Fowler - Literary names: personal names in English literature

LITERARY NAMES

ALASTAIR FOWLER

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, 0x2 6 DP,
United Kingdom

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Alastair Fowler 2012

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First published 2012

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ISBN 978-0-19-959222-7

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For my daughter Alison

My title Literary Names calls for explanation. The subtitle Personal Names in English Literature provides some of this but not quite enough. It gives no hint that while the main focus is on English I have made sorties into Latin, Greek, French, and Italian.

This book is an expansion of my 1974 Witter Bynner lecture at Harvard and my 2008 F. W. Bateson lecture at Oxford. Discussion after the Bateson lecture suggested the subject of literary names was far larger than I had grasped, and deserved treatment at book length. Subsequent work confirmed this: indeed, it now seems that a single book is hardly enough.

The following pages do not amount to a definitive or systematic treatise. I have rather aimed at a series of interrelated essays exploring how names have functioned in literature. The broader chapters (1, 2, 4, 7, and 9) are mixed with others on individual authors who use names in specially interesting ways: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Joyce, and Nabokov. I hope these case studies may be found less superficial.

Emphasis has fallen on earlier literature, partly because I am less ignorant about it and partly because names mattered more in Renaissance literature, and more diversely. In pre-Enlightenment literature names loomed large, not least in its hidden levels, in acrostics and anagrams.

A book of this sort incurs a mountain of indebtednessmore, probably, than I am aware of, and certainly more than can be adequately acknowledged here. Perhaps the greatest intellectual debt of scholars is to educative conversation with colleagues and friends. In my case this means colleagues at Oxford, Edinburgh, Princeton, Charlottesville, and elsewheremany of them now gone: F. W. Bateson, Irvin Ehrenpreis, C. S. Lewis, Wallace Robson. Among living colleagues at Edinburgh University, it is a pleasure to acknowledge what I have learned from Michael Bury, Owen Dudley Edwards, Liz Elliott, R. D. S. Jack, Roger Savage, and Susan Shatto (the last almost a collaborator).

Others, elsewhere, have corresponded generously: William Bellamy, Eleanor Cook, Jerry Leath Mills, James Nohrnberg, Bernard Richards, Tom Roche, Roger Swearingen, David Vander Meulen, Sir Christopher Ricks, and Jack Levenson (who after more than thirty years of contestation has finally persuaded me that Finnegans Wake is immensely enjoyable). On heraldry, I consulted Robin Orr Blair (formerly Lord Lyon King of Arms) and Katy Lumsden of the Genealogical Office, Dublin.

Former pupils too have instructed me, especially Christopher Butler, Anne Coldiron, Tom Corns, Peter Field, and Misako Himuro. But debts to pupils remain unknowably vast.

Some friends or acquaintances made the sacrifice of reading individual chapters or part chapters in draft: Howard Erskine-Hill, Robert Cummings, Denis Feeney, Juan Pellicer, and Peter Davidson. Others helped on particular points: John Burrow, Martin Dodsworth, Peter France, Christopher de Hamel, Emrys Jones, Aleta Konkol, Norman Kreitman, Michael Lurie, Mark Scowcroft, Karen Thompson, and Robbert Wetselaar. And always the staff of the National Library of Scotland have been unfailingly helpful.

It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the contribution of Professor John Considine of the University of Alberta, who made many learned and valuable suggestions.

What I owe to my wife Jenny may be imagined from the fact that she had to talk names every single day for three years.

Alastair Fowler
Edinburgh, 2011

Is not my name Sir Bounteous, am I not exprest there?