Abstract
It is over ten years now since R. H. Hilton pointed out some of the inconsistencies and problems in the arguments of historians who, in dealing with early English society, eschew the word ‘class’ and prefer instead some less politically charged term such as ‘status’.1 More recently, R. S. Neale has provided a detailed analysis of similar tendencies.2 Yet many involved in the teaching of literature, especially the inter-disciplinary area of literature and history, still avoid theories of cultural development which understand literary texts as the products of societies which are divided along class lines, and may even go so far as to penalise students who wish to employ such theories in their own work. However, although this essay starts from a pluralist position, it is not intended as a piece of sustained raillery against what seem to me illiberal tendencies in the teaching of literature, nor as a polemical analysis of the issues involved. Rather, these introductory remarks are necessary because in my account of some Jacobean popular fiction I shall treat early-seventeenth-century England as a society in the process of transforming itself through the dynamic interplay of conflicting class interests, and its literature as both product and reflection of that struggle.
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Notes
R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) pp. 3–19.
R. S. Neale, Class in English History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981).
See also B. Hindess and P. Q. Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975) pp. 299–301.
P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1971). A detailed critique of Laslett’s theory can be found in Neale, Class in English History, pp. 68–99.
R. Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981) p. 155.
Recent work on Renaissance literature has done something to redress this balance. See for example J. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Brighton: Harvester, 1984);
A. Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England (London: Croom Helm, 1983);
D. Aers et al., Literature, Language and Society in England, 1580–1680 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1981);
J. Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985).
The best account of the development of an ideology of English Studies may be found in C. Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Two recent works on Elizabethan and Jacobean fiction are P. Salzmann, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985;
D. Margolies, Novel and Society in Elizabethan England (London: Croom Helm, 1985).
Thomas Nashe, Anatomie of Absurditie, in Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904–10) I, p. 111.
Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. G. Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973) p: 127.
The fullest general account of the Middle English romances is that of D. Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968).
H. R. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Brighton: Harvester, 1982) p. 87.
Jauss’s article ‘The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature’, in New Literary History, X (1979) 181–229, comes to a model of literary development similar to my own but from the viewpoint of reception aesthetics and hermeneutics rather than semiotics.
J. Kristeva, Semeiotike: recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969) p. 55.
E. Gosse (ed.) in The Complete Works of Samuel Rowlands, 4 vols (Glasgow: Hunterian Club, 1880).
The significance of a work such as Guy may be seen by analysing the proposition that one way of discovering the Model Reader in the text is to consider the type of hero whose adventures are to be recounted. From the point of view of reception aesthetics H. R. Jauss’s ‘Levels of Identification of Hero and Audience’, New Literary History, V (1974) 283–317, should be consulted here.
On Robarts see Simons, ‘Medieval Chivalric Romance’, pp. 237–69; L. B. Wright, ‘Henry Robarts: Patriotic Propagandist and Novelist’, Studies in Philology, XXIX (1932) 176–99;
W. R. Davies, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969) pp. 261–5.
On this ‘imperialism’ see P. Hulme’s interesting essay ‘Hurricane in the Caribbees: the Constitution of the Discourse of English Colonialism’, in F. Barker et al. (eds), 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century (Colchester: University of Essex, 1981) pp. 55–83.
E. M. Blackie (ed.), Friendly Farewell, Given by a Welwiller to the Right Worshipful Sir Frauncis Drake Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924).
On the development of the term ‘literature’ see R. Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976) pp. 150–4.
Ed. J. P. Collier in Illustrations of Old English Literature, 3 vols (London, 1866).
Ed. Sir W. Foster in The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster to Brasil and the East Indies, Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., LXXXV (London, 1940) pp. 52–74.
See for example A. Chevalley, Thomas Deloney: le roman des métiers au temps de Shakespeare (Paris, 1926) p. 137;
E. A. Baker, The History of the English Novel, 4 vols (London, 1929) II, 198. Wright, Idea and Act, p. 197, defends Robarts against the unfair charge.
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Simons, J. (1988). Open and Closed Books: a Semiotic Approach to the History of Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Romance. In: Bloom, C. (eds) Jacobean Poetry and Prose. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19590-9_2
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