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The constitution of a literary heritage brings into play two axes: those of selection and combination. It depends on the veneration of select authors and works (that is, their adoption into a canon) and on the combination of these into an intelligible ‘tradition’ or creative genealogy. In this book, the word ‘canon’ refers to a list of books maintained by personal or public opinion to be illustrious, rather than in the more ideologically hard-edged application of it as a corpus of texts accredited and promulgated by some force of authority (such as a school, university, or publishing house). This definition allows for a distinction between canon-making as involving a principle of selection, and the exhaustive recovery of the cultural past undertaken by some antiquarians. When the English literary canon comes into being remains unclear. In recent times, it has become the norm for a relatively late date, usually falling in the 18th century or Romantic period, to be accorded to its inception.

This book has explored several different visual and written representations of Yellow Mountain, mostly from the seventeenth century. This chapter reiterates that a more effective understanding of the youji can be achieved through reading the landscape and perceiving it as a product of various representational practices that have been brought about within late-Ming Jiangnan's political, social, cultural, and economic contexts. Qian Qianyi's “Account of My Travels at Yellow Mountain” depictes a self-realization in which a religious pilgrimage was undertaken while in his writing he remained grounded in orthodox Confucian philosophy. Qian was able to present the landscape within the context of his literary heritage for he believed that the site could be best understood through text. Looking into the text, though, reveals that Qian owed much to his literary forefathers.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on Italian language learning in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It highlights the significant contributions of John Florio and Giovanni Torriano in the teaching and learning of the Italian language in England. This chapter also analyses the works of John Milton and suggests that he is the last significant example in seventeenth-century England of a student learning the Italian language primarily to benefit from the wealth of its literary heritage, rather than for the more practical and increasingly popular motives of travel and trade.

This book has documented a literary genealogy of the cultural attitudes toward black girls in the United States. By analyzing the images and tropes created by some nineteenth-century black writers to tackle black girlhood, it has painted a picture of a black girl who is not valued and whose accomplishments are undermined. This epilogue expresses the hope that the literary heritage of black girls will be recovered in a way that will contribute to solutions for black girls of today and tomorrow. It argues that black girls are often misrepresented in the media and offers a theoretical landscape for addressing such mirepresentations and for seeing beyond them to look at what black girls are actually doing, thinking, and dreaming. Finally, it discusses some of the major findings of the African American Policy Institute study on the treatment of black girls in schools entitled Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected, released in February 2015.

The short Afterword focuses on a recent development: the proposal to save for the nation a private collection of manuscripts and books known as the Honresfield Collection. Hidden from public view for almost one hundred years, the collection represents the most important cache of literary manuscripts and books to come onto the market in the last century. Formed at the close of the nineteenth century by William Law, a Rochdale mill-owner, the Honresfield manuscripts are associated with some of the greatest writers in the English and Scots languages, several of whose works and habits of composition have been the subjects of this study. The collection contains manuscripts in the hands of Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and the Brontës. In light of this development, the Afterword also considers what might be reasonable concepts and recommendations for balancing public with private good when it comes to objects of literary heritage.

This chapter focuses on one of the most important Jewish intellectuals of the Ashkenazi population during the thirteenth century—Yohanan Alemanno. The family name that he adopted, Alemanno, was the Italian version of “Ashkenazi,” and he was very proud of his extraction. The young Yohanan studied with a famous figure in Mantua, R. Yehudah Messer Leon, and received the title of doctor. For many years, he lived in Florence, where he had an association with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whom he mentions explicitly in one of his books, and played a role in the life of the Jewish community there. Alemanno left a substantial literary heritage, most of which still survives in autograph manuscripts. It consists of a lengthy commentary on the Song of Songs, titled Hesheq Shlomo (The Desire of Solomon), of which only the introduction has been printed as Sha'ar ha-Hesheq.

Bainbrigge’s closet drama is explored from a number of perspectives. These include its debt to Victorian classical burlesques, and responses to other versions of the myth of Achilles, including Homer’s. This chapter explores Bainbrigge’s dramatization of the secrecy that surrounds homoerotic writing, and its use of homoerotic codes. It interrogates the radical homoerotic literary heritage Bainbrigge lays claim to, and his portrayal of lesbianism as equivalent to male homosexuality, not least via a tradition of homoerotic receptions of Sappho, including those of Swinburne and John Addington Symonds. The chapter further explores Bainbrigge’s comments on the links between love between males and classical education, and the continuities between ancient and modern sexualities. The play offers an anarchic range of queer options, encompassing gender fluidity, cross-dressing, and a very wide variety of sexual possibilities and roles.