Making the English Canon Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 17001770 [Paperback]

Examines the English canon in the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century.This book offers an original examination of the formation of the English canon during the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, looking in particular at the treatment of Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. Through close readings of periodical essays, editions, treatises, reviews, disquisitions, pamphlets and poems, Jonathan Brody Kramnick recounts the origins of modern literary study and situates the rise of national literary tradition in the broad context of the making of a public culture.This book offers an original examination of the formation of the English canon during the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, looking in particular at the treatment of Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. Through close readings of periodical essays, editions, treatises, reviews, disquisitions, pamphlets and poems, Jonathan Brody Kramnick recounts the origins of modern literary study and situates the rise of national literary tradition in the broad context of the making of a public culture.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 analyzes 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, 17521754; 4. The cultural logic of late feudalism: or, Spenser and the romance of scholarship, 17541762; Part III. 5. Shakespeare's nation: the literarl,