Chapter 5 - Shakespeare's nation: the literary profession and “the shades of ages”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
I found no difficulty in getting admittance to Monsieur Le Count B****. The set of Shakespears was laid upon the table, and he was tumbling them over. I walk'd up close to the table, and giving first such a look at the books as to make him conceive I knew what they were – I told him I had come without any one to present me, knowing I should meet with a friend in his apartment who, I trusted, would do it for me – it is my countryman the great Shakespear, said I, pointing to his works – et ayez la bonté, mon cher ami, apostrophizing his spirit, added I, de me faire cet honneur la.
Laurence SterneThe preceding chapters have argued that the midcentury rethinking of English literary history happens in response to change in the institutions of cultural life, from the trade in books and the growth of criticism, to consumer culture and the novel. The last chapter argued that these developments were understood by mid-eighteenth-century critics within a comprehensive sense of historical change. Modernity spawns tradition: whether Dodd's sublime overcoming of a differentiated audience, for example, or Hurd's feudal fantasy of an older and better world.
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- Making the English CanonPrint-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770, pp. 193 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999