| During the middle of the eighteenth century literary critics rewrote the narrative of English literary history so as to confer high cultural status on Shakespeare and Spenser. This elevation of older texts was staked against contemporary literary and social forms, and against the earlier model of vernacular literary history which often examined older works only to celebrate the culture of the moment. While recent work in eighteenth-century studies has discussed the criticism of the early eighteenth century in terms of the formation of the "public sphere," it has overlooked the instability and crisis of the "public" during the mid-century. Analyzing essays, editions and treatises, I demonstrate that critics of the 1750s and 1760s are preoccupied with the emergence of mass culture and a wider readership. These conditions, which earlier in the century led to a public sphere of polite taste, produce a version of literary history consecrating the literary past as an anodyne contrast to the present. Critics articulate this understanding of literary history by means of the twin and contradictory hermeneutics of "historicism," the formal study and valuation of literary works in their cultural contexts, and "aestheticism," the high cultural estimation of taste and sublimity. As it reconfigures the meaning and status of the cultural past, mid-century literary history, and its singular focus on Shakespeare and Spenser, is encapsulated in a larger historical transformation: the development of the modern antinomy between high culture and mass culture and the crystallization of the concept "literature" itself. |
