Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) is one of the founding texts of English literature, and epoch-making collection of historical and lyrical ballads that defined the canon of popular poetry. It dramatically influenced Romanticism and the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Walter Scott, and even Lewis Carroll. This is the first monograph devoted to Percy's seminal work. In The Making of Percys
Reliques, Nick Groom vividly reconstructs pioneering antiquarianism and its processes of collecting, transcribing, and collating. With meticulous scholarship, he unravels Percy's working methods, examining his correspondence,
library, and papers - as well as his friendships with scholars like Samuel Johnson. This microbibliographical analysis takes literary history and critical theory in significant new directions. As Groom shows, the creation about historical sources and the origins of Englishness, and the practices of eighteenth-century editing were intertwined with themes as diverse as gardening, nightingales, forgery, and cannibalism.
Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) is one of the founding texts of English literature, and epoch-making collection of historical and lyrical ballads that defined the canon of popular poetry. It dramatically influenced Romanticism and the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Walter Scott, and even Lewis Carroll. This is the first monograph devoted to Percy's seminal work. In The Making of Percys
Reliques, Nick Groom vividly reconstructs pioneering antiquarianism and its processes of collecting, transcribing, and collating. With meticulous scholarship, he unravels Percy's working methods, examining his correspondence,
library, and papers - as well as his friendships with scholars like Samuel Johnson. This microbibliographical analysis takes literary history and critical theory in significant new directions. As Groom shows, the creation about historical sources and the origins of Englishness, and the practices of eighteenth-century editing were intertwined with themes as diverse as gardening, nightingales, forgery, and cannibalism.
Introduction
The Ballad and Literary Antiquarianism
Macpherson and Percy
The Genesis of the Reliques
The Making of the Reliques
Printing the Reliques
Conclusion
Lecturer in English, University of Exeter, 1994
`Written in an elegant and readable style, Groom's book is filled
with much substantial, never gratuously erudite, scholarship. More
importantly it provides a unique occasion to rediscover a text that
prefigures the contradictions, innovations and concerns of a whole
cultural phase as one of the founding, epoch-making texts of
British as well as European Romantic culture.'
Diego Saglia, British Asoc. for Romatic Studies, Issue 17, March
2000.
`Groom's study captures Percy's adaptation of new ideas of
authenticity circulating in the mid-to-late eighteenth century ...
Theory never encumbers Groom's discussions but usefully blends in
with them.'
Diego Saglia, British Asoc. for Romatic Studies, Issue 17, March
2000.
`The first book-length study of Thomas Percy's Reliques to appear
for a long time ... Particularly interesting is the reconstruction
of the different professional contacts established by Persy during
the 'making' of his collection with intellectuals as diverse as
William Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson.'
Diego Saglia, British Asoc. for Romatic Studies, Issue 17, March
2000.
`Nick Groom's microbibliographical analysis of The Making of
Percy's Relique's is extraordinarily detailed, yet lucid and
entertaining.'
Katherine Turner, TLS 26/11/99
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