Patrick Cheney - Classical Reception in English Volume 2: 1558-1660

The present volume is one of five that will make up The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (henceforth OHCREL). Each volume of OHCREL has its own editor or team of editors, who determine, within agreed overall guidelines, the appropriate shape and emphasis for the particular period covered by their volume. OHCREL charts English writers engagement and dialogue with ancient Greek and Roman literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day. OHCREL is, we hope, sufficiently comprehensive in scope to be legitimately described as a History, rather than a series of discrete critical essays. It should thus prove a valuable reference resource for students in the field. But OHCREL is intended to be attractive and accessible to a wide range of readers, so discursive interest is given priority over encyclopedic inclusiveness. Some potentially important aspects of the subject will thus receive only brief and passing discussion. OHCRELs main target audience is the serious student of classical and English literature, from (roughly) second-year undergraduate level upwards, but it is hoped that its methods and approach will be such as to appeal to a wide range of readers from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, within and outside the university.

The title of OHCREL includes three potentially contentious terms that need immediate clarification: Literature, English, and Reception. The main business of OHCREL is the close and sophisticated critical engagement with the complex interaction between classical and English literary texts from the early Middle Ages to the present. A comprehensive, totalizing, history of the impact of classical upon English culture would have to be undertaken on a scale far larger than that of OHCREL, and would, in any case, run the risk of lacking all coherent focus, purpose, and integrity. The editors of and contributors to OHCREL believe, moreover, that legitimate (albeit sometimes fuzzy and always debatable) distinctions can be madeand are, in practice, regularly madebetween literary history and cultural history more generally, without that involving any inert acceptance of an unscrutinized literary canon, or merely conventional assumptions about what constitutes the literary. Our main emphasis will fall on literary texts of high quality and maximum historical importance. We are aware that neither of these categories is a fixed and agreed entity. But we do not believe that either can be occluded, ignored, or simply subsumed within other intellectual categories. OHCREL positively encourages and incorporates debate about questions of literary quality and historical importance, rather than assume them as reified givens.

OHCREL conceives of reception as a complex dialogic exchange between two bodies of writing, rather than a one-way transmission of fixed and known entities. Attention is certainly given to matters traditionally encompassed under such terms as influence, echo, and allusion, but OHCREL also explores the ways in which classical texts have been remade and refashioned by English writers in ways that might cast (now, as well as then) as much light on the originals as on their English derivatives.