The reception of British authors in Britain has in good part been studied; indeed, it forms our literary history. By contrast, the reception of British authors in Europe has not been examined in any systematic, long-term or large-scale way. Remarkably, the word ‘afterlife’ is the term used to refer to the merely English reception of any author, whereas the reception of any major author (and many others) will be characterized by a wider audience and a more varied life in criticism.
With our volume on Jonathan Swift (2005), we altered our Series title to ‘The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe’, as a reminder that many writers previously travelling under the British flag may now be considered or claimed as belonging to the Republic of Ireland (1948). Irish writers have a powerful presence in the history of ‘English’ literature. Swift’s career in England was as prominent and embattled as his career in Ireland, while James Joyce in ‘silence, exile and cunning’ recreated himself as a European, and Oscar Wilde made and temporarily lost his name in England while establishing himself as a major dramatist in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. If it is the name of William Butler Yeats that has come to stand for ‘his country’s biography’, the life history of Ireland, as his most recent biographer has put it (R. E. Foster, I, xviii), he too died in France. In the case of Edmund Burke, we have a figure who became so central in English public and parliamentary life and in the definition of its constitution that his Irish origins may sometimes be overlooked, not least by indignant French readers of Burke’s resounding attack on the French Revolution.
It is the aim of this Series to initiate and forward the study of the reception of British and Irish authors in Continental Europe, or, as we would say, the rest of Europe as a whole, rather than as isolated national histories with a narrow national perspective. The perspectives of other nations greatly add to our understanding of individual contributors to that history. The history of the reception of British authors extends our knowledge of their capacity to stimulate and to call forth new responses, not only in their own disciplines but in wider fields and to diverse publics in a variety of historical circumstances. Often these responses provide quite unexpected and enriching insights into our own histories, politics and culture. Individual words and personalities take on new dimensions and facets. They may also be subject to enlightening critiques. Our knowledge of the writers of the British Isles is simply incomplete and inadequate without these reception studies.
By ‘authors’ we mean writers in any field whose works have been recognized as making a contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of our societies. Thus the Series includes literary figures such as Laurence Sterne, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce; philosophers such as David Hume; historians and political figures such as Edmund Burke; and scientists such as Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton, whose works have had a broad impact on thinking in every field. In some cases, individual works of the same author have dealt with different subjects, each virtually with its own reception history. For example, each of Laurence Sterne’s two major works of fiction, Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, has its own history of reception, giving rise to a whole line of literary movements, innovative progeny, and concomitant critical theory in most European countries. Even more strikingly, Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) was instantaneously translated, roused controversy, and moulded thinking on the power struggle in the Europe of his own day; whereas his youthful A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) exerted a powerful influence on aesthetic thought and the practice of writing and remains a seminal work for certain genres of fiction and of art. Recent writers on Burke have emphasized a specifically Irish quality in his aesthetic thought, with its stress on pain and danger in the experience of the sublime, the subjugation that represented ‘the underside of the Enlightenment’ in a country ruled from without, and this in turn gives an insight into Burke’s sympathy for the rebellion in the American colonies, and his deep concern for the practices of the British colonial rule in India. This mindset has also linked Burke with thinkers like Diderot, whose aesthetics and anti-colonial politics bore a similar underlying and unifying character. Many were initially surprised by Burke’s opposition to the French Revolution. But his quick response to an event of such magnitude established him as a major voice both on the contemporary European scene and in the long-term expression of what came to be thought of as conservative values. In Burke’s Reflections we have a prime example of a voice that is immediately heard and carries a long way.
The research project examines the ways in which selected authors have been translated, published, distributed, read, reviewed and discussed on the continent of Europe. In doing so, it throws light not only on specific strands of intellectual and cultural history, but also on the processes involved in the dissemination of ideas and texts. The project brings to bear the theoretical and critical approaches that have characterized the growing fields of reader response theory and reception studies in the last half century. These critical approaches have illuminated the activity of the reader in bringing the text to life and stressed the changing horizons of the reading public or community of which the reader is a part. The project also takes cognizance of the studies of the material history of the book that have begun to explore the production, publication and distribution of manuscripts and books. Increasingly, other media too are playing a role in these processes, and to the history of book illustration must be added slides (as in the popular versions of Scott’s and Dickens’s works), cinema (whose early impact forms an important part of our H. G. Wells volume, and in the circulation of George Eliot’s historical novel Romola provides a brief but telling piece of early cinema [1911]), and more recently television (as recounted in the Jane Austen and Dickens volumes). Byron’s writings, like Ossian’s and Scott’s, have almost as extensive a history in images and in sound as in prose and poetry. Scott’s novels, the most widely read English novels in Europe until about 1910, also have an imposing history in opera; Shelley and Burns in song. Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King have been carried by Gustave Doré’s grand illustrated books across Europe in a variety of translations, and Tennyson’s poetry has been closely linked with the painting of the Italian and Spanish nineteenth century, as well as with the more familiar British ‘Pre-Raphaelites’. Blake, that rare talent in which art and poetry are both exemplified in his own works and those of his diverse followers, has summoned an extraordinary variety of responses in all the arts as well as in politics. With Tennyson and Blake we have been able to provide illustrations for the first time in the Series.
Performance history requires strenuous tracing, beyond the texts, whether for works written for the stage or for adaptations. Our Timelines or chronologies have sometimes had to give separate representation to stage or musical performance. Yeats’s poetic national dramas had remarkable resonance across Europe, extending to Catalan nationalism and Basque separatism. Wilde’s plays (not least Salome, banned in England until 1933) found a permanent place within the flourishing drama and music drama of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The study of material history forms a curious annexe, that is, of the objects that form durable traces of the vogue for a particular author, which may be parts of himself (as with the macabre story told in our Shelley volume of the wish to possess the dead poet’s heart), or items of his wardrobe (as with Byron’s shirtsleeves), or souvenir objects associated with his characters (Uncle Toby’s pipe from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy), or the more elaborate memorial gardens and graveyards such as linked Rousseau and Sterne in France. The ceremonial moving of Yeats’s grave in Roquebrune to his birthplace in Ireland is an aspect of such history. The author’s own image may achieve iconic status, as with Byron ‘in Albanian dress’, or Yeats, vast of stature, both mage and sage, aesthete and Senator. The significance of such cults and cult objects requires further analysis as the examples multiply and diversify.
The Series as published by Bloomsbury is open-ended and multi-volumed, each volume based on a particular author. The authors may be regarded according to their discipline, or looked at across disciplines with their period. As the volumes accumulate they enrich each other and our awareness of the full context in which an individual author is received. The Swift volume shows that in many places Swift and Sterne were received at the same time, and viewed sometimes as a pair of witty ironists, and sometimes as opposites representing traditional biting satire on the one hand (Swift) and modern sentimentalism on the other (Sterne), and equally or diversely valued as a result. The Romantic poets were carried forward into mid-century nationalist movements and late-nineteenth-century Symbolist movements. The fin-de-siècle aspects of Pater, early Yeats, Woolf and Joyce are interwoven in a wider European experience. In the twentieth century, Sterne was paired with Joyce as subversive of the novel form; and Joyce and Woolf became Modernists.
These chronological shifts, bringing different authors and different works into view together, are common to the reception process, so often displacing or delaying them into an entirely new historical scene or set of circumstances or significances. Thus Byron’s two major works, Childe Harold and Don Juan, came to stand, after his death, for whole new epochs of feeling in Europe, first the melancholic, inward post-Napoleonic Weltschmerz, then the bitter and disillusioned, mocking tones of the failed Revolution of 1848. Clearly no commentary on a large-scale historical event, such as Burke’s, could do other than to alter under these pressures and to take on a variety of shapes depending on the observer’s assessment of the Revolution’s role in these subsequent events.
In period terms one may discern within the Series a Romantic group; a Victorian group; a fin-de-siècle group and an early Modernist group. Period designations differ from discipline to discipline, and are shifting even within any single discipline. Blake, who was a ‘Pre-Romantic’ poet a generation ago, is now considered a fully-fledged Romantic. Virginia Woolf may be regarded as a fin-de-siècle aesthete and stylist whose affinities are with Pater or as an epoch-making Modernist like Joyce. Terms referring to period and style often vary from country to country. What happens to a ‘Victorian’ author transplanted to ‘Wilhelmine’ Germany? Are English Metaphysical poets to be regarded as ‘baroque’ in continental terms, or will that term continue to be borrowed in English only for music or to an extent architecture? Is not ‘baroque music’ itself now referred to as ‘early music’? Is the ‘Augustan’ Swift a classicist in Italian terms, or an Enlightenment thinker in French terms? It is most straightforward to classify them simply according to century, for the calendar is for the most part shared. But the various possible groupings will provide a context for reception and enrich our knowledge of each author.
Division of each volume by country or by linguistic region is dictated by the historical development of Europe; each volume necessarily adopts a different selection of countries and regions, depending on period and the specific reception of any given author. Countries or regions are treated either substantially, in several chapters or in sections where this is warranted; for example, the French reception of Yeats, Woolf or Joyce (and nearly all English-language works until after World War II pass first through the medium of French language and the prism of French thought), or on a moderate scale or simply as a brief section. In some cases, where a rich reception is located which has not been reported or of which the critical community is not aware; more detailed coverage may be justified. In general, comparative studies have neglected Spain in favour of France, Germany and Italy, and this imbalance needs to be righted. For example, we have shown the reception of Woolf in the different linguistic communities of the Iberian Peninsula, and given a detailed treatment of a play of Yeats in Catalan, Galician and Basque. In our George Eliot volume we have been able to give a much fuller and richer picture of what Eliot and Lewes did on their long journey through Spain than has previously been available. On the other hand, brevity does not indicate a lack of interest. Where separate coverage of any particular country or region is not justified by the extent of the reception, relevant material is incorporated into the bibliography and the Timeline. Thus an early translation may be noted, although there was subsequently a minimal response to an author or work, or a very long gap in the reception in that region.
It is, of course, always possible, and indeed to be hoped and expected, that further aspects of reception will later be uncovered, and the long-term research project forwarded though this initial information. Reception studies often display an author’s intellectual and political impact and reveal effects that are unfamiliar to the authors’ compatriots. Thus, Byron, for example, had the power of carrying and incarnating liberal political thought to regimes and institutions to whom it was anathema; it is less well known that Sterne had the same effect and was charged with erotically tinged subversion. Shelley too, resident like Byron in Switzerland and Italy, was often understood in radical political terms, which in his native land became muffled. George Eliot was an advocate for Italian independence and a friend of political exiles. By the same token, the study of censorship, or more broadly, impediments to dissemination, and of modes of circumventing control, becomes an important aspect of reception studies. In studies on Bacon, the process of dissemination of his ideas through the private correspondence of organized circles was vital, Certain presses and publishers also play a role, and the study of modes of secret distribution under severe penalty is a particularly fascinating subject, whether in Catholic Europe or Soviet Russia. Much translation was carried out in prisons. Irony and Aesopian devices, and audience alertness to them, are highly developed under controlling regimes. A surprising number of authors live more dangerously abroad than at home. Where Yeats was at home is moot point; some Irish groups attacked him as aristocratic, elitist, even ‘fascistic’; yet he has been seen as the first prominent Western advocate of decolonization, and The Tower (1928) as advancing the perception that ‘colonial violence has to be counteracted by a politics of reason’. In fact, this perception may be attributed to his countryman Edmund Burke, whose untiring parliamentary investigations of the actions of Warren Hastings in colonial India, though Hastings was acquitted, give Burke pride of place by a large margin of time.
The Project website www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/rbae provides further information about the Project’s history, advisory board, conferences, colloquia and seminars, as well as reviews of its volumes.
Director, Research Project
The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe