The Grounds of English Literature by Christopher Cannon (review)

REVIEWS nal), and a number of contributors dismiss as antihistorical Staley’s interpretive distinction between ‘‘Margery’’ as character and ‘‘Kempe’’ as author. Phillips is even impelled to declare, ‘‘There was a real Margery Kempe’’ (p. 17), as if that has ever been in doubt. While there are some literary scholars, even some literary medievalists, who are not particularly interested in history, they are a distinct minority, and to my knowledge they do not include anyone who has ever written on Margery Kempe. These attacks, then, seem a backhanded and particularly ungracious way of acknowledging (1) that it has been literary scholars rather than historians who have been primarily responsible for Margery Kempe’s current popularity; and (2) that Lynn Staley’s book has been and remains the single most authoritative treatment of the topic. The structural division she locates in the Book’s narratorial voice applies a standard technique of narrative analysis, one that goes at least as far back as Wayne Booth’s ‘‘implied author,’’ and is even arguably implicit in Percy Lubbock’s older distinction between showing and telling. Anyone who thinks its effect in Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions is to deny the importance of history—much less the existence of Margery herself— has badly missed the point. Larry Scanlon Rutgers University Christopher Cannon. The Grounds of English Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 237. $65.00. Christopher Cannon’s study of early Middle English follows quite naturally from his first book, The Making of Chaucer’s English (Cambridge, 1998). Not only is this volume virtually prophesied there (p. 218), but both studies implicitly adopt the same critical moves. Cannon is preeminently engaged with positionality, posture or stance; he most readily situates himself at the margins of current critical ken and adopts as his field of study what he perceives as the currently ignored and unseen. The strength of Cannon’s current study is a series of closely analytical chapters taking up (I hesitate to say, given his overall argument, the canonical masterpieces of) early Middle English writing. These studies emphatically do not form a sequence (cf. the promise of ‘‘radial rather PAGE 281 281 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:04:58 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER than progressive’’ argumentation [p. 13]). But, however isolated, they present significant swaths of provocative local readings. I was particularly impressed, for example, by the discussions of La@amon, land, and law (pp. 65–77); of misogyny and protofeminism in The Owl and the Nightingale (pp. 121–34); and of the workings (‘‘the spirit’’) of early romance (pp. 182–93). The first chapter indicates why Cannon must present these as isolative readings. Cannon’s ‘‘Ground(s)’’ are generated from a Marxian-inflected Aristotelian hylomorphism. In his presentation, each text forms a fragment, what survives ‘‘The Norman Yoke’’ (which Cannon construes throughout as quite literally an appropriate historical narrative, see 19, 23ff.). There are considerably more supple and nuanced historical accounts , such as, for example, Hugh M. Thomas’s The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, 1066–c. 1220 (Oxford , 2003). Hylemorphism enables Cannon’s ‘‘topical’’ emphasis, each work instantiating a single literary focus or ‘‘idea’’ conjoined with a single place, alternatively a localized foundation put into dialogue with a field of ideas (pp. 12–13). Insofar as Cannon presents an overarching argument, it joins his first and final chapters (the latter on romance). There Cannon adopts a stance (one to which I am quite sympathetic) antipathetic to the notion of an English canon; for him, this forms a linked and concatenated ‘‘spiritualization’’ of literature. It shuts down the ‘‘grounded’’ possibilities of earlier centuries. Thus, a great deal here rides on Cannon’s conception of the ‘‘fragment ,’’ with its attendant ideas of detachment and isolation. The argument always presupposes his exhibits’ ‘‘isolation from vernacular models and examples’’ (p. 2). But a substantial grounding for this view is Cannon ’s own inattention (as was, in his first book, the description of Chaucer ’s English as a matter merely of lexis). The most provocative exhibit here is that Cannon presents as his argument ’s ground, a discussion of ‘‘The First Worcester Fragment’’ (‘‘Sanctus Beda was...