City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

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

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

index present

non fiction

The making of the English literary canon

bibliography

44689777

Trevor Ross

from the Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century

Annotation, 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

Part 1. Versions of Canonic Harmony -- 1. Early Gestures -- To the Coming of Print -- Dissolution in the Catalogues of Leland and Bale -- Evaluative Communities and Print Audiences -- Part 2. Consequences of Presentism -- 2. Albion's Parnassus and the Professional Author -- Promoting the Literary System: Classicism and the Problem of Modernity -- Revision in Greene's Vision -- The "Workes" of Benjamin Jonson and the Canonical Text -- Resentment in Drayton's "To My Most Dearely-Loved Friend Henery Reynolds Esquire, of Poets and Poesie" -- 3. The Uses of the Dead -- Elegies to Donne and Jonson -- Proving Wit by Power -- "Nor let us call him Father anie more": The Cavaliers on Chaucer -- Part 3. Defining a Cultural Field -- 4. Value into Knowledge -- The Grounds of Value -- Values in Literature -- Value and Cultural Change -- 5. The Fall of Apollo -- Sessions of the Poets -- "I lisp'd in Numbers, for the Numbers came": Pope and the Poetic Compulsion -- The Rejection of Classicism -- Part 4. Consumption and Canonic Hierarchy -- 6. Reading the Canon -- Addison Reads Milton -- Teaching to Read -- Inexhausting Shakespeare -- 7. A Basis for Criticism -- The Logic of Differentiation -- The Wartons on the Canon -- Johnson and the Paradox of Value -- Epilogue: How Poesy Became Literature