The Rise of English
In eighteenth-century England, the concept of literature was not confined asit sometimes is today to creative or imaginative writing. It meant thewhole body Of valued writing in society: philosophy, history, essays andletters as wellas poems. What made a text literary was not whether it wasfictional - the eighteenth century was in grave doubt about whether the newupstart form of the novel was literature at all - but whether it conformed tocertain standards of polite letters. The criteria of what counted as litera-ture, in other words, were frankly ideological: writing which embodied thevalues and tastes of a particular social class qualified as literature, whereasa street ballad, a popular romance and perhaps even the drama did not. Atthis historical point, then, the value-ladenness of the concept of literaturewas reasonably self-evident.
In the eighteenth century, however, literature did more than embodycertain social values: it was a vital instrument for their deeper entrenchmentand wider dissemination. Eighteenth-century England had emerged, battered but intact, from a bloody civil war in the previous century which hadset the social classes at each others throats; and in the drive to reconsolidatea shaken social order, the neo-classical notions of Reason, Nature, order andpropriety, epitomized in art, were key concepts. With the need to incorpor-ate the increasingly powerful but spiritually rather raw middle classes intounity with the ruling aristocracy, to diffuse polite social manners, habits ofcorrect taste and common cultural standards, literature gained a newimportance. It included a whole set of ideological institutions: periodicals,coffee houses, social and aesthetic treatises, sermons, classical translations,guidebooks to manners and morals. Literature was not a matter of feltexperience, personal response or imaginative uniqueness:such terms,indissociable for us today from the whole idea of the literary, would nothave counted for much with Henry Fielding.
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