Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of the English Athens

Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of the English Athens Review

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Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of the English Athens Feature

As 'the English Athens', Oxford has long been central to the country's cultural life. For over six centuries the city has been lauded, slighted and analysed in the pages of English literature. While it has been hailed as a bastion of excellence, beauty and truth on the one hand, it has also been denigrated for its elitism, exclusivity and insularity on the other. Oxford in English Literature provides for the first time a detailed overview of the literary representations, ranging from Chaucer's account of medieval students to modern-day detective stories. The book begins with the legend of the eighth-century Princess Frideswide, the city's patron saint. Praise for an English Athens first arose in the glad springtime of Elizabethan times, and after the disruptions of the Civil War the university settled back on its laurels, leading to the virulent denunciations of the eighteenth-century. The popularity of the Oxford Novel in the early nineteenth century coincided with a Romantic upsurge in affection for the university, culminating in Matthew Arnold's eulogy and the Oxford Myth of the early twentieth century. The underlying argument of Dougill's work is that the defining symbol of the literature is as much the college wall as the dreaming spire, for writings about Oxford have been shaped by the enclosed nature of the collegiate structure. In literary terms it was depicted as a world of its own - secluded, conservative, and eccentric. Idealised, it became a cloistered utopia, an Athenian city-state, or an Arcadian idyll. The privileged circumstance led to resentment from those on the outside, first evident in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. With greater egalitarian and meritocratic values in the twentieth century, élitism came under attack and with it the notion of a sheltered paradise. At the same time the loosening of college ties led to diversification as writers turned to previously unexamined parts of the city.

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