English Literature and Ancient Languages by Kenneth Haynes (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.3, 2005 803 archive, Joseph suggests, 'always challenges the firstone's monopoly over colonial truth, but it is impossible to get at fully' (p. 15). Joseph takes a period of 120 years in which the British East India Company de? veloped its monopoly on South Asian trade into a ruthless colonizing force, and by analysing the exchanges between these two kinds of archives, attempts her charting of a grammar of power. She takes female presence in these archives as a test case of how colonial knowledge and power were formed out of systematic exclusions and erasures , but also disruptive presences, fragments, hauntings, pressures. Thus, Joseph reads Defoe's Roxana with the official records of the rape of an unnamed Indian woman in Madras, Holwell's famous account of the 'Black Hole' of Calcutta inci? dent against Phebe Gibbes's Hartley House, Williamson's East India Vade-Mecum with Mrs Monkland's novel Life in India. In each case, what the exchange between the literary archive and the official one shows is not merely the symbiotic relation? ship between the two, but that in inventing subjects (gendered or otherwise) through omissions, distortions, and disruptions, the 'official'/historical archive was as fictional as the secondary 'literary' archive was historical. Thus, the limits and very tangible capacities of the fictional nature of colonial power become startlingly evident once gender is moved to the centre of analysis. Betty Joseph's book is a compelling demon? stration of this fact. And what of Bishnukumari, the Bengali rani who secured such a tenacious presence in the colonial archives ?Joseph's study reveals that she escaped the summary dismissal from her post that was the fate of most other Zamindars under British rule, and over fifty years later was celebrated by J.S. Mill in his essay 'The Subjection ofWomen', as an example of 'the natural capacity of women forgovernment'. Such a deployment no doubt reveals the changing contours and compulsions of patriarchal colonial power. But perhaps it also signals the role played by such challenges and disruptions as were mounted by the rani in altering the essence of such power itself. University of Warwick Pablo Mukherjee English Literature and Ancient Languages. By Kenneth Haynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003. xiv + 210 pp. ?47. ISBN 0-19-926190-3. This is an unusual and welcome book, probably the first monograph of its kind, devoted to the influence of the Latin and Greek languages upon English literature from the Renaissance onwards. Of the five chapters, the firstthree are concerned predominantly with relations between Latin and English literature in earlier centuries, while the final two are concerned with Greek, the emphasis here being mainly on the nineteenth century but looking also to modernism and the twentieth century. The order and proportion of the parts thus broadly illuminate the actual history of the linguistic influence which is broadly represented in all its great variety and range. Throughout the discussion, specialist terms that will be familiar to linguists but perhaps less familiar to literary readers are fully explained and clearly applied in many particular examples. Indeed, it is one of the virtues of this study that it contains a wealth of detailed, precise, and discriminating analysis of actual usages and quotations, that will be of great interest and value to linguists and literary critics, within the context of broader more general topics central to linguistic interaction and the history of influence. In the opening chapter on multilingualism, the modern history of Latin is briefly surveyed 'in its social, political, religious, and economic aspects' (p. ix) to provide contexts for the quotation of Latin and its presence in modern authors. The resort to Latin is shown to derive from many differentimpulses and to result in many dif? ferenteffects.The discussion gives the lie to the old notion that Latin and Greek have 804 Reviews been 'dead' languages since antiquity and provides an authoritative demonstration that even the humblest, most minute reference or quotation can be invested with a discernible cultural significance or value. The governing principle in the next chapter on varieties of language purism is the juxtaposition of two contradictory attitudes: the desire to accentuate the 'pure' Saxon elements...