Uncommon Tongues - by Catherine Nicholson (Hardcover)

About the Book

Uncommon Tongues explores the tension between the political value of eloquence and its classical definition in sixteenth-century English literature, locating eccentricity and unfamiliarity at the heart of pedagogical, rhetorical, and literary culture.

Book Synopsis

In the late sixteenth century, as England began to assert its integrity as a nation and English its merit as a literate tongue, vernacular writing took a turn for the eccentric. Authors such as John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, and Christopher Marlowe loudly announced their ambitions for the mother tongue--but the extremity of their stylistic innovations yielded texts that seemed hardly English at all. Critics likened Lyly's hyperembellished prose to a bejeweled "Indian," complained that Spenser had "writ no language," and mocked Marlowe's blank verse as a "Turkish" concoction of "big-sounding sentences" and "termes Italianate." In its most sophisticated literary guises, the much-vaunted common tongue suddenly appeared quite foreign.

In Uncommon Tongues, Catherine Nicholson locates strangeness at the paradoxical heart of sixteenth-century vernacular culture. Torn between two rival conceptions of eloquence, savvy writers and teachers labored to reconcile their country's need for a consistent, accessible mother tongue with the expectation that poetic language depart from everyday speech. That struggle, waged by pedagogical theorists and rhetoricians as well as authors we now recognize as some of the most accomplished and significant in English literary history, produced works that made the vernacular's oddities, constraints, and defects synonymous with its virtues. Such willful eccentricity, Nicholson argues, came to be seen as both the essence and antithesis of English eloquence.

Review Quotes

"An excellent discussion of ideas about style among English Renaissance writers, noteworthy for its remarkable lucidity and eloquence."-- "Paula Blank, College of William and Mary"

"An illuminating study. Uncommon Tongues opens up a very different understanding of the category and the lineaments of English eloquence. Nicholson is a very observant, ingenious, and persuasive literary critic."-- "Jeff Dolven, Princeton University"

"Nicholson complicates the triumphalist visions of earlier scholarship with a nuanced account of how England negotiated the marginality of its own status vis-à-vis the classical tradition, and the strangeness of eloquence per se, as a defamiliarized version of the language."-- "Recent Studies in the English Renaissance"

"Nicholson uniquely observes that contrary to what is commonly thought, the sixteenth-century writers purposefully sought linguistic eccentricity as a response against an ideal, traditional form of eloquence."-- "Sixteenth Century Journal"

About the Author

Catherine Nicholson teaches English at Yale University.