A Lecture by Seth Lerer, M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor - October 20, 2016

Seth Lerer, the Fall 2016 M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cornell University, delivers the Abrams lecture on Thursday, October 20, 2016: "The English Lyric, Medieval to Early Modern"
Recent scholarship and criticism have renewed our understanding the place of lyric poetry in literary history. This talk explores the relationship among the medieval and early modern traditions of the lyric in English to argue for the latter's creative readings of the former and for a revised sense of periodization that sees continuities of language, social function, and authorial identity in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England.
Seth Lerer is a Distinguished Professor of Literature and former Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California in San Diego. He has previously taught at Stanford and Princeton, and has been a visiting fellow at Oxford and Cambridge. He has published widely in medieval studies, the history of the English language Children's Literature and literary criticism and theory. His book, Error and the Academic Self (2002) won the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and his book Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter (2008) won the National Book Critics circle Award and the Truman Capote Prize in Literary Criticism. His most recent book is Tradition: A Feeling fro the Literary Past, just out from Oxford University Press.
The M.H. Visiting Professorship was established in 2006 by Stephen H. Weiss ('57) in honor of Meyer H. "Mike" Abrams, the late Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus