English Literature and Ancient Languages

Cover
OUP Oxford, 09.10.2003 - 224 Seiten
Literature in English is hardly ever entirely in English. Contact with other languages takes place, for example, whenever foreign languages are introduced, or if a native style is self-consciously developed, or when aspects of English are remade in the image of another language. Since the Renaissance, Latin and Greek have been an important presence in British poetry and prose. This is partly because of the importance of the ideals and ideologies founded and elaborated on Roman and Greek models. Latin quotations and latinate English have always been ways to represent, scrutinize, or satirize the influential values associated with Rome. The importance of Latin and Greek is also due to the fact that they have helped to form and define a variety of British social groups. Lawyers, Catholics, and British gentlemen invested in Latin as one source of their distinction from non-professionals, from Protestants, and from the unleisured. British attitudes toward Greek and Latin have been highly charged because the animus that existed between groups has also been directed toward these languages themselves. English Literature and Ancient Languages is a study of literary uses of language contact, of English literature in conjunction with Latin and Greek. While the book's emphasis is literary, that is formal and verbal, its goal is to discover how social interests and cultural ideas are, and are not, mediated through language.

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Ausgewählte Seiten

Inhalt

1 Multilingualism in Literature
1
2 Varieties of Language Purism
40
3 The Interference of Latin with English Literature
74
4 Some Greek Influences on English Poetry
104
5 Apollo Dionysus and NineteenthCentury English and German Poetry
138
Notes
174
Further Reading
203
Index
207
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Seite 202 - And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.
Seite 96 - Just are the ways of God, And justifiable to men ; Unless there be, who think not God at all . If any be, they walk obscure ; For of such doctrine never was there school, But the heart of the fool, And no man therein doctor but himself.
Seite 172 - I am soft sift In an hourglass— at the wall Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift, And it crowds and it combs to the fall; I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane...
Seite 97 - NOT to admire, is all the art I know, To make men happy, and to keep them so.
Seite 114 - Why sleep'st thou, Eve? now is the pleasant time, The cool, the silent, save where silence yields To the night-warbling bird, that now awake Tunes sweetest his love-labour'd song, now reigns Full orb'd the moon, and with more pleasing light Shadowy sets off the face of things, in vain, If none regard; heaven wakes with all his eyes, Whom to behold but thee, nature's desire?
Seite 48 - When Queen Mary took the resolution of sheltering herself in England, the Archbishop of St. Andrew's, attempting to dissuade her, attended on her journey; and when they came to the irremeable...
Seite 156 - The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.

Autoren-Profil (2003)

Kenneth Haynes is Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University. He is co-editor of Horace in English (Penguin 1996) and of the first scholarly editions of two major works by Swinburne (forthcoming from Penguin). He is also co-editor, with Peter France, of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 4: 1790-1890 (forthcoming).

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