The Jewel-Harding Controversy

1974 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 320-341
Author(s):  
Peter S.J. Milward
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gabriel Harvey

I cannot oucrslipp some without manifest iniury. that descrue to haue their names enrolled in the first rancke of valiant Confuters: worthy men, but subiect to imperfections, to errour. to mutual reproofe; some more, some lesse, as the manner is. Harding, and lewell, were our Aeschines, and Demosthenes: and scarsely any language in the Christian world, hath affoorded a payre of aduersaries, equiualent to Harding, and lewell; two thundring and lightning Oratours in Jiuinity.These words, occuring as they do in Gabriel Harvey's Pierces Supererogation (1593), cannot but sound strange to modern ears. The language is, of course, somewhat peculiar, as we might expect from a contemporary of Shakespeare's, and in particular from so pedantic a writer as Gabriel Harvey. But apart from that, the reference of his words—with their apparently exaggerated praise—seems oddly misplaced. If he had spoken of More and Tyndale, or even of Whitgift and Cartwright, his praise might have appeared more intelligible. But who today has heard of Jewel or Harding, at least in terms of literature? Neither of them receives so much as a mention in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, or even in Baugh's voluminous Literary History of England, no doubt because they are regarded as belonging to a brief episode in ecclesiastical history. Yet Harvey speaks of them, in openly literary terms, as “two thundring and lightning Oratours in diuinity,” and even dares to compare them with the great Athenian orators, Aeschines and Demosthenes. So the question arises: Was he merely deluding himself with a spirit of exaggeration—a spirit not unknown in Shakespeare's England? Or was he, after all, recording a widespread feeling among Shakespeare's contemporaries which has somehow vanished like a bubble on the river of time?

scholarly journals Two 17th century Jesuit plays in Ljubljana inspired by English literature

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 61-71
Author(s):  
Nada Grošelj
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
English Literature ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Great Emphasis ◽  
King Lear ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
History Of

Jesuit teachers, whose members came to Ljubljana in the late 16th century, placed great emphasis on the production and staging of the school drama. Despite the domination of religious themes, the range of its subject matter was wide and varied. The article discusses two plays which derived their subject matter from English literature, namely from Bede's Ecclesiastical History  of the English People and Holinshed's Historie of Britain.The texts themselves are lost, but in the case of the Holinshed-inspired  work (a version of the King Lear story), a detailed synopsis has been preserved. The article examines the synopsis and the extant manuscript reports about the plays, the original English sources, and the treatment of the two works in contemporary scholarly treatises.

scholarly journals In a Melting Pot of Autobiography: Pickthall’s With the Turk in Wartime and the Cause of Islam

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 2-16
Author(s):  
Ebtisam Ali Sadiq
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literature Analysis ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Receive

Marmaduke Pickthall, a half-forgotten British novelist of the early twentieth century, has come back to the spotlight over the past few years. His Near Eastern novels and short stories have started to receive attention in contemporary scholarship but not his two autobiographies. This essay aims at tackling the more neglected piece of the two, With the Turk in Wartime, that deserves attention because of its intricate amalgamation of several features of the genre of autobiography as manifested across its history within the tradition of English literature. Analysis finds that Pickthall’s autobiography has some Romantic, Victorian, and Modern elements as well as some old characteristics of the genre elaborately interwoven into its structure. The study also traces the use that Pickthall makes of this unique autobiography and how the commingling of diverse elements allows him to turn a usually subjective genre into a public cause and dedicate it to the service of Islam. This essay highlights both the diversity that the literary history of the genre lends to Pickthall’s autobiography and the socio-political service it renders to the faith that the author has long esteemed and will ultimately convert to not long after writing this autobiography.

Literary Histories

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Lerer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories

Literary history has had a mixed history among the readers and the writers of the European traditions. For William Warburton, an eighteenth-century ecclesiast and critic, literary history was “the most agreeable subject in the world.” However, the early nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine describes literary history as a “morgue where each seeks out the friend he most loved.” The complex connotation of literary history stems in part from the modern European understanding of the place of literature in the formation of national identity. This article examines how the history of medieval literature was received during the Renaissance. It first looks at the regulations of late Henrician reading, particularly the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, before focusing on Miles Hogarde and his poetry. It then discusses Richard Tottel’sMiscellanyin the context of English literature and its past, along with the poetry of love and loss that follows Tottel.

scholarly journals In a Melting Pot of Autobiography: Pickthall’s With the Turk in Wartime and the Cause of Islam

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ebtisam Ali Sadiq
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literature Analysis ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Receive

Marmaduke Pickthall, a half-forgotten British novelist of the early twentieth century, has come back to the spotlight over the past few years. His Near Eastern novels and short stories have started to receive attention in contemporary scholarship but not his two autobiographies. This essay aims at tackling the more neglected piece of the two, With the Turk in Wartime, that deserves attention because of its intricate amalgamation of several features of the genre of autobiography as manifested across its history within the tradition of English literature. Analysis finds that Pickthall’s autobiography has some Romantic, Victorian, and Modern elements as well as some old characteristics of the genre elaborately interwoven into its structure. The study also traces the use that Pickthall makes of this unique autobiography and how the commingling of diverse elements allows him to turn a usually subjective genre into a public cause and dedicate it to the service of Islam. This essay highlights both the diversity that the literary history of the genre lends to Pickthall’s autobiography and the socio-political service it renders to the faith that the author has long esteemed and will ultimately convert to not long after writing this autobiography.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Julianne Werlin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material History ◽  
Century Literature

This book is an experiment in conjoining two approaches to early modern English literature which, despite a seemingly obvious affinity, are rarely pursued together: the material history of texts and Marxist historical analysis. No trend in scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature in the past three decades has been more important than the rise of research on media, not confined to the history of the book or even manuscript, but encompassing communications as a whole. A wide variety of phenomena, including but by no means limited to methods of papermaking and bookbinding, readers’ habits of annotation, and the development of the postal system, have been shown to be relevant to early modern textual and literary history....

scholarly journals The Classroom in the Canon: T.S. Eliot's Modern English Literature Extension Course for Working People and The Sacred Wood

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-281
Author(s):  
Rachel Sagner Buurma ◽  
Laura Heffernan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
Elite Universities ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Canonical Literature ◽  
School Movement

Literary critics have long imagined that T. S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood (1920) shaped the canon and methods of countless twentieth-century classrooms. This essay turns instead to the classroom that made The Sacred Wood: the Modern English Literature extension school tutorial that Eliot taught to working-class adults between 1916 and 1919. Contextualizing Eliot's tutorial within the extension school movement shows how the ethos and practices of the Workers' Educational Association shaped his teaching. Over the course of three years, Eliot and his students reimagined canonical literature as writing by working poets for working people—a model of literary history that fully informed his canon reformation in The Sacred Wood. This example demonstrates how attention to teaching changes the history of English literary study. It further reveals how all kinds of institutions, not just elite universities, have shaped the discipline's methods and canons.

The Alfredian Project and its Aftermath: Rethinking the Literary History of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
MALCOLM GODDEN
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
Mass Education ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This lecture presents the text of the speech about the Alfredian project and its aftermath delivered by the author at the 2008 Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture held at the British Academy. It explains the details of King Alfred's programme of mass education and to deliver near-universal literacy in English, and evaluates the impact of Pastoral Care on English literature.

The Rise and Fall of Meter

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Martin
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
World War I ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Language ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Stable Model ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
History Of

Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, “English meter” concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline. This book tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, the book shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.

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