The Ties That Bind: A Literary Analysis

Literary fictions can no more transcend history that real persons. Though certainty not universally acknowledged, in the current criticism this truth has replaced the former truth that literature was a thing apart. Once banned from the interpretation of books for violating the integrity of the imagination, considerations of race and sex (and of class) have entered into even the most formalist readings. Race and sex are now found organic to problems of organic form. As a result, those problems have become vastly more complicated than when a literary work as thought to invent its own sufficient language (The Ties That Bind: Race and Sex in Pudd’n Head Wilson by: Myra Johlen Source: American Literary History, Vol. 2, N0. 1, (Spring 1990), pp. 39-55, Published by: Oxford University Press). …show more content…
A poem or story was a puzzle for which critics could be sure they had all pieces and that these dovetailed. Now neither assurance is available; one cannot be certain a work seen as engaged in history is internally cohort, or that the issues it treats finally hang together. This development is not altogether congenial to literary critics who mean to analyze works, not to dismantle them. But if we take literatures link to history seriously, we will have to admit that it renders literature contingent, like history itself (The Ties That Bind: Race and Sex in Pudd ‘n Head Wilson by: Myra Johlen Source: American Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 1, (Spring 1990), pp. 39-55, Published by Oxford University