Keston, this is fascinating stuff. I'm truly out of my depth here. I'd
always imagined that 17th and 18th century English models for a canon were
primarily translations of Latin or Greek classics, with bits of English
chucked in, wasn't Shakespeare excluded for most of the 17th C?
I also thought that the inclusion of say, Chaucer was a nineteenth century
thing?
Somehow I suspected that Scots took French models during their independence.
. . Anyway this is really great stuff thanks for the leads. Very impressive
erudition!
Best
Chris
> Chris - to pick up on your point about canons and national ID. I think
> the disparities between English and Scottish lists were engineered often
> to reflect political antipathies, in an exclusively opportunistic manner.
> A good deal of the anti-Scottish sentiment c.1760 was contrived as an
> attack on Bute's govt. and its stash of Scot supporters. Bute's
> unpopularity must have damaged the status of eg Macpherson's Fingal
> (Churchill had a stab). I'm not sure that this worked the other way --
> even violently Jacobite Scot poets like William Hamilton seemed to respect
> and draw overtly upon English models. But Hamilton's spectacle of
> opposition was to revert to an earlier stage of the English canon -- to
> courtly lyric, rather than the verse essays and mock heroic satires that
> chiefly characterized his period. Pound seems to have taken this tack
> also, though in a diffuser spirit. Anyone know what Burns thought of
> Milton?
>
> k
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