E-Book Overview
The career of Matthew Arnold as an eminent poet and the preeminent critic of his generation constitutes a remarkable historical spectacle orchestrated by a host of powerful Victorian cultural institutions. The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold investigates these constructions by situating Arnold’s poetry in a number of contexts that partially shaped it. Such analysis revises our understanding of the formation of the elite (and elitist) male literary-intellectual subject during the 1840s and 1850s, as Arnold attempts self-definition and strives simultaneously to move toward a position of ideological influence upon intellectual institutions that were contested sites of economic, social, and political power in his era. Antony H. Harrison reopens discussion of selected works by Arnold in order to make visible some of their crucial sociohistorical, intertextual, and political components. Only by doing so can we ultimately view the cultural work of Arnold steadily and . . . whole,” and in a fashion that actually eschews this mystifying premise of all Arnoldian inquiry which, by the early twentieth century, had become wholly naturalized in the academy as ideology.
E-Book Content
THE
CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Antony H. Harrison
The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold
Antony H. Harrison
The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold
Ohio University Press
Athens
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 www.ohioswallow.com © 2009 by Ohio University Press All rights reserved To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax). Printed in the United States of America Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ ™ 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harrison, Antony H. The cultural production of Matthew Arnold / Antony H. Harrison. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8214-1899-4 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-1900-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Arnold, Matthew, 1822–1888—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR4024.H36 2009 821'.8—dc22 2009033165
For Penn, who rejuvenates me, and Anne, who restores me
Rationale
The last truly important critical book devoted to Matthew Arnold’s poetry was David Riede’s Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language, published at the centenary of Arnold’s death.1 Some twenty years later, we might well wonder at the relative critical neglect endured by this icon of Victorian literature and culture during these two decades.2 But various explanations for the phenomenon are ready to hand. New, post-structuralist methodologies dominating criticism in this period have tended to devalue the work of Arnold as effectively as the formalist and New Critical methodologies dominating the previous decades of the twentieth century tended to overvalue it. Similarly, the popularity of feminist and other, new historicist approaches to literary study have shown more interest in recuperating undervalued authors or in analyzing issues of literary power and authority than in revalidating writers already perceived as triumphant in the field of cultural production. Still, in the literary world outside the academy, Arnold retains some prominence, as is remarkably demonstrated in the conclusion to Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel, Saturday, in which a recitation of “Dover Beach” effectively saves the protagonist and his family from horrifying threats to their lives and property.3 As this case in point demonstrates, the trajectory of Arnold’s career inside and outside the academy since his death suggests the extent to which h