The Making of the English Canon

PMLA ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 112 (5) ◽  
pp. 1087-1101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Brody Kramnick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Century Model ◽  
Literary Achievement ◽  
Cultural Market ◽  
Over Time

This essay discusses the origins of the literary canon in mid-eighteenth-century England, looking in particular at the changing reputations of Shakespeare and Spenser. Situating the writing of English literary history within the context of the cultural market, print culture, and nationalism, I argue that the mid-century model of literary history both represents the dialectical outcome of previous decades of thinking through the problem of cultural change and puts in place the terms for the modern narrative of the literary canon. An earlier aesthetics of gendered and sociable refinement separated itself from a Gothic past later recovered as the singular moment of literary achievement. The Gothic account was then challenged by a rethinking of consumption as reading abstracted over time. Together, Gothic historicism and abstract reading formed the antithetical basis on which critics established the modern canonical account of English literary history.

Histories for Systems

System ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford Siskin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Computational Resource ◽  
Niklas Luhmann ◽  
Modern Subject ◽  
History Of ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
Title Pages ◽  
Over Time

History is a genre consisting historically of different kinds with different functions. Instead of just writing “a history” of system, we need to recover the changing relationship between these two genres—starting with Bacon’s emphasis on the need for new histories and Galileo’s focus on system. This chapter follows their interrelations into the eighteenth century using a new computational resource I call Tectonics. It maps spatially over time the coming together of system and history at the century’s end as they share more and more title pages, modifying each other and forming a new platform for knowledge: the narrow-but-deep disciplines of modernity. The chapter confirms this finding using Encyclopedia Britannica and then—with turns to William Jones and the novel--shows how history itself became one of those narrowed disciplines by foregrounding “ideas” and the modern subject that embodies them. The chapter shows how these interrelations of system and history shaped the efforts of system theory, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Niklas Luhmann, and recovers for this book a different kind of history: Bacon’s notion of a capacious literary history that would tell the “story of learning” from age to age. The chapter concludes with Carl Woese’s efforts to transform biology through a newly capacious history, and with explanations of the scope and kinds of history featured in this book: the histories of “mediation,” “blame,” and the “real.”.

Typographic foregrounding

1993 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willie van Peer
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Uneven Distribution ◽  
Test Cases ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Very Old ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Way

This article investigates the way in which devices of foregrounding play a role at the typographical level of a text's organisation. In poetry, such devices are very old and are regularly used in a bold way, thereby creating specific effects. However, a historical overview reveals that such bold typographic experiments are not distributed evenly over time. It also emerges that some of these texts survive in the literary canon, while others are forgotten. On the basis of an analysis of some test cases in literary history, hypotheses are proposed which may explain this uneven distribution. The discussion has also repercussions for issues of value in the study of literature.

Dissenting Print Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tessa Whitehouse
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Commercial Publishing

Print culture was expanding rapidly in the eighteenth century. Yet religious literature remained the largest category of printed book and Dissenters were significant contributors to this genre. From 1695 pre-publication censorship disappeared within England so print was an important mechanism through which Dissenting identity was created and sustained. Religious works could be doctrinal, controversial, or practical and it was the latter category that had the largest lay readership. Material related to Scripture, either translated or paraphrased, accounted for much of the printed religious output but life writing and poetry were also influential. Many of the authors were ministerial and male, although the audiences for which they were writing were more varied. While it is easier to trace the uses to which material designed to educate ministers was put, there were also significant examples of Dissenters using print to fashion a wider sense of community, often through the use of non-commercial publishing models.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John West
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Differences

Literary history often positions Dryden as the precursor to the great Tory satirists of the eighteenth century, like Pope and Swift. Yet a surprising number of Whig writers expressed deep admiration for Dryden, despite their political and religious differences. They were particularly drawn to the enthusiastic dimensions of his writing. After a short reading of Dryden’s poem to his younger Whig contemporary William Congreve, this concluding chapter presents three case studies of Whig writers who used Dryden to develop their own ideas of enthusiastic literature. These three writers are Elizabeth Singer Rowe, John Dennis, and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. These case studies are used to critique the political polarizations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary history and to stress instead how literary friendship crossed political allegiances, and how writers of differing ideological positions competed to control mutually appealing ideas and vocabularies.

The “Twilight of the Poets” in the Age of Realism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Renker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Core ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Institutional Status ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Historical Origins

American literary histories of the post-Civil War period typically treat “poetry” and “realism” as oppositional phenomena. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated in a genteel “twilight of the poets.” This chapter excavates the historical origins of the twilight narrative in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It shows how this narrative emerged as a function of a particular idealist ideology of poetry that circulated widely in authoritative print-culture sites. The chapter demonstrates that the twilight narrative was only one strain in a complex cultural debate about poetry, a debate that entailed multiple voices and positions that would later fall out of literary history when the twilight narrative achieved institutional status as fact.

Historical Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.

Natives, Religion, and Race in Colonial America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
The Other ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
Over Time

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.

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