Text
Editionsbericht
Literatur: Percy
Literatur: Anthologie
Literatur: Brief
TO
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
ELIZABETH
COUNTESS OF NORTHUMBERLAND:
IN HER OWN RIGHT
BARONESS PERCY, LUCY, POYNINGS, FITZ-PAYNE,
BRYAN, AND LATIMER.
MADAM,
THOSE writers, who solicit the protection of the noble and the great, are
often exposed to censure by the impropriety of their adresses: a remark that will perhaps
[VI] be too readily applied to him, who having nothing better to offer than the rude songs
of ancient minstrels, aspires to the patronage of the Countess of NORTHUMBERLAND,
and hopes that the barbarous productions of unpolished ages can obtain the approbation
or the notice of her, who adorns courts by her presence, and diffuses elegance by her example.
But this impropriety, it is presumed, will disappear, when it is declared that these poems are presented to your LADYSHIP, not as labours of art, but as effusions of nature, shewing the first efforts of ancient genius, and exhibiting the customs and opinions of remote ages: of ages that had been almost lost to memory, had not the gallant deeds of your illustrious ancestors preserved them from oblivion.
No active or comprehensive mind can forbear some attention to the reliques of anti[VII]quity: It is prompted by natural curiosity to survey the progress of life and manners, and to inquire by what gradations barbarity was civilized, grossness refined, and ignorance instructed: but this curiosity, MADAM, must be stronger in those, who, like your LADYSHIP, can remark in every period the influence of some great progenitor, and who still feel in their effects the transactions and events of distant centuries.
By such Bards, MADAM, as I am now introducing to your presence, was the infancy of genius nurtured and advanced, by such were the minds of unlettered warriors softened and enlarged, by such was the memory of illustrious actions preserved and propagated, by such were the heroic deeds of the Earls of NORTHUMBERLAND sung at festivals in the hall of ALNWICK: and those songs, which the bounty of your ancestors rewarded, now return to your LADYSHIP by a kind of hereditary right; and, I flatter myself, will find [VIII] such reception, as is usually shewn to poets and historians, by those whose consciousness of merit makes it their interest to be long remembered.
I am,
MADAM,
Your LADYSHIP'S
Most Humble
And most devoted Servant,
THOMAS PERCY.
Erstdruck und Druckvorlage
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry:
Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of our earlier Poets,
(Chiefly of the Lyric kind.)
Together with some few of later Date.
3 Bde. London: Dodsley 1765.
Hier: Bd. 1, S. V-VIII.
Die Textwiedergabe erfolgt nach dem ersten Druck
(Editionsrichtlinien).
URL: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100024549 [Bd. 1-3]
URL: https://books.google.de/books?id=DtkFAAAAQAAJ [Bd. 1]
URL: https://books.google.de/books?id=HdkFAAAAQAAJ [Bd. 2]
URL: https://books.google.de/books?id=DXo_AQAAMAAJ [Bd. 3]
Literatur: Percy
Axer, Eva: "Effusions of nature" – "Samenkörner der Nation".
The Politics of Memory in Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry"
and Herder's "Volkslieder".
In: German Life and Letters 66 (2013), S. 388-401.
Domsch, Sebastian: The Emergence of Literary Criticism in 18th-Century Britain.
Discourse between Attacks and Authority.
Berlin u. Boston 2014 (= Buchreihe der Anglia / Anglia Book Series, 47).
Genette, Gérard: Paratexte.
Das Buch vom Beiwerk des Buches.
Frankfurt a.M. 2001 (= suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft, 1510).
Groom, Nick: The Making of Percy's Reliques.
Oxford 1999 (= Oxford English Monographs).
Martínez, Matías: Lyric – Keeper of the Past:
On the Poetics of Popular Poetry in T. Percy's "Reliques of Ancient Poetry"
and J. G. Herder's "Volkslieder".
In: Proceedings of the XVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association "Literature as Cultural Memory.
Bd. 5: Genres as Repositories of Cultural Memory. Hrsg. von Hendrik van Gorp u.a.
Amsterdam 2000, S. 205-217.
Niles, John D.: The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901.
Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past.
Chichester 2015.
Percy, Thomas: Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
With a new Introduction by Nick Groom.
3 Bde. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press 1996.
Regan, John: Ambiguous Progress and its Poetic Correlatives:
Percy's Reliques and Stadial History.
In: Journal of English Literary History 81 (2014), S. 615-634.
Regan, John: Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760-1790.
London 2018.
Rix, Robert: Thomas Percy's Antiquarian Alternative to Ossian.
In: Journal of Folklore Research 46.2 (2009), S. 197-229.
Savonius-Wroth, Celestina.
Visions of British Culture from the Reformation to Romanticism.
The Protestant Discovery of Tradition.
Cham 2022.
Strabone, Jeff: Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century.
Imagined Antiquities.
Cham 2018.
Edition
Lyriktheorie » R. Brandmeyer