Elfenbein, Andrew. Romanticism and the Rise of English.
"English professors now study everything except English" (3). Here, Elfenbein refers to literary criticism's tendency to contextualize and historicize everything about a literary work except the language in which it was written. Elfenbein argues that the study of English must consider the development of the English language and, more specifically, the development of the English language during Romanticism. For during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries English as we know it—with predictable formulae, recognizable sentence structure, and "correct" word choice—really came into being. Elfenbein’s work examines the influence of the late eighteenth-century’s “purification” (what contemporary linguists call “prescriptivism”) of English on Romantic prose and poetry. This now maligned process of “purification” as, during the Romantic period, seen as a revolution in language, necessary after the rise of print capitalism. As Elfenbein discusses in his first three chapters, this movement to "purify" English had many effects, good and bad, macro and micro: the rise of amateur authorship, additional barriers to literacy, the literary use of dialect. He argues that changes like the will/shall distinction and the prohibition of double negatives restructured "author-work-reader" relationships. Elfenbein also discusses elocution and the eighteenth-century elocution movement as influencing the standardization of the English language, as well as the accessibility of novels and prose. Elfenbein argues that novels adopted the practices and vocabulary of elocution to differentiate between the spoken dialogue of character and the "truth" of a narrator (who speaks in a way inspired by expository prose). Romantic poetry, by contrast, resists elocutionary speech patterns by "rejecting too-standardized audibility" (132)--playing with ambiguity in word pronunciation, rhythm and meter in order to create a voice of its own, "free from the perceived superiority of prosaic, genderless, silent narrators" (127).
Elfenbein joins Griffiths in considering (and applauding) the ambiguities of poetry's "printed voice." He sees Romantic poets not as phonocentric voice-lovers, but as practitioners of a "peculiar unheard voice available only in print" (135). Stewart could very well take issue with Elfenbein's distinction between prose and poetry, claiming that Romantic novelists too take interest in print's ambiguities in voicing. I would also find interesting Elfenbein's thoughts on Victorian poems like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Cry of the Children," poems that include an interpreting narrator and a speaking subject. Elfenbein also converses with theorists like Bakhtin and critical race scholars like Conquergood, who investigate the ideological consequences of speech standardization. Yet, Elfenbein rightly points out that, despite the eventual applications of elocution practice, eighteenth-century elocutionists saw themselves as part of a revolutionary movement towards equality and liberty. They wanted to create methods of speaking understandable to all. Elocution's original focus on improving clarity for the listener (not on eliminating imperfections in the speaker) proves interesting for my own project on listening to reading aloud.
