Reading old books: writing with traditions

254 Pages·11.28 MB·English

by  Mack, Peter

Reading Old BOOks
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Reading Old Books
WRiting W ith tR aditiOns
Peter Mack
PRincetOn UniveRsity PRess
PRincetOn & OxfORd
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Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Control Number 2019931722
ISBN 978- 0- 691- 19400- 4
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
Editorial: Ben Tate and Charlie Allen
Production Editorial: Jill Harris
Jacket Design: Layla Mac Rory
Production: Merli Guerra
Publicity: Alyssa Sanford and Katie Lewis
Copyeditor: Cynthia Buck
Jacket art: Raphael, The School of Athens, c. 1509–1511.
This book has been composed in Miller
Printed on acid-f ree paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Vicki Behm
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cOntents
Preface · ix
Introduction: Ideas of Literary Tradition 1
chaPteR 1. Petrarch, Scholarship, and Traditions
of Love Poetry 27
chaPteR 2. Chaucer and Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato 56
chaPteR 3. Renaissance Epics: Ariosto, Tasso, and
Spenser 97
chaPteR 4. Reading and Community as a Support for
the New in Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Mary Barton 136
chaPteR 5. European and African Literary Traditions
in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow 169
Conclusion: Writers’ and Readers’
Traditions 195
Notes · 209
Select Bibliography · 227
Index · 233
[ vii ]
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PReface
this BOOk seeks tO UndeRstand the ways in which literary
tradition has been and can be useful. It argues that literary tradition
provides essential imaginative resources for writers and readers.
Writers use earlier books for plots, for phrases, for ideas to copy or
contradict, for moral support, and for lessons in becoming better
writers. This book investigates how writers learn from and use their
predecessors, and how readers use the idea of a literary heritage, in
order to argue for the importance of tradition to readers and writ-
ers. We need to be critical of how, and why, the word “tradition” is
used by writers or critics, but we cannot allow that necessary wari-
ness to blind us to the ways in which writers make use of earlier
texts to make meanings and to create new works. Nor can we afford
to ignore the role of reading earlier texts in helping us understand
new writing.
In the introduction, I investigate the history of the word “tradi-
tion,” the ways in which over the last 160 years the word has been
applied to literature, and the opinions of a range of sociologists,
historians, philosophers, and critics on the use and value of tradi-
tion. Some of my sources for this introductory discussion were sug-
gested by a critic’s part in establishing the significance of literary
tradition (Sainte-B euve, Eliot, Leavis); others by people with whom
I discussed my ideas (Gadamer, Adorno, Ferrante, Hobsbawm and
Ranger, MacIntyre, Shils), and still others by my reading around
the subject. Late in the day I remembered that E. R. Curtius had
some interesting things to say on traditions and canons.1 In the
introduction, I emphasize the importance of studying the process
by which the later reader or writer uses the older text, the freedom
which the writer enjoys in choosing both a text to follow and the
way in which to exploit it, and the different uses which readers and
writers make of tradition. For one can best understand how tradi-
tion works by studying a later writer’s use of an individual text. The
requirement that a writer (or reader) should somehow possess a
[ ix ]
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