The making of the English literary canon : from the Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century / Trevor Ross.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ross, Trevor Thornton, 1961-

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry--History and criticism.

English poetry.

Canon (Literature).

Physical Description:

x, 400 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Montreal ; Buffalo : McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998.

Summary:

It is widely accepted among literary scholars that canon-formation began in the eighteenth century when scholarly editions and critical treatments of older works, designed to educate readers about the national literary heritage, appeared for the first time. In The Making of the English Literary Canon Trevor Ross challenges this assumption, arguing that canon formation was going on well before the eighteenth century but was based on a very different set of literary and cultural values. Covering a period that extends from the Middle Ages to the institutionalization of literature in the eighteenth century, Ross's comprehensive history traces the evolution of cultural attitudes toward literature in English society, highlighting the diverse interests and assumptions that defined and shaped the literary canon.

An indigenous canon of letters, Ross argues, had been both the hope and aim of English authors since the Middle Ages. Early authors believed that promoting the idea of a national literature would help publicize their work and favour literary production in the vernacular. Ross places these early gestures toward canon-making in the context of the highly rhetorical habits of thought that dominated medieval and Renaissance culture, habits that were gradually displaced by an emergent rationalist understanding of literary value. He shows that, beginning in the late seventeenth century, canon-makers became less concerned with how English literature was produced than with how it was read and received.

Contents:

Part 1 Versions of Canonic Harmony 21

1 Early Gestures 23

To the Coming of Print 26

Dissolution in the Catalogues of Leland and Bale 51

Evaluative Communities and Print Audiences 64

Part 2 Consequences of Presentism 85

2 Albion's Parnassus and the Professional Author 87

Promoting the Literary System: Classicism and the Problem of Modernity 91

Revision in Greene's Vision 103

The "Workes" of Benjamin Jonson and the Canonical Text 106

Resentment in Drayton's "To My Most Dearely-Loved Friend Henery Reynolds Esquire, of Poets and Poesie" 116

3 The Uses of the Dead 124

Elegies to Donne and Jonson 126

Proving Wit by Power 132

"Nor let us call him Father anie more": The Cavaliers on Chaucer 138

Part 3 Defining a Cultural Field 145

4 Value into Knowledge 147

The Grounds of Value 149

Values in Literature 156

Value and Cultural Change 165

5 The Fall of Apollo 173

Sessions of the Poets 174

"I lisp'd in Numbers, for the Numbers came": Pope and the Poetic Compulsion 184

The Rejection of Classicism 196

Part 4 Consumption and Canonic Hierarchy 207

6 Reading the Canon 209

Addison Reads Milton 213

Teaching to Read 220

Inexhausting Shakespeare 231

7 A Basis for Criticism 247

The Logic of Differentiation 250

The Wartons on the Canon 256

Johnson and the Paradox of Value 267

Epilogue: How Poesy Became Literature 293.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0773516832 :

OCLC:

42308103