In message <[log in to unmask]>, Chris Hamilton-Emery
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>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?
>
Not sure what 'inclusion' means here, or when anything we can call a
'canon' was established. But there were early Elizabethan edns of
Chaucer & then Urry's edn of c. 1710, right there in the high Augustan
period. But true enough Johnson starts with Cowley, reflecting an idea
of when the period of Modern English Poetry begins. The expansion of the
arena was probably the work of the Romantics, trawling back for a more
vital form of the language (in which sense Romantic-Modernist forms a
continuum). The intriguing thing is that that effort begins with
forgeries - most notably Chatterton's Rowley poems, but MacPherson's
Ossian before that (& a bit later Iolo Morganwg doing the same with the
Welsh). Plus the spate of Spenser imitations c.1760-80. And the way that
the rediscovery of the Jacobean drama goes hand in hand with the
Romantics' craze for writing stage plays - which none of them seem
exactly cut out for ...
--
Alan Halsey
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