Joke Brasser
Elizabeth Montagu in Germany:
The Contemporary German Reception of Montagu’s Eighteenth-Century
Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare
contribution to the COST-WWIH panel of the Chawton conference "Pride and Prejudices", July 2013.
Abstract:
The critical writings of Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800) were for a long time overlooked, with Montagu mostly remembered in her role as a salonnière of the famous London Bluestocking Circle. Since the 1990s, however, substantial attention has been paid to Montagu’s critical writings, especially her Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769). Feminist scholarship on the Bluestocking circle re-introduced Montagu’s work into the canon of literary criticism as a rare extended piece of literary criticism written by a woman, emphasizing its place within an emerging tradition of women’s writing. However, as the Essay is usually read as ‘female’ or ‘bluestocking’ criticism, its alliances with canonical criticism have not yet been fully explored. Additionally, scholarship of Montagu has rarely considered the German reception of her Essay which was translated into German in 1771, at a time when Sturm und Drang critics like Herder were formulating new ideas about Shakespeare that would become foundational for the romantic defense of the English bard.
This paper will address both these lacks by focusing on Montagu’s influence on the dominant scholarly discourse that developed into the romantic aesthetic. The so far unexplored German reception of Montagu’s Essay is an important context to take into account because it will enable me to trace Montagu’s influence upon these developments in Shakespeare criticism, in which the foundational role of German criticism is today widely acknowledged. Based on a detailed case-study of the German reception of the Essay, I will argue that Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay played an important role in the shifts in emphasis that helped create the Romantic Shakespeare.
This case study also relates to larger questions regarding the canonization of women critics. How do we assess the influence of a female critic? What is at stake when we emphasize women’s own aesthetic tradition as an alternative to the dominant, male-oriented canon of criticism? I will thereby reflect upon the work that needs to be done in the writing of women’s literary history, arguing for an inclusive, transnational perspective.
SvD, January 2013
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