Romanticism and the Rise of English

Reviews / Votes

"Admirable for its breadth, the book dwells mainly on the canonical Romantic writers but also spends time with composition manuals, grammar books, dictionaries, and guides to pronunciation. . . Elfenbein succeeds in making what might seem a musty and highly specialized topic relevant to contemporary literary criticism and the classroom teaching of English and composition. . . [G]enuinely compelling and deserves a wider audience than Romantic studies."-Grant F. Scott, Modern Philology "Andrew Elfenbein's insightful, informative, and often surprsing new book opens with an introduction that dusts off the concept and the tradition of 'philology.'"-William Keach, Wordsworth Circle "Elfenbein offers a well-informed analysis of British Romantic literature from the perspective of the history of the English language. His fascinating book provides important new insights into the complex and troubled relationship between the eighteenth-century purveyors of standard English and the various 'bad Englishes' employed by poets and playwrights of the Romantic period. It offers ample opportunity for reflection upon what is fundamentally at stake in the teaching of English in the twenty-first century, when the profession of English seems to have lost touch with any common core of disciplinary knowledge. Elfenbein encourages all professors of English to re-examine what it is that they profess."-James C. McKusick, New Books on Line 19 "The product of wide-ranging research, acute critical intelligence, and a mature knowledge of English studies, Romanticism and the Rise of English is that rare book that changes minds, pleases readers, and presents highly original, stimulating arguments about what seem to be unpopular ways of thinking."-Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 "...undeniably fascinating and important book."-David Simpson, Modern Language Quarterly "'English professors now study everything except English,' begins this breathtakingly learned, imaginative, and rewarding study of late- 18th- and early-19th-century literature and authorship. ... Everywhere Elfenbein fleshes out generalizations with persuasive close readings that have something genuine to say about works (by Austen, Scott, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shelley) one thought one knew well."-CHOICE "Elfenbein's outstanding and provocative book returns to questions about Romanticism and language incompletely explored in the scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s and presents an argument that is informed by but goes beyond the historicist work so influential these past fifteen to twenty years."--William Keach, Brown University "This is an important and original work by one of British Romanticism's most innovative voices. Romanticism and the Rise of English is a broadly arching account of how Romanticism created the terms for how we conceive of and use the English language. It is an impressive call for radical thinking about language as at the root of literature and for how we read it."-Stuart Curran, University of Pennsylvania