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Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain
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Description
Long before they appeared in the pages of Ivanhoe and nineteenth-century Old English scholarship, the Anglo-Saxons had become commonplace in Georgian Britain. The eighteenth century - closely associated with Neoclassicism and the Gothic and Celtic revivals - also witnessed the emergence of intertwined scholarly and popular Anglo-Saxonisms that helped to define what it meant to be English.
This book explores scholarly Anglo-Saxon studies and imaginative Anglo-Saxonism during a century not normally associated with either. Early in the century, scholars and politicians devised a rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon inheritance in response to the Hanoverian succession, and participants in Britain's burgeoning antiquarian culture adopted simultaneously affective and scientific approaches to Anglo-Saxon remains. Patriotism, imagination and scholarship informed the writing of Enlightenment histories that presented England, its counties and its towns as Anglo-Saxon landscapes. Those same histories encouraged English readers to imagine themselves as the descendants of Anglo-Saxon ancestors - as did history paintings, book illustrations, poetry and drama that brought the Anglo-Saxon past to life. Drawing together these strands of scholarly and popular medievalism, this book identifies Anglo-Saxonism as a multifaceted, celebratory and inclusive idea of Englishness at work in eighteenth-century Britain.
DUSTIN M. FRAZIER WOOD is a Lecturer in English at the University of Roehampton.
Product details
- Edition:
- illustrated
- Languages:
- Original: English
- Number of Pages:
- 258
- Publisher:
- Boydell Press
- Publication Date:
- 2020-03-20
- Release Date:
- 2020-03-17
- ISBN / EAN:
- 9781783275014
- Weight:
- 555 g
- Dimensions:
- 16/24/2 cm
- GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
- [email protected]
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