Making the English Canon
Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770

Examines the English canon in the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century.

Jonathan Brody Kramnick (Author)

9780521641272, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 January 1999

296 pages
23.7 x 16 x 2.2 cm, 0.54 kg

Review of the hardback: 'While the rise of the English canon has been a topic of continuous and fraught interest over the past couple of decades Jonathan Kramnick offers the most coherent and detailed discussion of what is arguably its crucial historical moment: the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Kramnick's discussion of how Shakespeare and Spenser became the first English 'classics' will itself become classic. Making the English Canon is not simply a monograph on eighteenth-century literary aesthetics, it is a singularly powerful and authoritative contribution to perhaps the most important discussion going on in the literary humanities today.' Terry Castle

Jonathan Brody Kramnick's book examines the formation of the English canon over the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century. Kramnick details how the idea of literary tradition emerged out of a prolonged engagement with the institutions of cultural modernity, from the public sphere and national identity to capitalism and the print market. Looking at a wide variety of eighteenth-century critical writing, he analyses the tensions that inhabited the categories of national literature and public culture at the moment of their emergence.

Introduction: the modernity of the past
Part I: 1. The structural transformation of literary history
2. The mode of consecration: between aesthetics and historicism. Part II: 3. Novel to Lyric: Shakespeare in the field of culture, 1752–1754
4. The cultural logic of late feudalism: or, Spenser and the romance of scholarship, 1754–1762
Part III. 5. Shakespeare's nation: the literary profession and the 'shades of ages'
Afterword: the present crisis.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]