Before national literary history

Modern Language Quarterly

Volumn 64, Issue PART 2, 2003, Pages 169-178

  Helgerson, Richard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249147539     PISSN: 00267929     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00267929-64-2-169     Document Type: Review

References (19)

1. See esp. René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941).
2. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 131;
3. E. K., in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford, 11 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932-57), 7:8-9;
4. William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1904), 1:227. In all quotations I have modernized spelling and punctuation. I have also modernized the spelling of titles in my text, though in the notes they appear as on the editions cited.
5. No such lack had been apparent a generation earlier when John Leland and John Bale compiled their lengthy lists of English writers, Leland's Commentarii de scriptoribus Britannicis (1545) and Bale's Illustrium majoris Britanniae scriptorum (1548, 1557). What happened in the interim was the emergence of a category familiar to us but not to Leland or Bale, that of specifically "literary" - that is, imaginative or poetic - writing in the vernacular. That, as Sidney, E. K., and Webbe lamented, was a category thinly represented in English, however many Englishmen may have mitten in Latin of theology and other learned topics.
6. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 59.
7. Richard Carew, "The Excellencie of the English Tongue," in William Camden, Remains Concerning Britain, ed. R. D. Dunn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 43-44.
8. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury, ed. Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland, 1973), 279, 286-87.
9. Henry V, 4.7.11-50, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1007.
10. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. R. J. Schoeck (Don Mills, Ont.: Dent, 1966), 119.
11. For some wonderfully telling examples of this tendency in English literary history see Margit Sichert's and Herbert Grabes's essays in this issue.
12. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" Representations 37 (1992): 3.
13. I discuss the Elizabethan push for quantitative verse at length in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 25-40.
14. Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática de la lengua castellana, ed. Ig. González-Llubera (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 3.
15. Francisco de Medina, "A los letores," in Obras de Garcilaso de la Vega con anotaciones de Fernando de Herrera, ed. Antonio Gallego Morell (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1973), 1-12.
16. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
17. v.
18. I borrow a couple of sentences in this discussion of Mulcaster from my essay "Language Lessons: Linguistic Colonialism, Linguistic Postcolonialism, and the Early Modern English Nation," Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (1998): 292-93.
19. Lorenzo Valla, quoted in Eugenio Asenio, "La lengua compan̄era del imperio: Historia de una idea de Nebrija en Espan̄a y Portugal," Revista de filología española 43 (1960): 401.