Loving Literature: A Cultural History

335 Pages·2015·1.752 MB·English

by  Deidre Shauna Lynch

Loving Literature

Loving Literature
A Cultural History
D e i D r e S h a u n a Ly n c h
The university of chicago Press
chicago and london
deidre shauna lynch is the Chancellor Jackman Professor
of English at the University of Toronto.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 18370- 1 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 18384- 8 (e- book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226183848.001.0001
The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of
the Chancellor Jackman Professorship at the University of Toronto toward
the publication of this book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lynch, Deidre, author.
Loving literature : a cultural history / Deidre Shauna Lynch.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-226-18370-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-18384-8
(e-book) 1. English literature—Appreciation. 2. English literature—History
and criticism. I. Title.
pr129.u5l96 2015
820.9—dc23
2014015454
a This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48– 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
List of Illustrations • vii
Introduction: At Home in English • 1
part 1: choosing an author as you choose a friend
1  Making It Personal  21
part 2: possessive love
2  Literary History and the Man Who Loved Too Much  65
3  Wedded to Books: Nineteenth- Century Bookmen at Home  103
part 3: english literature for everyday use
4  Going Steady: Canons’ Clockwork  147
part 4: dead poets societies
5  Canon Love in Gothic Libraries  195
6  Poetry at Death’s Door  235
Acknowledgments • 277
Notes • 279
Index • 319

Illustrations
1.1  Frontispiece and title page from Select British Poets . . . (1824)  29
1.2  “Promissory Note . . . from Shakspeare” (1805)  43
1.3  “Apollo and the Muses, Inflicting Penance on Doctor Pomposo” 
(1783) (detail)  51
1.4  “The Ladies of Llangollen” (ca. 1887)  57
3.1  “The Pursuit of Letters” (1828–32)  133
3.2  Page from Mary Watson’s “The Scrap Book” (ca. 1821)  143
4.1  Frontispiece and title page from volume 2 of The Every- Day Book
(1827)  164
5.1  Frontispiece from The Monks of St. Andrews . . . (ca. 1808– 27)  200
6.1  Frontispiece and title page from The Lives of the Most Famous English
Poets (1687)  258
6.2 Illustration to Browning’s “Memorabilia” (1886)  265
6.3 Title page from A. W. Bennett’s edition of The Lady of the Lake
(1865)  268
6.4 Frontispiece from Our English Lakes . . . (1864)  269
6.5 Wordsworth’s tomb from Our English Lakes . . . (1864)  271

Introduction
at home in english
Although since the era of Thomas Kuhn the natural sciences have inspired
attempts to historicize their basic epistemological assumptions, research
protocols, and social practices, we continue to await, Lorraine Daston has
recently lamented, comparable self- reflection from and on behalf of human-
ists: accounts of “what they do” and “how they know what they know.”1
In Loving Literature I aim to help English studies contribute to the project
that Daston calls for. More precisely, I aim to suggest why self- reflection on
our ways of knowing will not suffice when we seek to assess English pro-
fessors’ characteristic mode of practicing humanist study: I aim to honor,
instead, the central role that affective labor— our ways of feeling, then, as
well as knowing—h as been assigned within English studies, and I aim to
consider how through our cooperation with that assignment we have come
to inhabit a profession that is paradoxically beholden to statements of per-
sonal connection. Loving Literature turns to literary studies’ eighteenth- and
nineteenth- century prehistory— to early definitions of literariness, to histo-
ries of criticism, canonicity, literary history, and “heritage,” and, above all,
to the emergence during this period of new etiquettes of literary appreci-
ation— so as to examine how it has come to be that those of us for whom
English is a line of work are also called upon to love literature and to ensure
that others do so too.
Following Max Weber, William Clark states that the “modern bureau-
cratic distinction allowing the formation of a public- professional, expert
self, and its insulation from the interests and hobbies of the amateur, pri-
vate self, lies in the distinction between office and home.”2 The freewheeling