After Augustine The Meditative Reader and the Text Brian Stock
""This book is an instructive and comprehensive work about Augustine's influence on history as well as on the nature of reading and the discovery of the Self through literary texts.""--Lundefined engages the related question of ethical values and literary experience in the same period; and reconsiders Erich Auerbach's interpretation of ancient literary realism.
In subsequent chapters, Stock moves forward to the Middle Ages to explore the attitude of medieval Latin authors toward the genre of autobiography as a model for self-representation and takes up the problem of reading, writing, and the self in Petrarch. He compares the role of the reader in Augustine's City of God and Thomas More's Utopia, and, in a final important move, reframes the problem of European cultural identity by shifting attention from the continuity and change in spoken language to significant shifts in the practice of spiritual, silent reading in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. A richly rewarding reflection on the history and nature of reading, After Augustine promises to be a centerpiece of discussions about the discovery of the self through literature.
Brian Stock is Professor of History and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto. He is author of The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries; Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation; and Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Material Texts 2001 ISBN 978-0-8122-3602-6 ISBN 978-0-8122-0304-2 World Rights
