Colonial American:
• Captivity Narratives:
• American Gothic:

19th Century American:

• Antebellum American:
• American Civil War: Patriotic Gore: Studies in the American Civil War, Edmund Wilson
• Slave Narratives: To Wake The Nations, Eric Sundquist
• American Renaissance: Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination n the Age of Emerson and Melville,  David S. Reynolds
  
• Transcendalist:
• Realist: The Social Construction of American Realism, Amy Kaplan
• Naturalist:

Modern American:

• American Modernism:
• Vorticist:
• Futurist:
• 1922: Reading 1922: Return to the  Scene of the Modern, Michael North
• The Jazz Age: Terrible Honesty, Ann Douglas
• The Harlem Renaissance:
• Social Realist:
• The Beats:
• The New York Intellectuals: The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930'2 to the 1980's Alan Wald
• Southern Agrarian: The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism, Mark Jancovich
• Native American Studies:
• African American:
• Asian American: Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong
• Chicano/Chicana: Chicano Narratives: The Dialectics of Difference, Ramon Saldivar
• Visual Culture: Reading American Photographs, Alan Trachtenberg
• New Americanist: The Futures of American Studies, Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds.

Spanish:

Italian:

• Italian Renaissance:

Russian:

French:

• French Realism:
• French Naturalism:

Arabic:

Indian:

Asian:

Australian:

• Settler Australian:

African:

Theoretical:

• Philological:
• Old Historicist:
• New Criticism: The New Apologists for Poetry, Murray Krieger
• Phenomenological: Truth and Method, Hans-George Gadamer
• Geneva School: Critics of Consciousness, Sarah Lawall
• Structuralism: Structuralist Poetics, Jonathan Culler
• French Structuralism: History of Structuralism I & II, Francoise Dosse
• Freudian Psychoanalytic:
• Lacanian Psychoanalytic: Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, Shoshana Felman
• Bloomian:
• Post-Structural:
• Deconstructive: Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction, Vincent Leitch
• Marxist: Considerations on Western Marxism, Perry Anderson
• Frankfurt School: The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay
• Rhizomatic: A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi
• Semiotic:
• Reception Theory:
• Reader-Response Theory: Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction, Steven Mailloux
• Foucauldian: Saint Foucault, David Halperin
• First-Wave Feminist:
• Second-Wave Feminist: Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory, Jane Gallop
• Third-Wave Feminist:
• Post-Colonial:
• New Historicist: New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics, Brook Thomas
• Cultural Studies:
• Gender Studies:
• Queer Theory: Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• African American:
• Asian American: Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong
• Chicano/Chicana: Chicano Narratives: The Dialectics of Difference, Ramon Saldivar
• Genre:
• Pastoral:
• Analytic:
• Existential:
• Posthuman:

Genre:

• Poetry:
• Ode:
• Epic:
• Drama:
• Comedy:
• Tragedy:
• Allegory:
• Romance:
• Novel: The Origins of the English Novel: 1600-1740, Michael McKeon
• Short Story:

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

"posthuman" disappeared, I think.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Yes it did. It has resurfaced, however, at the bottom of the theory list.

[Dr. Virago]

Did you or someone else object to my suggestions of Andy Orchard's "Pride and Prodigies" for the Anglo-Saxon period and Gail McMurray Gibson's "The Theater of Devotion" for late medieval lay devotional literature and material culture? Or did you not see them? Or do you hate me for some inexplicable reason?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I didn't see them. They'll be added to the update tonight. (I scoured the comments here and elsewhere, and no doubt missed more than a few. Don't worry, I don't hate you. Matter of fact, I don't hate. Period. Although I'm quite often annoyed. Though not by you.)

[Kevin Andre Elliott]

It's probably not fair for me to hype one of my committee members. But who cares. I suggest Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture by Hortense Spillers for African American Theoretical.

I didn't notice a poetry criticism category, but I'd also suggest Melissa Kwasny's Toward the Open Field - Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950 and Brian Vickers' English Renaissance Literary Criticism to go somewhere.

[Loki]

Don't leave the Germans out! Not exactly a sunny bunch, but sehr wichtig!

[Brian]

As an outsider to the Lit field, might I inquire as to how many of these books a grad student in Lit would actually read? How many a Lit Prof would/should have read? The list seems so subdivided that an outsider might be excused if he wondered how many books even exist that describe these areas of inquiry, let alone the one that gives the "best" "comprehensive peek"...

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Loki, I can't believe I wiped Germany from the face of the earth. I'll put it back with this evening's update; which is when I'll add Kevin's suggestions (although poetry's already up there, only without an introduction, which it'll now have).

Brian, I'm certain that each of these areas of inquiry contain quite a few candidates for "best introduction to," since they're all established scholarly sub-disciplines. What's frightening isn't that they all exist, but that I've actually read so many of the books. Granted, they were almost exclusively 1) in my field and 2) germane to my theoretical approach (see this post for more on that); but I had read 'em. I think you may underestimate the investment a typical graduate student makes in his or her chosen specialty; to be honest, reading 15-20 books strikes me as a normal activity, but one that needs supplementing with 50-60 articles. And that's just to write an essay. Of course, it's also cumulative: one of the reasons I'm keeping tabs on what I read on the right sidebar is because it makes me feel productive (even in my unproductive moments); I'm doing something, and that something is work. Intellectual labor, yes, but work nonetheless.

Man, I hope this doesn't sound hostile; reading over it, I fear that it does. All I'm trying to say is that when I sit down at the end of a week and realize that I've read six books, written seven blog entries, visited countless blogs, engaged in numerous online and real-life conversations, taught two classes, &c. I'm really impressed with myself. But at the time, well, it's just what I'm doing, and it doesn't seem like much . . . esp. when the alternative would be watching television. Or exercising. Or sleeping, even.

[Rodney Herring]

Just to repeat a comment I made to Part I of this series,

African American: It's probably tough to avoid The Signifying Monkey.

Seriously, this didn't get any discussion, but I think Gates's theorization of African American literature--its subtleties, its art, its code, its well-earned place in the discipline--to be important and unsurpassed in its seminality. I haven't read Spillers's newest book (contents here), but I think it's hard to say (at this point) that it's anywhere near as important as the Gates. Of course, I wouldn’t pit the two against one another, except that the point is to choose the one work most recognized as what those in the know should have read.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I think the list could turn out to be very valuable, but I think that it's important to have only one book per category even if (as seems likely) there really are two or more just about equally good ones in many cases. Once you put in two in one place, everyone would want them. Or having two would lose you ... suspension of disbelief, or something. It's the age-old problem of canon formation, right? Once you have 100 Great Books, why not 101? But that way lies madness. At least with this setup, you have some natural limit -- although, of course, people could just start suggesting narrower and narrower categories.

[sterna]

You mentioned Bjarni Herjólfsson, but where is Old Norse? I swear by C. J. Clover and J. Lindow's Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide (Cornell 1985), but it might be too specialized. Blackwell has a new guide out since 2004 or so: Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction (ed. Heather O'Donoghue). I don't know it in detail, but it looks more introductory.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Sterna, you'd think since I had Iceland on my mind, I'd have been able to remember to include its literature on my list. It'll go up there wtih tonight's revision.

Rodney, I'm not sure it should be what those in the know have read so much as something that introduces people to a wide variety of ways scholars have read the material those in the know have read. That's why I'm still uncomfortable with the Sedgwick (and, to a lesser degree, the Gadamer) up there.

[Rodney Herring]

Scott, you still haven't addressed Gates's book. Do you prefer not to? Or are you just holding out for this?

Okay, well, by the standard of "something that introduces people to a wide variety of ways scholars have read the material those in the know have read," then The Signifying Monkey may or may not fit the bill. If by "material" you mean African American Literature, then I think it does; if by "material" you mean African American Literary Scholarship, then probably not. It's not a kind of field survey text for what's been done in terms of studies of race. But it is an ex/intensive study of African American Literature.

So I guess my follow-up question is: What do you mean by the category of "African American:"?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I think you've nailed the source of my confusion; and it's mine, not yours, not to mention something I should've realized when I divided the list last night. I mean both: i.e. I need to add a category to the American sub-section called "African American," for which a book like Gates' would be perfect. Once I do that, then I need to specify what I mean by "African American" in the theory sub-section, and add another category like "African American Feminist" to account for scholars like Barbara Smith. (BTW: Rich, this isn't endless subdivision; or if it is, it's the discipline's, not mine.) Too often the literature and theory categories are confused because, well, because a lot of literature professors are closeted liberal humanists who believe life can be captured by literature. (They may be correct. It's not my part to say.) The reasons for this are familiar to us all; in fact, I'm currently writing about them in another window, a bit about chiasmus and literary studies which'll hit the net hot in an hour or so.

For Modern British, Michael Levenson's *A Genealogy of Modernism*

[Natalia]

For Harlem Renaissance as a period, I like Langston Hughes's The Big Sea. But that's not really an intro the the scholarship.

Pastoral: Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral?

Also, dare I mention... film?

It seems that it's hard to distinguish between texts that are seminal and texts that are a good introduction (see Signifying Monkey question above). I keep wanting to shout things like Love and Death in the American Novel, and realizing it's not what we're going for here.

I wonder what it is that causes that impulse to give shout-outs to one's favorite books of criticism...

[Jenny D]

I think Empson's book is lovely but MUCH too peculiar to go on this list!

Here are some miscellaneous suggestions (BTW I think the 18th-century categories are a bit peculiar, "Age of Johnson" is well-nigh obsolete, Burke seems to have largely displaced Johnson in the study of this period--if you were going to have something, therefore, it would probably be something older like Walter Jackson Bate's biography).

Enlightenment: E. O. Hirschman, "The Passions and the Interests" (oh, but I guess this is more a classic and less an introduction to approaches)

Augustan (this is one of my own former dissertation supervisors, so take with a grain of salt): Claude Rawson, Order From Confusion Sprung

Performance history: Joseph Roach, The Player's Passion

Pastoral: Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (this book MUST be on here somewhere!)

Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden also surely belongs somewhere (the "old" American studies?)

I'd propose Jay Fliegelman's "Declaring Independence" for colonial America, but I don't know that it has that established status, probably Michael Warner's "Letters of the Republic" is the standard work?

John Hollander's "The Figure of Echo" would make an interesting poetry choice, but surely we've got to have Bloom's "Anxiety of Influence" for poetry

Geoffrey Hartman's Wordsworth biography is a good candidate for Romanticism (and I am often recommending Richard Holmes's biographies of Coleridge and Shelley)

Nancy Armstrong's "Desire and Domestic Fiction" is a sometimes maddening book but has been immensely influential in eighteenth-century studies

I don't think there's any one book by Donna Haraway that _exactly_ does the posthuman thing, but I most often recommend not "Primate Visions" but "Simians, Cyborgs and Women"

There was a Toril Moi book about feminist theory--can't remember the name--that used to be much assigned in 80s and 90s, not sure if it has been superseded.

I see that I keep on skewing back as some earlier commenters have noted to seminal books in the field rather than introductions to/summary of approaches to books, partly because the latter seem to date more quickly. Aren't the latter often, in any case, edited collections (or even anthologies) rather than books by one person? I like Simon During's Cultural Studies Reader, for instance. But I just don't think that there _are_ good versions of this in many subfields (it is perhaps not the kind of scholarly work that is most rewarded by universities, though these books can sometimes be relatively lucrative).

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Natalia and Jenny, I'll update the list according later this afternoon. Thanks for the suggestions even if they do contradict each other.

[minnesotaj]

I'd recommend Elizabeth Belfiore's "Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion" in the "Aristotle" category--too bad it's all but unobtainable except at the biggest university libraries (but then: maybe a groundswell of support would get Princeton to do paperback--the hardcover sells for a $100+ nearly instantly whenever it appears on abebooks or amazon).

[Rory M]

It boggles my mind to see how Brian Massumi's "A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari" could be considered the best introduction to Deleuze/Rhizomatics. It may be a good application of a Deleuzian method, but an introduction it is not. It has all the worst excesses of these writers especially those that are only fruitful if one is reading from inside the discourse of D&G. In my case Massumi's turned me off them for years, in my frustration with it, I actually hurled it across the room, where it was to lie in the 'pile of indecipherability' for years. It wasn't until I read the introductory books on Deleuze by Claire Colebrook and Todd May, that I could see some potential in Deleuze's strange brew of thought and by extension the merits in Massumi's book.