Response to Richard Terry

I found Richard Terry’s arguments in the February issue stimulating, particularly when he argued for important shared areas of conceptual space between “belles lettres” and more modern uses of the word “literature,” and when he suggested ways in which poets and cultural institutions were developing forms of canonicity before the eighteenth century. Where I take issue with him is in his presentation of the Scottish universities’ teaching of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres as so peculiar and marginal that it can relate only incidently to larger debates about the development of literature, its institutions, and the canon.

Anglocentrism carries a political charge. Just as the emergence of English literary studies in the universities was bound up with British unionist politics, cultural imperialism, and attempts to remove markers of Scottish cultural difference (following the removal of Edinburgh’s parliament in 1707), so modern debates about English literary studies in Britain take place in a political environment highly charged with ideas about national identity within the European Community and about devolution of power within Britain (especially the return of Edinburgh’s parliament in the year 2000). In Devolving English Literature (1992), to which Terry referred, I attempted to outline a devolutionary and Scottish-international perspective on the writing and teaching of literature over the last three centuries. Whether intended or not, Terry’s Anglocentric focus implied another politics, and his aligning of Scotland only with England was short-sighted.

If he had looked at the connections between the teaching of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in eighteenth-century Scottish universities and the development of literary teaching in North America, India, and later Australasia, Terry would have seen that the cultural-political and social concerns of the Scots, which he calls “marginal,” are often shared with, or are parallel to, developments in many other parts of the English-speaking world. For example, those who have read Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1987) and are familiar with the Scottish situation will see that some of the colonial figures whom she sees as inventors of English studies were simply replicating patterns familiar to them from their Scottish university education. So, for instance, the St. Andrews-educated Alexander Duff (whose impact on Indian literary education Viswanathan sees as “staggering”) saw the relationship between English and native Indian literary studies in terms of the relationship between English literary education in Scotland and the study of border legends and Ossianic tales (New Era of the English Language and English Literature in India [1837]). In the eighteenth century itself, the links between the teaching of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in Scotland and the developing of American literary and educational institutions is a rich and complex one.

Pointing to such enthusiasm as the championing of Addison and the down-playing of Shakespeare, Terry argued that “Insofar as Smith and Blair posit a canon, this canon has ultimately failed the test of time.” In some respects this is so, but equally the implied canon of T. S. Eliot (which championed the later Jacobean dramatists and downplayed Chaucer and Milton) now seems curiously antique. If an earlier figuration of a canon has “failed the test of time,” that does not mean that it was unimportant, lacked influence, or was insignificant in shaping later reactions. Recently, I have edited two books pertinent to this debate. The first, Launch-Site for English Studies: Three Centuries of Literary Studies at the University of St. Andrews (Verse, 1997), tracks the development of literary studies (including ideas about the canon) on a single site, looking at what happened in the wake of the 1720 debate over the proposed St. Andrews Chair of Eloquence. The second, The Scottish Invention of English Literature (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in April 1998), looks in detail at the teaching of literature in the eighteenth-century Scottish universities, and at the impact of that on the teaching of literature in North America, India, England, and elsewhere. There will be a session on “The Scottish Invention of English Literature” at the 1998 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference at the University of Notre Dame in April...