Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-75dct Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-11T02:06:35.293Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Making of the English Canon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jonathan Brody Kramnick
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 112 , Issue 5 , October 1997 , pp. 1087 - 1101
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Addison, Joseph, and Steele, Richard. The Spectator. Ed. Donald Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.Google Scholar
Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983.Google Scholar
Black, Jeremy. The English Press in the Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1987.Google Scholar
Cressy, David “Levels of Illiteracy in England, 1530-1730.” Literacy and Social Development in the West. Ed. Harvey, J. Graff. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. 105–10.Google Scholar
Cressy, David “Literacy in Context: Meaning and Measurement in Early Modern England.” Consumption and the World of Goods. Ed. Brewer, John and Porter, Roy. New York: Routledge, 1993. 303–30.Google Scholar
DeMaria, Robert “Samuel Johnson and the Reading Revolution.” Eighteenth-Century Life, ns 16 (1992): 86–102.Google Scholar
Dryden, John Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern. “Of Dramatic Poesy” and Other Critical Essays. New York: Everyman, 1962. 269–26.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism. London: Verso, 1984.Google Scholar
Feather, John “The Commerce of Letters: The Study of the Eighteenth-Century Book Trade.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 19–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feather, John. The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferdinand, C. Y “Local Distribution Networks in Eighteenth-Century England.” Myers and Harris, Spreading the Word 25–40.Google Scholar
Foot, Mirjam “Some Bookbinders' Price Lists of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century.” Myers and Harris, Economics 124–12.Google Scholar
Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Burger, Thomas. Cambridge: MIT P, 1989.Google Scholar
Harris, Michael “A Few Shillings for Small Books: The Experiences of Flying Stationer in the Eighteenth Century.” Myers and Harris, Spreading the Word 65–80.Google Scholar
Hurd, Richard. A Dissertation on the Idea of Universal Poetry. London, 1766.Google Scholar
Hurd, Richard. Letters on Chivalry and Romance with The Third Elizabethan Dialogue. Ed. Morley, Edith. 1911. New York: AMS, 1976.Google Scholar
Jarvis, Simon. Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and the Representation of Scholarly Labor, 1725-1769. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Samuel. The Idler and the Adventurer. Ed. W. J. Bate, John Ballett, and L. F. Powell. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969. Vol. 2 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.Google Scholar
Johnson, Samuel. Johnson on Shakespeare. Ed. Sherbo, Arthur. New Haven: Yale UP, 1968. Vol. 7 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.Google Scholar
Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler. Ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969. Vols. 3–5 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.Google Scholar
Kernan, Alvin. Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Kinney, E. J. The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Google Scholar
Klancher, John. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.Google Scholar
Kramnick, Jonathan Brody “The Cultural Logic of Late Feudalism: Placing Spenser in the Eighteenth Century.” ELH 63 (1996): 871–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laugero, Greg “Infrastructures of the Enlightenment: Road-Making, the Public Sphere, and the Emergence of Literature.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1995): 45–68.Google Scholar
Levine, Joseph. The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Lynch, Deidre ‘“Beating the Track of the Alphabet’: Samuel Johnson, Tourism and the ABC's of Modern Authority.” ELH 57 (1990): 357–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myers, Robin, and Harris, Michael, eds Development of the English Book Trade, 1700-1899. Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic, 1981.Google Scholar
Myers, Robin, and Harris, Michael, eds Economics of the British Book Trade, 1605-1939. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1985.Google Scholar
Myers, Robin, and Harris, Michael, eds Spreading the Word: The Distribution Networks of Print, 1550-1850. Foxbury Meadows, Eng.: St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1990.Google Scholar
Patey, Douglas “The Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon.” Modern Language Studies 18.1 (1988): 17–37.Google Scholar
Pfeiffer, Rudolph. History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.Google Scholar
Pittock, Joan “Thomas Warton and the Oxford Chair of Poetry.” English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 62 (1981): 14–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plant, Marjorie. The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books. 3rd ed. London: Allen and Unwin, 1974.Google Scholar
Reinert, Thomas. Regulating Confusion: Samuel Johnson and the Crowd. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reiss, Timothy. The Meaning of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Ross, Trevor “The Emergence of ‘Literature’: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century.” ELH 63 (1996): 340–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rymer, Thomas. A Short View of Tragedy: The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer. Ed. Zimanski, Curt. New Haven: Yale UP, 1956.Google Scholar
Schofield, R. S “The Measurement of Literacy in Pre-industrial England.” Literacy in Traditional Societies. Ed. Goody, Jack. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968. 311–31.Google Scholar
Stone, Lawrence “Literacy and Education in England, 1640-1900.” Past and Present 42 (1969): 98–112.Google Scholar
Terry, Richard “The Eighteenth-Century Invention of Literature: A Truism Reconsidered.” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 19 (1996): 47–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Upton, John. Critical Observations on Shakespeare. 1746. London, 1748.Google Scholar
Vance, John A “Samuel Johnson and Thomas Warton.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 9 (1986): 95–9 11.Google Scholar
Warton, Joseph. Adventurer. British Essayists. Ed. Chalmers, A. Vols. 20-21. London, 1823.Google Scholar
Warton, Joseph. An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Alexander Pope. London, 1756.Google Scholar
Warton, Thomas. Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser. 2 vols. London, 1754-62.Google Scholar
Wasserman, Earl. Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth-Century. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1947.Google Scholar
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson. London: Chatto, 1957.Google Scholar
Weinbrot, Howard. Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wellek, René. The Rise of English Literary History. New York: McGraw, 1941.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, William. Samuel Johnson's Prose Style. New Haven: Yale UP, 1947.Google Scholar
Woodmansee, Martha. The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Wurtsbaugh, Jewel. Two Centuries of Spenserian Scholarship. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1936.Google Scholar