From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Studies in English Language

by Haruko Momma

The study of English language and literature in Britain changed dramatically between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. From Philology to English Studies explores the contribution of philology to this evolution. Haruko Momma charts both the rise and fall of philology from antiquity to the late eighteenth century, and the impact of modern philology on the study of modern languages and literatures. Focusing in detail on the work of key philologists in the nineteenth century, Momma considers how they shaped European discourse and especially vernacular studies in Britain: William Jones' discovery of Sanskrit in British India gave rise to Indo-European studies; Max Müller's study of this same language helped spread the Aryan myth to the English-speaking world; the OED achieved its greatness as a post-national lexicon through the editorship of the Scottish dialectologist.

238 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2012

Reviews

[Simon Cook]

It is really hard to find any good secondary literature on the history of philology, especially the history of the study of philology in England. This book looked the ticket and I splashed out $60 for a kindle copy of it.... Gah! This book is another disciplinary history, by which I mean that the perspective of the author is confined to her own modern discipline - English - and she tells a teleological story leading up to it. She appears utterly unaware, to point out just one blinding lacuna, that the hegemony of philology was successively challenged in the 1880s by the new disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. Quite why this definitive moment in the history of philology is passed over is mysterious, although I suspect it relates to the key role of racial categories in the arguments of the time and the fact that Momma wants to hold ideas of race at arms distance from philology (but then, why write a book that covers an intellectual era in which ideas of race were so dominant?)