![\"Dr.](\"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Andrew-Mattison-08312026-9291a.jpg\")
Dr. Andrew Mattison’s “Reading the Literary Past” traces four centuries of literary criticism \u2014 and finds an unexpected echo in the summer’s debate over Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.”<\/p><\/div>\n
“It’s a fascinating debate, because Wilson herself has been an advocate of the idea that any translation is necessarily an interpretation,” said Mattison, professor and chair of the Department of English Language and Literature, who hasn’t seen the film yet but has read Wilson’s essay closely.<\/p>\n
“There’s no doubt that her translation is [an interpretation] \u2014 for example, she tries to give the minor characters a little more prominence and distinctiveness than they might have in a strictly literal translation of the Greek. So, while I’m sure it’s true that the movie is very different from Homer’s poem, so, in some ways, is her translation.”<\/p>\n
Though “Reading the Literary Past” doesn’t reach as far back as Homer \u2014 its focus is 16th- and 17th-century English literature, including Shakespeare and Milton \u2014 Mattison said the Nolan-Wilson dust-up gets at exactly what his book is about.<\/p>\n
In fact, he devotes a chapter to Rachel Bespaloff, a critic and World War II refugee who compared Homer’s “Iliad” to Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in the 1940s, arguing that part of a critic’s job is to voice what an author leaves unspoken \u2014 particularly, in Bespaloff’s case, the inner life of Helen, who is central to the “Iliad” but rarely given her own voice on the page.<\/p>\n
“If we think of translation as an interpretation, as Wilson says, and certainly an adaptation is as well, then part of the function of either would be to make explicit what Homer leaves unspoken, just as criticism does,” Mattison said.<\/p>\n
That idea \u2014 that every reader, translator, adapter and critic is doing some version of the same unpredictable work \u2014 runs through the entirety of the book. Mattison traces how critics have written about early modern English literature from the moment authors were still alive, through the 18th and 19th centuries and into the present. But he said the project is really about reading itself: how strange and unpredictable it is to pick up an old book or poem and try to make sense of it, and what today’s readers can learn from readers who got there first \u2014 even, especially, when they got something wrong.<\/p>\n
![\"Cover](\"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Andrew-Mattison-Book-STORY-9781512829860.jpg\")
Dr. Andrew Mattison’s newly published book traces how critics have written about early modern English literature from when the authors were alive, through the 18th and 19th centuries and into the present.<\/p><\/div>\n
A favorite example of his is the 18th-century Shakespeare scholar George Steevens, who made a consequential mistake in his notes on “Antony and Cleopatra.” Mattison built an entire chapter around it, tracking down marked-up books from Steevens’ personal collection to retrace his reasoning step by step.<\/p>\n
“We can’t dismiss what he says just because he got his facts confused,” Mattison said, “because when we examine Steevens’s process … we can see that he’s groping toward a really important insight even when he’s gotten some details incorrect.”<\/p>\n
That argument runs against a strain of literary theory dating back to at least the 1960s, which holds that a critic first settles on a method and then applies it to a text. Mattison wanted to make the opposite case: that interpretations aren’t predictable from a critic’s stated method, and that readers learn more from other interpretations of the same text than from the same method applied to different texts.<\/p>\n
Mattison began writing the book in 2020, and the pandemic shaped it in ways he didn’t expect.<\/p>\n
As a scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago, he was allowed back into the building before the general public that September, but he couldn’t travel to other libraries \u2014 aside from UToledo’s own Carlson Library \u2014 while writing. Rather than treat that as a limitation, he came to see it as an echo of the very critics he was studying.<\/p>\n
“Before airplanes, Interlibrary Loan or digital databases, their scholarship was limited to the books they had immediately available to them, whether through book dealers, a local library or a circle of friends,” he said.<\/p>\n
He ended up writing directly about that constraint, arguing that literary interpretation is shaped as much by the resources a critic happens to have on hand as by any formal methodology.<\/p>\n
“Reading the Literary Past” is Mattison’s fourth book. His most recent, “Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation” (University of Toronto Press, 2019), also explored the history of reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dr. Andrew Mattison’s “Reading the Literary Past” traces four centuries of literary criticism \u2014 and finds an unexpected echo in the summer’s debate over Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":878,"featured_media":101114,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,498,1,7],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101112"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/878"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101112"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101118,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101112\/revisions\/101118"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Dr.](\"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Andrew-Mattison-08312026-9291a-150x150.jpg\")
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