IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB120032710

The Rise of Philology in Britain: Explaining the Progress of Knowledge, 1750–1859 (2021)

McMullan, Luke Anthony (Author)
Siskin, Clifford (Advisor)

New York University
Siskin, Clifford

URI: http://www.proquest.com/docview/2562878533/8304247E039349DBPQ/54

Publication Date: 2021
Physical Details: 282
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Language and languages Discipline formation Arts and humanities Historical method Evolution Encyclopedias and dictionaries Linguistics; philology 19th century 18th century Great Britain

The historiography of philology—known in criticism as the philological turn—has long treated philologists’ intellectual practices and the objects they studied as historical hallmarks of philology. The practice-based definitions of philology produced by this treatment allow critics to emphasize continuities between philology and the contemporary humanities. But they also often lack historical specificity, and sometimes lead to anachronism when historical texts are misidentified as philological. The result is a distorted picture of philology’s history. “The Rise of Philology in Britain” redresses that critical neglect by departing from the twin focus on practices and objects that has dominated the historiography. Instead, this dissertation examines the purposes and rationales that drove and defined philological enquiry from its rise in the mid-eighteenth century to its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than work backwards from a set of textual characteristics presumed to have belonged to philology, this dissertation assembles its historical corpus from texts that explicitly invoked philology and the concepts associated with it. The resulting analysis breaks with consensus about philology’s history. Philology’s rise in Britain began not in the late eighteenth century but around 1750, when the relative frequency of philology in the English print corpus began a rapid rise, which would be sustained until the 1880s. Furthermore, in the eighteenth century, a text’s philological status depended neither on the practices of its writer(s) nor on the objects they studied. Philology was not about texts and languages. Instead, it was about the progress of knowledge. In terms of historical coverage, philology’s enquiry into progress ranged from the most distant antiquity to the present day, and the parts of knowledge it analyzed extended beyond those that are today considered parts of the humanities. The broader implications of this finding for the eighteenth century are explored via the conceptual dynamics of philology’s changing relationship with encyclopedias. For most of the century, philology was strongly associated with the phrase universal literature. Yet as the century went on, encyclopedias began to describe more thoroughly the progress of the various arts and sciences they defined, and hence took on some of philology’s remit. Universal literature was increasingly used to describe encyclopedias after the 1770s, and this reflected the encyclopedia genre’s incorporation of philology’s function: explaining the progress of knowledge. While the notion of philology that circulates in today’s critical literature evokes language families, manuscript collation, and painstaking etymology, the histories of languages did not become objects of philological inquiry until the 1780s. And then, the study of languages did not replace an earlier kind of philology. Rather, languages were annexed to philology’s framework for the study of knowledge’s progress, when it was realized that they exhibited their own historically legible progress and, therefore, could be treated as media that showed the progress of other domains. By 1859, the relative frequency of philology in the English print corpus was approaching its peak, and comparative philology enjoyed enormous intellectual prestige. This was the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Whereas philology and species transmutation, in the critical literature about their relationship, have usually been characterized as two separate fields, they were in fact a single hybrid, or amalgamated, field. From the 1830s to the 1860s, this hybrid field worked to answer a single question: whether the origin(s) of humankind had been many or one. The crucial factor for whether a work belonged to philology was whether it described some part of knowledge in terms of its historical origin or its progress. This dissertation recovers that fact and locates it at the center of philology’s history in Britain. In doing so, it improves our understanding of the rise of philology in the mid-eighteenth century and the changes it underwent for the next hundred years. Today, any attempt to reckon with philology’s legacy for the humanities must consider the role of progress in contemporary knowledge production in the humanities and elsewhere.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB120032710/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Johannes, Gert-Jan; (2011)
“Nationale filologieën” en het historisch onderzoek naar disciplinevorming in de geesteswetenschappen. Een verkenning (/isis/citation/CBB001251325/)

Article Keipert, Helmut; (2013)
Die Pallas-Redaktion der Petersburger Vocabularia comparativa und ihre Bedeutung für die Entwicklung der slavischen Sprachwissenschaft (/isis/citation/CBB001211990/)

Article Hein van den Berg; (2022)
Animal languages in eighteenth-century German philosophy and science (/isis/citation/CBB285555955/)

Book Reiner, Erica; (2002)
An Adventure of Great Dimension: The Launching of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (/isis/citation/CBB000301527/)

Thesis Lisa Lynn Chen Obrist; (2015)
Time and How to Calculate It: A Study and Edition with Translation of Book 10 of Hrabanus Maurus’ "De rerum naturis" (/isis/citation/CBB862549669/)

Article Eddy, Matthew D.; (2011)
The Line of Reason: Hugh Blair, Spatiality and the Progressive Structure of Language (/isis/citation/CBB001022766/)

Book Lauzon, Matthew; (2010)
Signs of Light: French and British Theories of Linguistic Communication, 1648--1789 (/isis/citation/CBB001212252/)

Article Alter, Stephen G.; (2008)
“Curiously Parallel”: Analogies of Language and Race in Darwin's Descent of Man. A Reply to Gregory Radick (/isis/citation/CBB000831724/)

Article Alter, Stephen G.; (2007)
Darwin and the Linguists: The Coevolution of Mind and Language, Part 1. Problematic Friends (/isis/citation/CBB000830393/)

Article Peter Harrison; (2016)
What was historical about natural history? Contingency and explanation in the science of living things (/isis/citation/CBB972800240/)

Article Linn, Andrew R.; (2008)
The Birth of Applied Linguistics: The Anglo-Scandinavian School as “Discourse Community” (/isis/citation/CBB001211634/)

Book Giulia Virgilio; (2023)
Parole al microscopio: i composti neoclassici nell'italiano delle scienze tra Settecento e primo Ottocento (/isis/citation/CBB267827261/)

Thesis B. Josh Doty; (2016)
The Anatomy of Conscience: Science, Ethics, and Religion in Nineteenth-century American Literature (/isis/citation/CBB174403585/)

Article Philippe Huneman; (2017)
From a religious view of madness to religious mania: the Encyclopédie, Pinel, Esquirol (/isis/citation/CBB013167715/)

Article Sven Dupré; Geert Somsen; (2019)
The History of Knowledge and the Future of Knowledge Societies (/isis/citation/CBB931053546/)

Thesis Pearce, Christopher Patrick; (2004)
Terms of Corruption: Samuel Johnson's “Dictionary” in Its Contexts (/isis/citation/CBB001561749/)

Article Rebeca Fernández Rodríguez; (2023)
Language, Science and Globalization in the Eighteenth Century (/isis/citation/CBB980504645/)

Article Mary Terrall; (2017)
French in the Siècle des Lumières: A Universal Language? (/isis/citation/CBB318613312/)

Article Brian, Éric; (2006)
Combinaisons et disposition. Langue universelle et géométrie de situation chez Condorcet (1793-1794) (/isis/citation/CBB000772989/)

Book Nataša Raschi; (2020)
La langue des mathématiques chez Diderot (/isis/citation/CBB984952533/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}