MH Abrams

Meyer Howard Abrams (born July 23, 1912 in Long Branch , New Jersey ; died April 21, 2015 in Ithaca , New York ) was an American literary scholar .

Live and act

Abrams came from a family of Eastern European Jews; his parents emigrated to the United States in 1906 after a pogrom from Hrodna (now Belarus). He studied English at Harvard University ( BA 1934, MA 1937, Ph.D. 1940), and in 1934 he was a Henry Scholarship holder at the University of Cambridge under IA Richards . During World War II, he conducted research at the "psycho-acoustic laboratory" (Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory) of Harvard transmission security and military telecommunications. He began teaching in 1947 at Cornell University's English Department , where he was appointed full professor in 1953 and remained there until his retirement in 1983. Among his students here were Harold Bloom and Thomas Pynchon .

Abrams research focus was the literature of the English Romanticism, in particular his 1953 published and until today fundamental, if not paradigmatic work The Mirror and the Lamp (German "Spiegel und Lampe") should be mentioned. In it he traces the development "from a classical mimetic poetics (poetry as a mirror of nature) to that of romanticism (the poet as a lamp fired by the spirit)". Abrams monograph made it to 25th place on the much-cited list of the 100 best English-language non-fiction books of the 20th century presented by the editors of the Modern Library in 1998.

A standard work to this day is his Glossary of Literary Terms , first published in 1957 , often simply called “Abrams”, a concise dictionary of the most important literary terms. Abrams also had a great influence on university teaching and the canon of English literature as the founder and editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature , the anthology of literature in the English language that is widespread not only in university use . He took care of the first seven editions himself, until the end he acted as General Editor , since the eighth edition (2006) together with Stephen Greenblatt , who is now in charge of the edition.

In 1963 Abrams was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society since 1973 and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2001 . In 2014 he received the National Humanities Medal .

Works (selection)

• The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953) ISBN 978-0-19-501471-6 .
  • German: Spiegel und Lampe: Romantic theory and the tradition of criticism . Translated and introduced by Lore Iser. Fink, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-770-51469-6 ( Theory and History of Literature and the Fine Arts , Volume 42).
• (Ed.): The Poetry of Pope: A Selection (1954) ISBN 978-0-88295-067-9 .
• A Glossary of Literary Terms (1957). Ninth, revised edition 2009, ISBN 978-1-4130-3390-8 .
• English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism (1960) ISBN 978-0-19-501946-9 .
• (Ed.) The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962, current, eleventh edition 2014, ISBN 978-1285465067 ).
• The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge (1970) ISBN 978-0-374-90028-1 .
• Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971) ISBN 978-0-393-00609-4 .
• The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (1984) ISBN 978-0-393-30340-7 .
• Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (1989) ISBN 978-0-393-02713-6 .
• The Fourth Dimension of a Poem and Other Essays . Norton & Co., New York City 2012, ISBN 978-0-393-05830-7 .

Secondary literature

• Wayne C. Booth : MH Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist . In: Critical Inquiry 2: 3, 1976, pp. 411-445.
• Adam Kirsch: The Last Critic Turns 100 . In: Tablet (online publication), July 11, 2012.
• Susanne Klingenstein : The fourth dimension of the poem: MH Abrams brought up generations of American literature students - now he is 100 years old . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of July 18, 2012, p. N 3.
• Seamus Perry: The Mirror and the Lamp . In: Essays in Criticism 54: 3, 2004, pp. 260-82.
• Sean Shesgreen: Canonizing the Canonizer: A Short History of The Norton Anthology of English Literature . In: Critical Inquiry 35: 2, 2009, pp. 293-318.
• Jeffrey J. Williams: A Life in Criticism: An Interview with MH Abrams . In: Minnesota Review 69, Fall 2007, pp. 71-93.

Web links

• Literature by and about MH Abrams in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ MH Abrams, Professor Who Shaped the Study of Romanticism, Dies at 102
2. ↑ Jan Wiele: Mirror and Lamp. Literary historian MH Abrams is dead . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 24, 2015, p. 13.
3. ↑ Member History: Meyer Howard Abrams. American Philosophical Society, accessed April 3, 2018 (with a short biography).