Chris,
There seem to be signs of canon formation studies as an important trend
in recent medieval scholarship. Langland and Chaucer have been treated to
much of it, and David Matthews tracks <<The Making of Middle English,
1765-1910>> (Minnesota UP, 1999). This book is also a history of the
origins of English as a discipline altogether. To the extent that these
kinds of studies follow the editing and printing of medieval texts in the
16th and 17th centuries, they are crucially relevant to Renaissance
scholarship. You might want to go back a few centuries before the
Enlightenment and inquire to what extent your critical concerns are
conditioned by the construction of the canon in earlier phases of the
early modern era. Trevor Ross's The English Literary Canon: From the
Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (McGill-Queen's UP, 1998)
might be of interest.
Dan Knauss
[log in to unmask] - [log in to unmask]
On Fri, 20 Jul 2001 13:30:57 -0400 warley <[log in to unmask]> writes:
> Can I take this opportunity to stress something that came up briefly
> at
> the end of the Spenser conference in Cambridge (at which,
> incidentally, I
> had an especially good time)? The question was, what was left out
> of
> the conference, and someone (I didn't catch who actually) said what
> about
> Spenser in the 19th century? The question of Spenser in early
> America
> points to the same issue -- we need more studies of what used to be
> called
> "reception history," but what in the wake of Guillory might be
> called with
> more theoretical precision "canon formation." Shakespeare studies
> has
> lots of work like this going on,
> partly following de Grazia's Shakespeare Verbatim. No need merely
> to
> imitate Shakespeare studies, of course, but I think we need a
> Spenser
> Verbatim (or perhaps, in light of the list, a Sidney-Spenser
> Verbatim). There has been some recent work (Greg Kucich's Keats,
> Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism; Jonathan Kramnick's Making the
> English Canon, just off the top of my head), and I know there are
> lots of
> people out there who know
> lots about these issues. I increasingly find myself wondering to
> what
> extent the sorts of things I want to talk about in Spenser were
> invented,
> or at least addressed, by post-Enlightenment scholarship, that is,
> to
> what extent my concerns are repeating the (repressed?) history of
> Spenser
> scholarship. One thing the opening session made abundantly clear is
> that
> flipping through the Variorum is not sufficient.
>
> I am thinking, for instance, of Richard McCabe's irresistible nugget
> that
> the hall at Pembroke is not the one Spenser served in -- that
> Spenser's
> hall was torn down in the 19th century because it didn't look
> medieval
> enough. Might something similar be said about The Faerie Queene?
>
> Seeking Mute Inglorious Spensers,
>
> Chris Warley
>
________________________________________________________________
GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO!
Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less!
Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit:
http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj.
|