The Stigma of Meter

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Martin
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
English Language ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Max Müller ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comparative Philology ◽  
Critical Turning Point ◽  
Successes And Failures

This chapter resituates Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose name has become synonymous with metrical experiment, within the prosodic, philological, and theological debates of his time. His commitment to defining accent and stress in English was a critical turning point in his thinking about his identity as a Catholic and as an Englishman. It argues that his attempt to create a new English meter was a particularly Victorian engagement with poetic form, national identity, and the English language. Broader movements in comparative philology (particularly those associated with scholars such as Max Müller and Richard Chevenix Trench) influenced Hopkins's attempts to reconcile the history of English and the materiality of meter with his Catholic beliefs. Hopkins is used to prove that even the most obscure and alienated-seeming poet must be read as part of the broader debate about what meter can do for the quickly changing nation. Hopkins's successes and failures, anticipate later attempts to examine the constituent parts of meter and the English language.

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.

The Institution of Meter

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Martin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Prime Mover ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primary Measure ◽  
Successes And Failures ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins with a discussion of metrical mastery, outlining the way that Robert Bridges's intervention in his best-selling treatise Milton's Prosody expanded and popularized the theories that he and Gerard Manley Hopkins discussed together. It shows how Bridges and his influential competitor, George Saintsbury, were jostling for position during the height of the prosody wars between 1900 and 1910, and how their successes and failures characterize much of our contemporary thinking about early twentieth-century prosody. Author of the three-volume History of English Prosody (1906–10), Saintsbury was a prime mover in both the foundation of English literary study and the institutionalization of the “foot” as the primary measure of English poetry. Infused with Edwardian-era military rhetoric, Sainstbury's foot marched to a particularly English rhythm, which he traced through the ages with wit and martial vigor.

The History of Meter

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Martin
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
English Poet ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material History ◽  
English Culture

This chapter sets out the book's historical and methodological framework. Despite the modernist characterization of Victorian tradition as unified and steadfast, the various approaches to Victorian meter in English histories, grammars, and metrical studies reveal ideologically charged histories of English culture, often presented as Roman or Anglo-Saxon. Gerard Manley Hopkins was himself a mediator between various metrical discourses and theories. As a Catholic priest who taught the classics and an English poet who attempted to valorize the material history of the English language in his syntax and through his use of sprung rhythm, Hopkins is a test case for the personal and national ideologies of English meter.

INTERNATIONALISING THE SONNET: TORU DUTT'S “SONNET – BAUGMAREE”

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 595-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Boundaries

“When the history of theliterature of our country comes to be written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom of song” (Dutt xxvii). This sentence is Edmund Gosse's famous final flourish to his memoir of Toru Dutt, which introduced her posthumous volumeAncient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, published in 1882, five years after her death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-one. But what would Dutt's page look like in the history of “our country,” by which Gosse means of course England? This question is a tricky one, because placing a late nineteenth-century Bengali who was a Europhile, a Christian convert, and an English-language woman poet within a British Victorian tradition is a simplistic, if not a problematic appropriation of a colonial subject into the centre of the British Empire. Where Dutt belongs has long preoccupied critics who try to recuperate her poetry for an Indian national poetic tradition, or for a transnational, cosmopolitan poetics. The issue of placing Dutt allows us also to press questions about the conception of Victorian poetry studies, its geographical, cultural, and national boundaries, not just in the nineteenth-century creation of a canon but in our current conception of the symbolic map of Victorian poetry. But, while recent critics have celebrated her poetry's embrace of global poetry as a challenge to the parochialism of national literary boundaries, Dutt's original English-language poetry also suggests an uneven, uncomfortable hybridity, and a wry, ironic interplay between distance and proximity that unfolds through her use of poetic form. This essay investigates what it means to “make something” of Toru Dutt, in the nineteenth century and in the twenty-first century, what is at stake for Victorian poetry studies in privileging Dutt and her multi-lingual writing, and whether her celebrated transnationalism might not also include a discomfort with hybridity that reveals itself through the relation between space and literary form in her poetry.

The Diversification of the Amniotes

1994 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 129-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques A. Gauthier
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Egg Laying ◽  
Phylogenetic Systematics ◽  
Darwinian Revolution ◽  
Systematic Theory ◽  
Language Version ◽  
The Core ◽  
History Of

Publication of the English-language version of Hennig's (1966)Phylogenetic Systematicsmarked a turning point in the history of inquiry into the genealogy of life. Hennig catalyzed a long overdue reevaluation of systematic theory and method that should have followed immediately upon publication of Darwin's revolutionary ideas (de Queiroz, 1988). Hennig revitalized the field by taking the Theory of Descent to the core ofsystematics(de Queiroz, 1988, 1992)—the methods for investigating life's genealogy—andtaxonomy—the methods for communicating the results of those investigations (de Queiroz and Gauthier, 1992). Unfortunately, the Darwinian revolution has yet to sweep aside all vestiges of nonevolutionary thinking in this field. To further that goal, and to provide an update of Gauthier et al. (1989), this contribution summarizes current progress in the phylogeny and taxonomy of the major clades of land-egg-laying, or amniote, vertebrates.

The History of the English Language and the Medievalist

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Lerer
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Change ◽  
First Century ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
Languages In Contact ◽  
History Of ◽  
Vowel Shift ◽  
Vernacular Literacy

The History of the English Language (HEL) is a largely ideological enterprise keyed to fitting literary evidence into expected categories, and yet recent work has suggested that we can no longer simply assume that phenomena such as the Great Vowel Shift were “real,” historical, systematic changes. Contemporary debates on language change and use have historical precedent; social arguments about language are part of a very long tradition; languages in contact have generated linguistic change and adaptation, and language and national identity, as well as personal self-consciousness, have long gone together. This chapter will explore the ways in which the historical and institutional associations of HEL and the “medievalist” are contingently driven, and then to suggest some ways in which the redefinition of the “medievalist” in the twenty-first century can productively include a newer, critical sensibility about the place of HEL in the teachings of social vernacular literacy.

A Nineteenth-Century Garment Throughout

2019 ◽  
pp. 54-72
Author(s):  
Sarah Ogilvie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
English Language ◽  
The State ◽  
Comparative Philology

Ogilvie discusses how the OED represents a key development in ‘modern’ lexicography based on how it was envisioned, compiled, and executed. The chapter provides background on the state of philology throughout the seventy-year process of compiling the OED, and documents the roles played by some of the primary figures who influenced and shaped the dictionary’s development. The central features characterizing the OED’s production, Ogilvie argues, were the editors’ application of historical principles to each entry; the favouring of descriptive over prescriptive methods; the attempt to provide thorough coverage of the English lexicon; and the use of collaborative compilation practices. Ogilvie also places the OED into the context of comparative philology and lexicography, and considers the intersection of nationalism, national identity, and the codification of the English language.

scholarly journals حقوق الاقليات في الدساتير العراقية ما بعد عام 2003

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
عمر الجبوري
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Important Thing ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
State Administration ◽  
History Of

The Iraqi State Administration Act of 2003 and the Iraqi Constitution of 2005 are a turning point in the history of minorities in Iraq. They stipulate rights that have not been addressed by the Iraqi constitutions since the inception of the Iraqi state until 2003. They stipulated all political and cultural rights and other rights, Using the language of these minorities, and the most important thing that was stipulated by the Iraqi constitution is the use of a single description of components rather than minorities, but the latter still bear political suffering through the absence of legislation to verify the Constitution, as most of these rights provided for in constitutions Paper, then the reason lies In the mechanism of application and not in the mechanism of the provision of rights and therefore emerged many of the most problematic issues, including the problematic national identity of Iraq.

“Where the devil should he learn our language?”: Shakespeare’s Territorial Linguistics

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-199
Author(s):  
Sharon Emmerichs
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Language ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
English National Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Abstract Notion ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
And Control ◽  
Physical Spaces

Abstract This article looks at how Spenser’s desire for an English national identity, rooted in a “kingdom of our own language,” is realized in Shakespeare’s works. I track the way early modern systems of power have used language as a colonial weapon and show how Shakespeare demonstrates the problematic effects of imagining language as a scaffold to hold oppressive social structures—such as class, gender, and nationality—in place. Throughout his works—comedies, tragedies, and histories alike—Shakespeare consistently plays with the notion that there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to speak, and I argue he connects these definitions with the colonial notion of a “right” and a “wrong” way to be “English”. The article examines language as space, in which “English” and “England” become synonymous. It explores language as a shared national identity in which language belongs to physical spaces as well as to peoples and a more abstract notion of nation. It explores the colonial imposition of the English language on indigenous populations that map the expansion of the known world in the early modern era, and looks at the tensions between the English and the Welsh—and their respective languages—in Shakespeare’s plays. Ultimately, shows us the inevitable victims of linguistic nationalism and draws attention to England’s long history of using language as a tool of abuse, oppression, and control.

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