Search Results

The Epilogue follows the book's account of the ways in which English literary modernism was formed in response to the Great War, by showing how various movements in the history of literary criticism were unable to identify or admit the historical content and implication of this fact. Beginning with F. R. Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, the misreading of modernism is often repeated and culminates in the New Critical movement in America in the 1930s, which witnesses a severe misapprehension of I. A. Richards's historically informed critical principle of pseudo-statement, while the critical understanding of Kenneth Burke, most notably in Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, marks a signal exception to this rule.

English identity and anti-foreign feeling were important in English politics during the 13th century. This chapter examines five interrelated developments in the reigns of Richard I and John. The first was the intensification of English identity among the predominantly immigrant elites. The second was the increasingly strong focus on the realm of England as a community to which loyalty was owed. The third was the development of a politically based xenophobia, directed not only against potentially hostile or disruptive outsiders, but also against new immigrants who might compete for power and royal favour with the established and increasingly English elites. Fourth was the solidification of anti-French views during the civil war surrounding Magna Carta. Fifth was the increasing tendency to view politics through an ethnic or national lens. In tracing the politicization of Englishness, this chapter pays as much attention to the interpretation of events and the rhetoric surrounding them as to the events themselves.

This chapter analyses the transformation in the functions and working of national assemblies which took place between Richard I's accession in 1189 and the end of Henry III's minority in 1227. That transformation was largely caused by two factors: the fiscal demands of the crown, and the increasingly controversial nature of royal counsel, the result of King John's reliance on an inner circle of counsellors, many of them aliens. Magna Carta, which was in part the product of these royal policies, marked a crucial step towards the establishment of parliament by making national taxation subject to conciliar consent for the first time. The giving of counsel was being transformed from a duty which magnates owed to the king into a right to be used against him. This process was completed during the long minority of Henry III, when national councils gained a new authority by governing in the king's name, granting taxes, and sanctioning government appointments.

This chapter puts the Liberal support of the Great War in the context of 19th-century British Liberalism. This legacy places an exceptionally high degree of value on Reason, a priority that results often in a reliance on verbal reason over factual evidence. This susceptibility is evidenced in the rhetoric of support for the war, which was at odds with the major tenets of Liberal policy, and so evinced a most strenuous exercise of sheer verbal rationalization. The language of “seeming reason” is followed across a wide body of writing in support of the war, ranging from the partisan press to scholarly articles and monographs. The prevalence of this new tone in national politics is established as the basis of a number of verbal initiatives in literary modernism, beginning with the critical work of I. A. Richards, whose signature doctrine of “pseudo-statement” answers specifically to the tone of the political times.

The Archbishop of Rouen, Walter of Coutances, was ostensibly charged by Richard I to work with William Longchamp, but really he was to keep an eye on him. Eleanor of Aquitaine's role as regent, assisted by Walter, now became even more important than before. This chapter notes in passing, though, that she had to have a man beside her, first William Longchamp and then Walter of Coutances, able to take decisions and enforce them. It was unthinkable at that time that government should be entrusted ‘officially’ to a queen, even one of Eleanor's character and quality. The chapter also argues that while suspicious of John, Eleanor sought first and foremost to preserve the dynastic heritage for her sons and to prevent King Arthur from becoming a candidate for the succession should Richard I not beget an heir. The events described here, then, foreshadow to a certain extent those that followed the King's death some years later.

This chapter contends that Richard I, King of England, gave King Tancred of Sicily a sword that the chroniclers identified, rightly or wrongly, with the sword of King Arthur. It is known that the Plantagenet monarchy had invested heavily in the promotion, the diffusion, and, most of all, the ‘takeover’ of the Arthurian legend as a component of its ideology. Eleanor of Aquitaine herself, who inherited the image of Queen Guinevere, the fascinating adulterous wife of King Arthur, played a major role in that ideology, which made the mythical Arthurian court the ancestor and archetype of the court of the Plantagenets. However, the myth had certain risks attached to it that needed to be contained. For, according to several interpretations, Arthur did not die of the wounds he received in his last battle with Mordred, but was borne away to Avalon, to ‘another world’, a world of faery, magical or demoniac, where his wounds were tended.

Poetry presents a paradox: it is capable of saving us, but it does not matter. However, to read poets like T. S. Eliot and Wystan Hugh Auden for the poetry, and not for something else, makes paradoxes like these redundant, and puts poetic language back into the world where sense has to be made, truths (like lies) can be told, and clarity of meaning is possible. Auden has come to be celebrated as an embodied paradox: he was the greatest poet, and the most sceptical about poetry; he was the most celebrated English poet, and the most misunderstood. From the mid-century onwards, British literary criticism and poetry were much taken up with Eliot. This chapter examines Eliot's engagement with I. A. Richards, his poem Four Quartets, and Tom Paulin's misreading of Eliot.

This chapter gives a broad outline of the events that occurred at Châlus. There is not the least doubt about Richard I's main intention in laying siege to Châlus. He went into the county of Limousin as an overlord wishing to inflict severe punishment in accordance with feudal law on treacherous vassals. The chapter also shows that at the age of seventy-eight, Eleanor of Aquitaine came out of her Fontevrault retreat to play an active role in what was a real war now flaring up. King Arthur and his troops laid siege to the town and soon made their way in, forcing Eleanor to go farther into the town and take refuge in the castle. Eleanor managed to send messengers out to her son John, then in the neighbourhood of Le Mans, and to William des Roches, who had replaced Guy of Thouars at Chinon.

Disciplinary historians have seen I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929) as foundational for modern pedagogy in English. This chapter turns instead to Richards’s teaching notebooks for the Practical Criticism courses he taught at the University of Cambridge to show how, in the classroom, Richards sought to enlist his students as fellow researchers rather than study subjects. Edith Rickert, another 1920s pedagogical experimenter, enlisted the students in her University of Chicago course Scientific Analysis of Style to help her invent the “new methods for the study of literature” that would appear in her 1927 book of that title. Both Rickert and Richards demanded from students not polished readings of literary works, but their cooperation in the process of gathering and organizing bits of data about the formal properties of texts and the interpretive decisions of readers. Like other classroom experimenters and organizers of literary laboratories in the 1920s, Richards and Rickert believed that their new methods would elevate the discernment of individual students, but only in the context of what Richards called “co-operative inquiry.” They believed that collective literary study was both a valuable social activity itself and an important tool for elevating individual judgment.

This brief concluding chapter looks at Cambridge English in the 20th century and points out that its founding father, I. A. Richards, referred to Kames’s ‘great and novel venture’ in his lectures on ‘The Philosophy of Rhetoric’. It considers Raymond Williams’s valedictory Cambridge lectures, which focus on the importance of expression in English studies and seek in effect to reinstate rhetoric, though with more social and political contextualisation. It is argued that rhetoric not only represents the origins of English, but also offers a future for English through a recombining of the active, performative arts of writing and speaking with the more passive, analytical, and interpretative arts of reading.

The discussion begins by revisiting the Richards-Eliot debate over the relationship between poetry and ‘belief’. This notorious debate helped to inscribe two mutually conflicting critical languages which cohabit incongruously in thirties literary and critical discourse. The controversy between Richards and Eliot registered belief as a passive presence in poetry which complicates the idea of a text-centred critical hermeneutics (this is the ‘weak’ version of the belief-problem), but it also reflected on the possibilities of advertising and propagating belief, whether religious or political, by artistic means (the ‘strong’ version). Both parts of the debate rose to prominence in the 1930s, when they became central to the new literary decade’s self-definitions. The chapter traces the development which these literary-critical arguments played in the incipient critical debates of the 1930s by focussing on the Cambridge little magazine Experiment.

This chapter elaborates on English royal falconry from the period of Richard I to Henry III. Richard was a dedicated falconer. He spent over nine years of his reign outside England, there was less royal falconry activity in England during his reign than in that of Henry II, and recorded instances of Richard's hawking activity all take place abroad. Several of the falconers of Richard's reign who appear most frequently in the records were men who served Henry II. Ralph and Walter de Hauville appear again, joined by Ralph de Erlham, another member of the Hauville family. The most striking thing about John's falconry establishment is the comparatively large number of people employed in it. Members of the Fitz Bernard family, acting as marshals of the king's hawks, generally vouched for wages of hawkers, though sometimes individual hawkers were paid separately.

This chapter pieces together the early career of Hugh's son and heir, Walter de Lacy (†1241). Through an analysis of surviving royal and seigniorial charters, the testimony of contemporary English and Irish chroniclers, and a previously unnoticed letter by John, lord of Ireland (dominus Hiberniae), this chapter produces a revised account of Walter's entry into the Lacy inheritance in England, Ireland, Wales and Normandy. Walter initially received all of his inheritance in 1189, yet found his rights in Ireland ignored by John as soon as King Richard I (the Lionheart) left on Crusade in 1191. King Richard set things right upon his return in 1194, forcing John to make peace with Walter. This account has implications reaching far beyond Lacy family history, for it provides new insight into the constitutional position of colonial Ireland within the Plantagenet Empire. The chapter then illustrates the interconnectedness of the Anglo-Norman realm, as King Richard sequestrated both the English and Norman components of the Lacy inheritance for Walter's failure to pay a fine pertaining to Normandy. The fact that Walter's Irish lands remained untouched further highlights Ireland's separate political character under King Richard and John.

This chapter argues that an English degree is closely tied to market and management philosophies. The continuity between the concepts of criticism and capitalist economics re-established that connection, and challenges the conventional view that the values of literature stand opposed to those of commerce. Criticism is speaking or writing about literature, but its idiom, tone, priorities, and direction connect with wider ideas about the individual and society. I. A. Richards pioneered the use of practical criticism. Based on what he said, it is clear that the difference between good and bad art is that the former arouses, organises, and fulfils many more impulses than the latter. F. R. Leavis and Frederic Winslow Taylor used the concept of the part and the whole to understand the literary work and the factory organisation, respectively. Blog, self-publishing, and a potentially worldwide audience democratises the acts of writing and commentary.

This chapter provides the text and translation of Book 2 of William of Newburgh's The History of English Affairs, which includes the beginnings of the reign of Henry II and how he restored the royal domains to their former condition. It describes the site of Scarborough Castle as a rock of astounding height and breadth that is made virtually impregnable by precipitous cliffs on all sides. It also details the siege and surrender of Bridgnorth and how the king of Scots restored the northern region of England to the king of the English. The chapter recounts Richard I's war with the Welsh and how the Welsh regained the king's favour as remnants of the Britons, who were the first inhabitants of England.

This chapter examines Wace's Roman de Rou and why it was commissioned by Henry II. The Roman de Rou is divided into three main parts and an appendix. Part I is a 315-line poem composed in twelve-syllable laisses, which briefly sets out the history of the Norman dukes and kings of England in ascending order, beginning with Henry II and ending with the dynasty's founder, Rollo. Part II traces the history of the Normans from Rollo to the beginning of Duke Richard I's reign in 4,425 twelve-syllable lines known as Alexandrines. This chapter focuses on Part III, which continues the history from Richard I's marriage to Gunnor to the 1106 battle of Tinchebray, and considers Wace's representation of Norman history as well as the reasons why he lost Henry's support. It also analyzes why Henry patronized a vernacular historiography of his ancestors, arguing that he wanted to aggrandize his dynasty and to affirm his hereditary right to rule England and Normandy.

This chapter argues that scientific approaches to aesthetics that were popular in Victorian culture constitute a suppressed alternative to New Critical interpretive practices that were foundational in professional literary study. Analyzing the literary critic Vernon Lee’s unusual synthesis of German physiological aesthetics, British aestheticism, and American quantitative textual analysis, the chapter shows how the concept of empathy became at once quantitative and embodied in Lee’s literary theory. In Beauty and Ugliness, Lee and her lover, Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, developed strategies for empirical introspective analysis that were meant to demonstrate the effects of paintings and sculpture on the body. As Lee learned about the stylometric analysis of literature carried out in the United States, she expanded her empirical approach to include counting words and issuing surveys. Although this intersection of quantitative and affective approaches was largely disregarded by I.A. Richards and his progeny, it represents a vital prehistory of current approaches to the quantitative and empirical analysis of culture.