Sean Keilen

Inventing English Literature
October 1, 2004

Abstract:
This talk is an informal introduction to my current book project: Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature. This book is a reassessment of the terms in which the English Renaissance imagined its poetic activity. It offers a genealogy of English literature, in the sense that it describes the conditions that led to the birth of that concept during the late sixteenth century, and examines the myths through which Renaissance poets like Geoffrey Whitney, William Shakespeare, and John Milton invented archaic origins for this new kind of writing. In particular, it examines three classical fables that English writers commonly used in order to articulate the rarity and excellence of their vernacular compositions; to distinguish their writing from Greek and Latin literature, even as they imitated it with conspicuous intensity; and to understand what it meant to fashion their modern texts from ancient materials.

My story begins in the 1580s and 1590s, when fables about Orpheus, Philomela, and Circe came to prominence as representations of English poetic agency, and England's broader relationship to Rome was suffering an unprecedented strain. During this critical time, the idea that Brutus, Aeneas's great-grandson, had sired English culture was entering its final decline, as Reformation antiquaries discovered that the traces of a Roman presence in early Britain told a story that differed sharply from the celebratory legends of Geoffrey of Monmouth: a story in which a foreign empire conquered Britain, enslaved its population, and occupied it as a colony for nearly half a millennium. Newly-recovered texts by Roman authors and Roman artifacts taken out of England's soil corroborated this ignominious history of conquest and subjugation. At the very moment that Roman remains were more familiar and desirable than they had ever been, England's claim on them, and on the past that they represented, had never seemed more tenuous, illegitimate, and shameful.

I argue that this crisis precipitated the emergence of English literature. For when history obliged English poets to regard themselves as the victims of the Roman Conquest, rather than the rightful heirs of classical Latin culture, it also required them to redefine their long acquaintance with Roman literature in a radical way. Searching for a new beginning, they paradoxically tacked toward the myths that Antiquity had used in order to express the origins and nature of its own poetic activity. And thus, as they reworked familiar fables about Orpheus, Philomela, and Circe, they not only reaffiliated themselves with the Mediterranean heritage from which England had lately had been severed by the Reformation. They also invented a new point of departure for their own poetic history-what William James called, in a different context, someplace else "to go from."

Sean Keilen
Assistant Professor
English
University of Pennsylvania