Geoffrey The Unbarbarous: Chaucerian 'Genius' And Eighteenth-Century Antimedievalism

Wright, Glenn

English Studies 2001 82 (3)193-202
(ReLIS:jul:juljig:y:2001:v:82:i:3:p:193-202)

Abstract:

The second half of the eighteenth century brought a wave of literary neomedievalism normally seen as both an early manifestation of and a powerful influence on the Romantic movement in Britain. This turn to the native, insular past took several forms, the most important of which were the production of pseudomedieval works and a flowering of antiquarian scholarship. Thomas Gray’s ‘The Bard’ was published in 1757, and the masterly forgeries of James Macpherson (the Poems of Ossian) and Thomas Chatterton (the Rowley poems) began to appear in 1760 and ’69, respectively. Even Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) was at first passed off as the translation of an ancient original. At the same time, early English ballads and romances were being unearthed and published by the likes of Thomas Percy and George Ellis, and efforts at literary criticism inaugurated by Richard Hurd and Thomas Warton.

Keywords: Siglo 18º ; literatura inglesa ; Romanticismo
Pages: 193-202
Volume: 82
Year: 2001
Issue: 3

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