The First English Author

Further to the post last year about the identity of "the first author" in the history of English literature, here, courtesy of the British Academy's website, is a brief audio extract of my discussion of three possible candidates, at an event held at the Royal Society last month on "Writing National Literatures": click for the audio.

The Female Repertoire

Further to my suggestion in English Literature: A Very Short Introduction that 'repertoire' is a more valuable term than 'canon', I have been asked to reflect on whether or not the shift of terminology has any bearing on the debate about the gendering of the canon. For a generation, feminists have been arguing that the canon as traditionally received is predominantly male. 'Canon' is a term that comes from Biblical criticism. It might be said that, just as the books of the Bible are predominantly male-voiced, with a few exceptions such as the Books of Ruth and Esther, so the canon is predominantly male, with a few exceptions such as Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes. What is more, Eliot and the Brontes wrote under male pseudonyms and Austen published anonymously. The assault on the canon is associated with the term "dead white European males." In my Guardian column linking the VSI to Michael Gove's remarks about the teaching of classic literary texts in schools, I defended the value of the dead and suggested that the literary repertoire of these islands has always been ethnically highly diverse, as witnessed by the fact that the earliest identifiable author in the tradition could variously be argued to be a Celt (Ossian), a Roman (Julius Caesar) or an Anglo-Saxon (Caedmon). This provoked the response: if these are the fathers of English Literature, who is the mother?

The answer that the book offers to this question is: a variety of female religious writers from the post-1066 era, for example the author of the 13th century Ancrene Wisse. I am not aware of any identifiable pre-1066 female authors, but I'd love to hear about them. The book also proposes that the study of English Literature has been in some sense limited by our tendency to think only about literature in the English language. Thus it suggests that the honour of being the first English poet to have their works collected in a quasi-scholarly edition, with commentary, in the manner of editions of the classics of ancient Greek and Rome, belongs to a woman, Elizabeth Jane Weston, but that she has been neglected not because she was a woman but because she wrote in Latin and lived for much of her life in Prague.

I introduce the term "repertoire" by analogy with the theatrical repertoire, which is something much more fluid than a "canon." One of the things that struck me in doing the research for the book was how the eighteenth-century repertoire gave much more space to women dramatists than the nineteenth: I'd like to know more about exactly when and why those fine dramatists Susanna Centlivre and Hannah Cowley dropped out of the repertoire.

Very Short English Literature

Fitting that my Very Short Introduction to English Literature is published on the day that Michael Gove tells the Tory party conference that we need a return to the canon -- to Pope, Dryden, Keats and Shelley. I argue in the book that "repertoire" is a better term than "canon", but I'm hoping for lively debate on the subject.

Meanwhile, I have blogged for the publisher, OUP, on the subject of the book, so I won't do so here, but will merely provide a link.

On Delivering

Probably the most satisfying moment for an author - more than seeing the work set in print when the proof comes or even when receiving the first copy - is that of delivery. Hitting the send button. Especially as the final stages of writing - cutting to length, removing repetition, checking references - are so laborious. Ecstasy therefore this morning as my English Literature: A Very Short Introduction wings its way through the ether to Oxford University Press.

Early research for the book was done over a year ago (mentioned in my Writer's Rooms feature in The Guardian), but the writing has been rapid fire in the last few months, including a blissful escape to France alone for a few days, and then, for the final push, taking advantage of the village being snowed in.

An especially satisfying book to write because short! A ludicrous proposition to introduce a subject the size of EngLit in 50,000 words (I pushed them up from the standard 40k for the series by cunningly asking for 60k and splitting the difference...). But the series guidelines are very helpful: "The text should not read like an encyclopedia entry or a textbook; depending on the topic, it may be more comprehensive or more idiosyncratic in its coverage. Don't be afraid to express a point of view or to inject some style into the prose. Focus on issues, details, and context that make the subject interesting; you should draw your reader in with examples and quotations. Give the reader a sense both of your subject's contours and of the debates that shape it." Good principles, which have made for a great series - so many people have said how much they like these little books.

No one will expect 'coverage' from such a thing, but there are bound to be some reviews and reader responses along the lines of "I can't believe that X didn't get a single mention." Among the initial candidates for X are: medieval mystery plays, the Brownings and the Rossettis, H. G. Wells. Over the coming months before publication - scheduled for October - I will try to list as many as I can of my apologies to the shades of the mighty dead whom I have neglected. As far as the living are concerned, I've been very selective. They can look after themselves.

A living author I greatly admire is Richard Powers. I review his latest novel, Generosity, in the latest TLS, but it doesn't have a free access online link to the piece. So instead, here is a picture of the village - well at least the church, which I look out on from my study - covered in snow.