Marcus Walsh | University of Liverpool (original) (raw)
Papers by Marcus Walsh
Clarendon Press eBooks, 1983
A scholarly edition of poetical works by Christopher Smart. The edition presents an authoritative... more A scholarly edition of poetical works by Christopher Smart. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.
Yearbook of English studies, 1998
It has been a truism of much recent discussion that many of the most creative poets in the mid-ei... more It has been a truism of much recent discussion that many of the most creative poets in the mid-eighteenth century, Thomson and Collins and Gray and Smart notably, were anxious about the adequacy of the language available to them for the poetry they wished to write. As Murray Cohen, for example, has put it, Their exquisitely developed aesthetics of failure dwells on a sense that their poetic language no longer possesses the real presence [...] that made the languages of Aeschylus or Spenser or Milton adequate to their meanings and feelings, [. . .] a sense [.. .] that language has been impoverished, or more extremely, that it is an enemy of poetry.'
I would like to take the opportunity of our present theme, 'Old Challenges / New Horizons... more I would like to take the opportunity of our present theme, 'Old Challenges / New Horizons', not to report on any very particular aspect of my own research, but to offer some thoughts on issues which seem to me important for the nature and future of English literature as a discipline, on the basis of my experience as a scholar and teacher of English literature in the English university environment. Some of my observations and concerns no doubt relate specifically to the United Kingdom, and they might at least satisfy some of the curiosities you may have about the odd ways in which we British do things. Some of my observations however may have larger and European resonances. I speak as one who professes the discipline of English literature, but I shall be exploring areas where language studies have much to offer, and where the cooperation of literary and language expertise might well, it seems to me, be profitably explored. I am a scholar of the long eighteenth century, and both a practising and a theorising textual editor, and many of my examples, but not all, come from that period and that field. We are all of us familiar with the notion that English literature is chronically a discipline in crisis. In some ways that might seem an odd notion. The subject remains, throughout the world, intellectually vibrant and productive, and recruits well in a competitive world. Nevertheless, English literature has surely experienced, over the last three decades, a greater degree of internal methodological contest than any other. Self-examination is healthy; nosce teipsum. A continuous and unremitting state of self-questioning however has led, many believe, to a radical loss of disciplinary confidence and identity. The theory explosion of the seventies and eighties deconstructed many old certainties about texts and their understanding. The hermeneutics of suspicion have led many to read texts not for what they say, but for what they allegedly conceal. The notions that texts might be read for their avowed meanings, or that authorial intention might be a credible voucher of meaning, or that meanings might be in any sense determinable, fractured under these pressures. In a field of English literary studies in which I have a strong personal investment, textual editing and explanatory annotation, many theorists argued that not only the meaning of words, but the printed texts in which they appeared, were radically unstable. In the extreme case some theorists went on to assert that any pretence not only to credible textual editing, but to any kind of credible textual interpretation or explanation, or indeed to English itself
The Age of Johnson: a Scholarly Annual, 2021
Samuel Johnson's running commentary to the plays of Shakespeare in his 1765 edition is informed b... more Samuel Johnson's running commentary to the plays of Shakespeare in his 1765 edition is informed by a coherent theoretical understanding of mimesis as truth to human nature and experience. It is informed by Aristotle's theoretical writing on mimesis in the Poetics, and anticipate modern scholarly discussions of the philosophy and psychology of mimesis.
The Age of Johnson: a Scholarly Annual, 2021
Johnson's running commentary to the text of Shakespeare's plays in his 1765 edition is informed b... more Johnson's running commentary to the text of Shakespeare's plays in his 1765 edition is informed by a coherent theoretical understanding of mimesis as truth to nature, and both echoes Aristotle's mimetic theory and anticipates modern discussions of literature as mimesis.
Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Davis , 2019
In the first half of the twentieth century Addison’s literary critical and theoretical works were... more In the first half of the twentieth century Addison’s literary critical and theoretical works were understood as early formulations of a literary aesthetics, as important theoretical statements on wit and imagination, as pioneering exercises in the analysis and sponsorship of vernacular literary texts, as influential popularisations of philosophical ideas. These writings have in recent decades however been less regularly a subject of attention. Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s, Addison’s essays in literary criticism and theory were often treated as though they were covert works of political ideology, as affirmations of ‘a hierarchic Chain of Seeing’. This essay takes Addison at his literary-critical word. It stresses the epistemological, rather than the sensational, elements in Addison’s critical theorising. In particular, it argues that Addison the critic was fundamentally concerned with recognisably Aristotelian pleasures of mimesis. As readers we take a double mimetic pleasure, not ...
One could hardly imagine a conference theme better suited to the Humor of our Age than 'Opening M... more One could hardly imagine a conference theme better suited to the Humor of our Age than 'Opening Markets'. 1 That rubric might by some be suspected of privileging the historical, the material and indeed the materialistic, and of marginalising the literary and the textual. We must nevertheless remember that ours is an age in which the market, in the form of global turbo capitalism, has triumphed even through crisis, and that many of our Universities have accepted their primary mission as commodity providers on behalf of, and within, the competitive networks of commerce. Learning has always had a market value, though often a very small value, and is properly recognised as a trade. From the disciplinary point of view, literary studies have necessarily given way to the students of contextual and material cultures, a disciplinary army 'determined', in Professor Peter Barry's resonantly punning phrase, 'to make English History'; Barry's remark may properly be applied to literary or textual study in any language of course. 2 1 This paper was delivered in a panel on Sterne at ISECS Rotterdam 2019.
The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations, ed. Marion Thain, 2013
A discussion of the high-lyric ode as a vehicle for a poetics of affect, imagination, indebted to... more A discussion of the high-lyric ode as a vehicle for a poetics of affect, imagination, indebted to Greek (Pindar), Roman (Horace), Hebraic (the psalmist, and Robert Lowth's Lectures), and English (Spenser, Milton) models, exemplified with detailed analysis especially of William Collins's Ode on the Poetical Character and Christopher Smart's Song to David.
Clarendon Press eBooks, 1983
A scholarly edition of poetical works by Christopher Smart. The edition presents an authoritative... more A scholarly edition of poetical works by Christopher Smart. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.
Yearbook of English studies, 1998
It has been a truism of much recent discussion that many of the most creative poets in the mid-ei... more It has been a truism of much recent discussion that many of the most creative poets in the mid-eighteenth century, Thomson and Collins and Gray and Smart notably, were anxious about the adequacy of the language available to them for the poetry they wished to write. As Murray Cohen, for example, has put it, Their exquisitely developed aesthetics of failure dwells on a sense that their poetic language no longer possesses the real presence [...] that made the languages of Aeschylus or Spenser or Milton adequate to their meanings and feelings, [. . .] a sense [.. .] that language has been impoverished, or more extremely, that it is an enemy of poetry.'
I would like to take the opportunity of our present theme, 'Old Challenges / New Horizons... more I would like to take the opportunity of our present theme, 'Old Challenges / New Horizons', not to report on any very particular aspect of my own research, but to offer some thoughts on issues which seem to me important for the nature and future of English literature as a discipline, on the basis of my experience as a scholar and teacher of English literature in the English university environment. Some of my observations and concerns no doubt relate specifically to the United Kingdom, and they might at least satisfy some of the curiosities you may have about the odd ways in which we British do things. Some of my observations however may have larger and European resonances. I speak as one who professes the discipline of English literature, but I shall be exploring areas where language studies have much to offer, and where the cooperation of literary and language expertise might well, it seems to me, be profitably explored. I am a scholar of the long eighteenth century, and both a practising and a theorising textual editor, and many of my examples, but not all, come from that period and that field. We are all of us familiar with the notion that English literature is chronically a discipline in crisis. In some ways that might seem an odd notion. The subject remains, throughout the world, intellectually vibrant and productive, and recruits well in a competitive world. Nevertheless, English literature has surely experienced, over the last three decades, a greater degree of internal methodological contest than any other. Self-examination is healthy; nosce teipsum. A continuous and unremitting state of self-questioning however has led, many believe, to a radical loss of disciplinary confidence and identity. The theory explosion of the seventies and eighties deconstructed many old certainties about texts and their understanding. The hermeneutics of suspicion have led many to read texts not for what they say, but for what they allegedly conceal. The notions that texts might be read for their avowed meanings, or that authorial intention might be a credible voucher of meaning, or that meanings might be in any sense determinable, fractured under these pressures. In a field of English literary studies in which I have a strong personal investment, textual editing and explanatory annotation, many theorists argued that not only the meaning of words, but the printed texts in which they appeared, were radically unstable. In the extreme case some theorists went on to assert that any pretence not only to credible textual editing, but to any kind of credible textual interpretation or explanation, or indeed to English itself
The Age of Johnson: a Scholarly Annual, 2021
Samuel Johnson's running commentary to the plays of Shakespeare in his 1765 edition is informed b... more Samuel Johnson's running commentary to the plays of Shakespeare in his 1765 edition is informed by a coherent theoretical understanding of mimesis as truth to human nature and experience. It is informed by Aristotle's theoretical writing on mimesis in the Poetics, and anticipate modern scholarly discussions of the philosophy and psychology of mimesis.
The Age of Johnson: a Scholarly Annual, 2021
Johnson's running commentary to the text of Shakespeare's plays in his 1765 edition is informed b... more Johnson's running commentary to the text of Shakespeare's plays in his 1765 edition is informed by a coherent theoretical understanding of mimesis as truth to nature, and both echoes Aristotle's mimetic theory and anticipates modern discussions of literature as mimesis.
Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Davis , 2019
In the first half of the twentieth century Addison’s literary critical and theoretical works were... more In the first half of the twentieth century Addison’s literary critical and theoretical works were understood as early formulations of a literary aesthetics, as important theoretical statements on wit and imagination, as pioneering exercises in the analysis and sponsorship of vernacular literary texts, as influential popularisations of philosophical ideas. These writings have in recent decades however been less regularly a subject of attention. Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s, Addison’s essays in literary criticism and theory were often treated as though they were covert works of political ideology, as affirmations of ‘a hierarchic Chain of Seeing’. This essay takes Addison at his literary-critical word. It stresses the epistemological, rather than the sensational, elements in Addison’s critical theorising. In particular, it argues that Addison the critic was fundamentally concerned with recognisably Aristotelian pleasures of mimesis. As readers we take a double mimetic pleasure, not ...
One could hardly imagine a conference theme better suited to the Humor of our Age than 'Opening M... more One could hardly imagine a conference theme better suited to the Humor of our Age than 'Opening Markets'. 1 That rubric might by some be suspected of privileging the historical, the material and indeed the materialistic, and of marginalising the literary and the textual. We must nevertheless remember that ours is an age in which the market, in the form of global turbo capitalism, has triumphed even through crisis, and that many of our Universities have accepted their primary mission as commodity providers on behalf of, and within, the competitive networks of commerce. Learning has always had a market value, though often a very small value, and is properly recognised as a trade. From the disciplinary point of view, literary studies have necessarily given way to the students of contextual and material cultures, a disciplinary army 'determined', in Professor Peter Barry's resonantly punning phrase, 'to make English History'; Barry's remark may properly be applied to literary or textual study in any language of course. 2 1 This paper was delivered in a panel on Sterne at ISECS Rotterdam 2019.
The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations, ed. Marion Thain, 2013
A discussion of the high-lyric ode as a vehicle for a poetics of affect, imagination, indebted to... more A discussion of the high-lyric ode as a vehicle for a poetics of affect, imagination, indebted to Greek (Pindar), Roman (Horace), Hebraic (the psalmist, and Robert Lowth's Lectures), and English (Spenser, Milton) models, exemplified with detailed analysis especially of William Collins's Ode on the Poetical Character and Christopher Smart's Song to David.