Textual Imitation—Making and Seeing in Literature

Textual Imitation offers a new critique of the space between fiction and truth, poetry and philosophy. In a nimble, yet startlingly wide-ranging argument, esteemed scholar Jonathan Hart argues that recognition and misrecognition are the keys to understanding texts and contexts from the Old World to the New World. Revealing the underpinnings of mimesis and representation in Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle, Hart moves on to show how Spain, France, and England used mimesis in the exploration and settlement of the New World - and how they recognized and misrecognized both these 'new' worlds and the 'old' one they lived in. Concluding with an examination of how modern theorists take up these issues, this study reminds us as the world is ever more globalized, it continually forges typologies of old and new.

Jonathan Hart is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has published nine books with Palgrave Macmillan, most recently, Literature, Theory, History (2011); Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2011); and Shakespeare: Poetry, History and Culture (2009). He is also a poet and his most recent works are Dreamwork (2010) and Musing (2011), a book of sonnets. He has held visiting appointments at Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, and the Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris III).