This article was accepted into the corpus but its outbound wikilinks were never NER-processed — typical at the deepest BFS hop or when the run's entity cap was reached. No expansion funnel to show.
| Cambridge History of English and American Literature | |
|---|---|
| Title | Cambridge History of English and American Literature |
| Editor | A. W. Ward; A. R. Waller; etc. |
| Country | United Kingdom; United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Pub date | 1907–1921 |
| Media type | |
Cambridge History of English and American Literature The Cambridge History of English and American Literature is a multi-volume reference work produced under the auspices of Cambridge University Press that surveys English literature and American literature from medieval to early twentieth-century periods. Conceived during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the work assembled scholars connected with institutions such as University of Cambridge, Harvard University, Oxford University, Columbia University, and Yale University, and engaged with literary histories shaped by figures like Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Edmund Spenser and Emily Dickinson.
The project presents a panoramic treatment linking medieval authors such as Beowulf poets and Geoffrey Chaucer to Renaissance writers like Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Sir Philip Sidney, extending through Restoration figures including John Dryden and Aphra Behn to eighteenth-century authors such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson. Its American coverage ranges from Puritan writers like Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor to Romantic and realist figures including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Walt Whitman. The volumes also engage with Victorian literary life featuring Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Alfred Tennyson, and with modernist tendencies in writers like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce.
Initiated in the early 1900s, the series was issued by Cambridge University Press across multiple years, with editorial leadership from scholars including Arthur W. Ward and Arthur R. Waller. Publication coincided with debates in institutions such as British Museum and universities in London and New York City about canon formation and scholarly standards. The project unfolded contemporaneously with other encyclopedic efforts such as the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary, and its release paralleled developments in periodicals like The Times Literary Supplement and reviews in journals tied to Guildhall and academic societies.
Organized into themed volumes, the work covers periods, genres, and national literatures with dedicated chapters on medieval drama exemplified by Everyman and on Elizabethan theatre linked to Globe Theatre and practitioners like Richard Burbage. It treats poetic traditions from Geoffrey Chaucer to Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, addresses prose forms from Thomas Browne to Daniel Defoe and Jane Austen, and surveys American poetic and prose developments including studies of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass. Special chapters examine print culture and institutions such as Stationers' Company, book trade practices in London, theatrical institutions like the King's Men, and periodical networks that included The Atlantic Monthly and Blackwood's Magazine.
Contributors were drawn from leading scholars affiliated with University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, and Cornell University, and included specialists in medieval studies, Renaissance drama, Restoration literature, eighteenth-century satire, Romanticism, Victorian studies, and American letters. The editorial process reflected contemporary scholarly norms involving correspondence between editors and authors, manuscript review patterned after practices at Cambridge University Press and editorial boards akin to those of Royal Society publications. Contributors engaged with primary sources preserved at institutions like the Bodleian Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, and Houghton Library and debated philological methods exemplified by work on texts such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and editorial controversies surrounding Shakespearean chronology.
Contemporaneous reception included reviews in periodicals linked to The Times, New York Times, and academic journals of Oxford and Cambridge, where critics compared its scope to that of the Dictionary of National Biography and other national literary surveys. The series influenced curricular choices at universities such as Harvard, Yale, and University of Chicago and shaped scholarly reference practices used by editors of collected works for figures like Shakespeare, Milton, Poe, and Emily Dickinson. Later critical reassessments referenced movements and theorists such as New Criticism, Structuralism, and scholars reacting against canonical formations including advocates connected to Harvard and Columbia who promoted broader inclusion.
Originally published in multiple print volumes, the work has been reissued in facsimile editions by Cambridge University Press and made accessible through digitization projects associated with libraries such as the British Library, Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and university repositories at Princeton and Yale. Modern readers consult it alongside later reference works like the Oxford Companion to English Literature and the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, and scholars reference its essays in bibliographies, course syllabi at institutions like King's College London and Columbia University, and online archival collections maintained by major research libraries.
Category:Literary history