Jonathan Brody Kramnick

Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770

Cambridge University Press, 1999

This book offers an original examination of the formation of the English canon during the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, looking in particular at the treatment of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Through close readings of periodical essays, editions, treatises, reviews, disquisitions, pamphlets, and poems, Professor Jonathan Brody Kramnick recounts the origins of modern literary study and situates the rise of national literary tradition in the broad context of the making of a public culture.