Hard agree with all of this. I wrote my doctorate (back in the day) on changes in prose style in preaching, generation by generation from 1580-1660. Lancelot Andrewes, for example, becomes even more interesting when assessed as ‘competing with’ the late Elizabethans at the beginning of his career, and then being outshone by Donne et al, and then re-finding his preeminence with what we think of as the typical Andrewes style (as popularised by Eliot) in the 1620s. Then a school of that style exists into the 1630s, before it all collapses at the Civil War. Plenty of scholars had written before about ‘what’ Donne and Andrewes were doing in their prose, but looking at the generations opened up the ‘why’: why those things, in that order, at that time (in a culture which, briefly, prized the writing and performing of sermons as the highest literary achievement).
Absolutely brilliant. I may ask you to see a copy of that doctorate some day! Very interested in the next generation of preacher-poets, esp. Henry King, who really tried hard to keep up with changing styles.
Interesting discussion for me as a Russian philologist because of two famous names in Russian Literature: Ivan Turgenev and Fiodor Dostoevsky. In Russian understanding, the writer shapes the public- the generations; he is a preacher, an advocate, a philosopher, and a forerunner of the new ideas and events of the future. And Turgenev was the first to understand the appearance of the generation of nihilists- a small part of a new class of Russian intelligentsia. Dostoevsky in Devils satirically reverberated on the other part of the intelligentsia, social democrats, and future revolutionaries. It was his revenge for his former ideas and his Siberian hard labor. He also used his novel to caricature Turgenev because he hated this aristocrat. Once, being very poor and a gambler, he asked T. for money and never forgave the humiliation.
Great discussion with Julianne. I hope there will be more of these
Hard agree with all of this. I wrote my doctorate (back in the day) on changes in prose style in preaching, generation by generation from 1580-1660. Lancelot Andrewes, for example, becomes even more interesting when assessed as ‘competing with’ the late Elizabethans at the beginning of his career, and then being outshone by Donne et al, and then re-finding his preeminence with what we think of as the typical Andrewes style (as popularised by Eliot) in the 1620s. Then a school of that style exists into the 1630s, before it all collapses at the Civil War. Plenty of scholars had written before about ‘what’ Donne and Andrewes were doing in their prose, but looking at the generations opened up the ‘why’: why those things, in that order, at that time (in a culture which, briefly, prized the writing and performing of sermons as the highest literary achievement).
Absolutely brilliant. I may ask you to see a copy of that doctorate some day! Very interested in the next generation of preacher-poets, esp. Henry King, who really tried hard to keep up with changing styles.
Indeed Henry King features in the doctorate, as does his father.
ooh this sounds excellent
Interesting discussion for me as a Russian philologist because of two famous names in Russian Literature: Ivan Turgenev and Fiodor Dostoevsky. In Russian understanding, the writer shapes the public- the generations; he is a preacher, an advocate, a philosopher, and a forerunner of the new ideas and events of the future. And Turgenev was the first to understand the appearance of the generation of nihilists- a small part of a new class of Russian intelligentsia. Dostoevsky in Devils satirically reverberated on the other part of the intelligentsia, social democrats, and future revolutionaries. It was his revenge for his former ideas and his Siberian hard labor. He also used his novel to caricature Turgenev because he hated this aristocrat. Once, being very poor and a gambler, he asked T. for money and never forgave the humiliation.
Thank you. Larisa