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Shakespeare and (Anti-German) Nationalism in the Writing of English Literary History, 1880-1923 Lynne Walhout Hinojosa University of Notre Dame FROM 1880 TO 1920 English literary history emerged as a new field of scholarly writing in England. Surveying these literary histories within their contexts illuminates larger developments in the literary criticism and culture of this period, especially the interrelated phenomena of English as a discipline, Shakespeare criticism, cultural nationalism , and literary modernism. In these decades writers began to construct comprehensive histories of English literature in order to validate English as a scientific, university discipline. As competition increased between England and Germany over the national and racial nature of William Shakespeare, however, nationalist and imperialist sentiment shaped both the content of these literary histories and the historical methods their authors used. Literary historians worked to standardize Shakespeare's Englishness, and thereby joined other groups who were making efforts to reclaim Shakespeare from the Germans and consequently reestablish England 's cultural reputation. As a result, the Elizabethan Age was standardized as a period term idealizing England's cultural and imperial past and marking the origins of the modern English language and a national English literature. In contrast, the earlier "Anglo-Saxon" period was denigrated. Anti-German sentiment also inspired historians to reject the German-influenced philological and scientific methods of lateVictorian Shakespeare scholarship. Instead writers began to conceptualize and research historical periods in national cultural history. To date, the genre of literary history has been understudied. Within modernist studies, the writers of these literary histories—George Saintsbury, Sidney Lee, and Walter Raleigh, to name a few—have been 227 ELT 46 : 3 2003 ignored. In Shakespeare studies, recent major volumes on modernism and Shakespeare quickly pass over the years 1880 to 1920, and as a result , continue to see a Victorian-modernist divide as the central development in Shakespeare criticism.1 What drives Shakespeare activity and the writing of literary history in this period, however, is not solely a concern for being "modern," but rather a concern for England's national and imperial status, especially as Germany increasingly becomes England's political and cultural rival. Recent scholarship on cultural appropriations of Shakespeare analyzes nationalism in these decades, but such work only touches on the genre of literary history.2 This study argues that viewing the development of literary history in its nationalist context blurs the boundaries traditionally drawn between "Victorians" (George Saintsbury, Sidney Lee, and Walter Raleigh) and "Moderns" (T. S. Eliot), especially as two concepts constructed to represent England's ideal past-the Elizabethan Age and Shakespeare-become foundational to both English as a discipline and Modernism. The idea of Shakespeare as national icon was certainly not a new phenomenon for England—to some extent he had always been seen as the national poet. For most of the nineteenth century, however, Germany and England were in amiable relationship and Shakespeare's "AngloSaxon " or Germanic nature was an easily accepted notion in both countries . For example, as Richard Halpern points out, Thomas Carlyle in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History sees Shakespeare as composed of "pure Germanic blood."3 A nineteenth-century group of historians known as the Anglo-Saxon school traced Germanic influences on England's constitutional and legal development and lauded England and Germany's common roots.4 Since the Romantic age Germans regularly performed Shakespeare in translation and studied Shakespearean texts in great detail. Throughout the nineteenth century English literary critics, from Romantics such as Coleridge to amateur Shakespeare scholars such as F. J. Furnivall, made use of German philological methods , were influenced by German Shakespeare critics (most notably G. G. Gervinus), and often collaborated with Germans on Shakespeare scholarship . Furnivall's New Shakspere Society, which existed from 1873 to 1894, worked to establish a Shakespearean canon of authorship and chronology through the use of German methods such as scientific historical and biographical treatment and statistical versification tests. The New Shakspere Society and German Shakespeare societies were mutually appreciative of each other and stayed in close contact. 228 ____________HINOJOSA : SHAKESPEARE & (ANTI-GERMAN) NATIONALISM____________ From the 1880s through the 1910s, however, the amiable relationship between Germany and England began to deteriorate and Shakespeare increasingly became a symbolic...

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