British Literature : the career of a concept
Abstract
British Literature is an unfamiliar concept in literary studies. English Literature and Scottish Literature are the customary terms of art, expressive, it seems, of the distinctive national cultures from which these literatures emerge. Indeed, English Literature, rather than British Literature also does service as an umbrella for all Anglophone literatures. However, the idea of British Literature has a longer history. In the eighteenth century there was a keen sense among literary antiquaries and philologists that the sister languages of English and Scots had produced a striking corpus of medieval Anglo-Scottish literature. In the nineteenth century ‘British Literature’ entered the currency of criticism. However, the coming of the Scots literary renaissance in the inter-War era killed off this usage. In more recent decades, with the growing recognition that the UK is a multi-national state a new appreciation of ‘British Literature’ – associated with cultural pluralism and the expansion of the English canon – has emerged.
Citation
Kidd , C C 2016 , ' British Literature : the career of a concept ' , Scottish Literary Review , vol. 8 , no. 1 , pp. 1-16 . < http://muse.jhu.edu/article/619274 >
Publication
Scottish Literary Review
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1756-5634Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2016 Association for Scottish Literary Studies and individual contributors. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the final published version of the work, which was originally published at http://muse.jhu.edu/article/619274
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