Romanticism & The Rise of English by Andrew Elfenbein, and: Language and Revolution in Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin by Jane Hodson

Abstract

Andrew Elfenbein. Romanticism & The Rise of English. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Pp. 278. $55.00 cloth/$21.95 paper. Jane Hodson. Language and Revolution in Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2007. Pp. 226. $99.95. Both Elfenbein's and Hodson's books invite at least four questions on the views of grammarians during the decades of Romanticism and on practices of contemporary dramatists, essayists, novelists, and poets. (1) What evidence supports an argument that the grammarians' views enjoyed some influence among them? (2) As for readers of literature and periodicals in decades, how fully did they accept the teachings on pure advanced by grammarians such as Hugh Blair and James Beattie? (3) How influential was pure English on critical reviews, both in contemporary literature and discursive texts? (4) Lastly, quite apart from clear responses to rules recommended by grammarians, do the works that Elfenbein and Hodson examine give credence in themselves to influences attributable to pure English? Taken together, these questions on uses of pure grammar in the Romantic period also prompt an engagement with the structures and methods of Elfenbein's and Hodson's works in historical criticism. To begin with the structure of each book, Hodson proposes to consider as one pervasive theme the functions of grammar in political discourse, mainly in the 1790s. Her initial chapter--The Language of Politics and the Politics of Language'--resourcefully introduces discursive responses to the French Revolution as texts enough for sufficient analysis. The analysis proposed offers to explore diverse attitudes representatively manifest in Romantic responses to Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin's discourses but also to contemporary grammarians and their works. Her second chapter, as groundwork for the study of discourses on the French Revolution, surveys fifty grammars, their analyses not all alike, published in the late eighteenth century. This survey reveals that despite a desire for an inherently correct English, the grammarians' arguments on such topics as syntax, diction, and public speaking brought the Romantic decades no unanimity. Chapters Three through Six examine in order Hodson's four chosen discourses on the revolution in France. Her method in each chapter is consistent. Chapter Three has several subtopics under which to appreciate Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France: (1) modern criticism, (2) contemporary reviews, (3) his other writings, (4) his linguistic practices, (5) his concepts of language. Chapters Four through Six contain these subtopics, each also including, respectively, some comparison of Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin's linguistic practices to Burke's as well as their commentaries on his Reflections. For the political writing of Wollstonecraft, Hodson chooses A Vindication of the Rights of Men; for Paine, Rights of Man; for Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. This consistent structure in the chapters offering exposition on discourse presents a methodological possibility for recovering patterns of grammar and politics in the historical context of the Romantic period. The structure of Elfenbein's book supports an argument that philological procedures, valuable for analyses of Romantic literature, ought to spur new thinking in graduate studies on literary English. The book's introduction recounts the lapse of philological methods from graduate study, outlines their value in appreciating Romantic literature, and provides a conspectus of the chapters to follow. Chapter 1, Purifying English, explores the Romantic project for establishing prescriptive rules in order to enhance the opportunity for common ground between authors and readers. This project set barriers, however, between those who did and did not use the prestige language and willy-nilly diminished in English an earthiness associated with primitive speech (14). …