Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth CenturyAn 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
3 | |
VERSIONS OF CANONIC HARMONY | 21 |
CONSEQUENCES OF PRESENTISM | 85 |
DEFINING A CULTURAL FIELD | 145 |
CONSUMPTION AND CANONICHIERARCHY | 207 |
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Addison aesthetic argument assert auctorial audience authors authorship autono autonomous believed Bourdieu Cambridge canon-formation canon-making canonical text catalogue Chaucer civic humanism claim Clarendon Press classical common reader contemporary courtiers courtly critical discourse cultural capital cultural field defined Drayton Dryden Dunciad edition eighteenth century elegies English literature English poetry Essay evaluative fame function genius genres gestures Gower harmony human ideal imagination J.G.A. Pocock John Johnson judgment language later laureate legitimacy legitimize literary canon literary history literary system London Milton modern moral economy Muses narrative nature neoclassicism objectivist objectivist culture original Oxford Paradise Lost paradox of value Parnassus past Petrarch pleasure plural poem Poesie poet's poetic poetry's poets political Pope Pope's praise pref presentist production reading refinement Renaissance rhetorical culture Samuel Johnson seemed sense Shakespeare social source of value Spenser suggests symbolic capital taste tion tradition University Press verbal power verse vols Warton Widsith writing