University of Plymouth PEARL https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk 04 University of Plymouth Research Theses 01 Research Theses Main Collection 2015 Making the Past: The Concepts of Literary History and Literary Tradition in the Works of Thomas Gray Albu-Mohammed, Raheem Rashid Mnayit http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/3362 Plymouth University All content in PEARL is protected by copyright law. Author manuscripts are made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the details provided on the item record or document. In the absence of an open licence (e.g. Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher or author. Copyright Statement This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the author’s prior consent. Making the Past: The Concepts of Literary History and Literary Tradition in the Works of Thomas Gray By Raheem Rashid Mnayit Albu‐Mohammed A thesis submitted to the University of Plymouth in partial fulfilment for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy School of Humanities and Performing Arts Faculty of Arts and Humanities November 2014 Raheem Rashid Mnayit Albu‐mohammed Making the Past: The Concepts of Literary History and Literary Tradition in the Works of Thomas Gray Abstract This study explores Thomas Gray’s concepts of literary history, tradition, and the past. It proffers critical examinations of Gray’s literary and historical thoughts, illustrating the extent of the complexity of the mid‐century cultural and intellectual climate in which Gray and his contemporaries were writing. It shows the aesthetic, cultural, and political dimensions of canonicity in the course of examining the ideological motivation behind Gray’s literary history. Though much of Gray’s poetry is private and written for a narrow literary circle, his literary history seems engaged with issues of public concerns. Gray’s literary history must not be understood as a mere objective scholarly study, but as an ideological narrative invented to promote specific national and cultural agendas. Though Gray’s plan for his History of English Poetry was inspired directly by Pope’s scheme of writing a history of English poetry, Gray’s historiography represents a challenge to Pope’s most fundamental “neo‐classical” premises of canonicity in that it aligns English literary poetry back to the literary tradition of ancient Britain and resituates the English literary canon in an entirely different theoretical framework. Gray reworked Pope’s historical scheme to suits the need of the political and intellectual agendas of his own time: the national need for a distinctive cultural identity, which was promoted by and led to the emergence of a more national and less partisan atmosphere. Gray’s comprehensive project of literary history charts the birth and development of what he views as an English “high‐cultural” tradition, whose origins he attributes to the classical and Celtic antiquity. In Gray’s view, this tradition reaches its peak with the rise of Elizabethan literary culture; a culture which was later challenged by the “French” model which dominated British literary culture from the Restoration to Gray’s time. Gray’s literary history is to be examined in this study in relation to the concept of canon‐ formation. Gray’s historiographical study of literary culture of ancient Britain, his historicization of Chaucerian and medieval texts, his celebration of Elizabethan literary culture, and his polemical attack on “neo‐classical” literary ideals intend to relocate the process of canon‐formation within a “pure” source of national literary heritage, something which provides cultural momentum for the emergence of a historiography and an aesthetics promoting Gray’s idea of the continuity of tradition. As is the case in his poetry, the concept of cultural continuity is also central to Gray’s literary history, and permeates through his periodization, historicism, criticism, and his concept of the transformation of tradition. i Contents Dedication iii Acknowledgements iv Author’s Declaration v Introduction 1 Chapter One: Cultural Nationalism: Welsh Mythology and the Construction of Britishness 10 Chapter Two: Historicism and the Canonization of the Vernacular Poets 37 Chapter Three: The Canonization of Elizabethan literary Past 66 Chapter Four: Making the Aesthetics of the National Poetry 90 Chapter Five: Gray’s Odes: The Poetics of Literary Tradition 118 Conclusion 148 Bibliography 153 ii Dedication To my late parents who supported me since the first stage of the journey of my learning and to my late brother Ali who was and will be an endless great source of motivation and inspiration. I also dedicate this dissertation to my family for their support and encouragement. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Prof. Dafydd Moore and Dr Bonnie Latimer, for the guidance, encouragement, and advice they provided my throughout my study. I would also like to thank the staff members of the library of Plymouth University, English Language Centre, International Student Gateway, and the administrators of Graduate school for their help and support. iv Author’s Declaration At no time during the registration for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy has the author been registered for any other University award without prior agreement of the Graduate Committee. Work submitted for this research degree at the Plymouth University has not formed part of any other degree either at Plymouth University or at another establishment. Relevant English and creative writing research seminars were regularly attended at which literary works were often presented. Word count of main body of thesis: 61, 500 Signed: …………………………………………………… Date: ………………………………………………………. v Introduction [M]y only employment & amusement in Town… has been the Musæum: but I have been rather historically than poetically given. with a little of your encouragement perhaps I may return to my old Lydgate and Occleve, whose works are there in abundance. (Gray’s letter to William Mason, 6 October 1759)1 In this study, I will concentrate on Gray’s literary history in prose and in verse. I will take the outline of Gray’s History of English Poetry as a framework around which to construct and develop a discussion of Gray’s notions of literary history and literary tradition in relation to a central idea of the continuity and connectedness of tradition. This study comes as a reaction to what I feel to be a neglect of modern studies of Gray’s literary history. Criticism of Gray’s works can be primarily and briefly grouped into three main orientations: the criticism which in one way or another situates Gray’s poetics within the wide‐ranging “Romantic” shift of poetic taste which occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century; the criticism which tends to view Gray’s poetry in relation to the public and political milieu of the mid‐eighteenth century; and, finally, the criticism which shows Gray’s poetry swinging between the poles of a dichotomy between his private and public tendencies. A typical example for the first orientation is John Sitter’s Literary Loneliness in Mid‐Eighteenth‐ Century England (1982) in which Sitter describes Gray and mid‐century poets as “solitary writers” whose private poetry marks a “flight from history”. The most influential studies which represent the second orientation are Howard D. Weinbrot’s Britannia’s Issue (1993); Dustin Griffin’s Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth‐Century Britain (2002); and Suvir Kaul’s Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: A Study in Ideology and Poetics (1992). William Levin’s essay, “‘Beyond the Limits of a Vulgar Fate’: The Renegotiation of Public and Private Concerns in the Career of Gray and other Mid‐Eighteenth‐ Century Poets”, is an example of the third approach to Gray’s poetry.2 Though these studies shed 1 Thomas Gray, Correspondence of Thomas Gray, eds. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1935), 2:646. 2 See John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid‐Eighteenth‐Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 77‐103; Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Dustin Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth‐Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 149‐79; Suvir Kaul, Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: A Study in Ideology and poetics (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992); and William Levin, 1 light on Gray’s poetry, in common with other modern studies, they do not study Gray’s History of English Poetry nor scrutinize in detail his concepts of literary history and literary tradition. Gray’s literary history not only throws light on him as a literary historian and a critic, but offers a key to understanding his poetry.3 This dissertation examines the cruxes of Thomas Gray’s theory and practice of literary history and considers a range of topics concerning the writing of literary history, such as the ideology and canonicity of literary history, the role of literary history, the problem of periodization, and the question of objectivity in literary history. Gray's interest in writing a history of English poetry had its original in a project Alexander Pope intended to achieve.4 In his Commonplace Book, Gray makes this clear when he declares that Pope’s sketch of literary history came to his hands through his friend William Mason: “The following is an exact Transcript from a Paper in Mr Pope's own Hand‐writing, wch was given by Mr Warburton to Mr W. Mason, in 1752. It is a slight sketch for a History of English Poetry”.5 Like Pope, Gray also periodizes his History of English Poetry according to schools of influence.