Reference > Cambridge History > The Age of Johnson > The Literary Influence of the Middle Ages > Influence of Architecture
  Limited Influence of the Middle Ages upon Modern Literature The Literary Gothic Terror or Wonder  

CONTENTS · VOLUME CONTENTS · INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume X. The Age of Johnson.

X. The Literary Influence of the Middle Ages.

§ 2. Influence of Architecture.


The Middle Ages did much to help literary fancy long before the time of Scott; but the thrill of mystery and wonder came much more from Gothic buildings than from Morte d’Arthur, and it is found in writers who had paid little or no attention to old English romance, as well as in those who showed their interest in it. The famous passage in Congreve’s Mourning Bride is romantic in spirit and intention, and its success is won from a Gothic cathedral, with no intermediary literature. So, also, the romantic ruin in the first version of Collins’s Ode to Evening, “whose walls more awful nod,” is pictorial, not literary, except in the conventional “nod,” which is literary, indeed, but not at all medieval. This “nod,” by the way, has been carefully studied in Guesses at Truth; 1  it is a good criterion of the eighteenth century romantic style; Collins, happily, got rid of it, and saved his poem unblemished.   2
Note 1. Pp. 44 ff. Eversley Series edn. 1897. [ back ]

CONTENTS · VOLUME CONTENTS · INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
  Limited Influence of the Middle Ages upon Modern Literature The Literary Gothic Terror or Wonder  
 
Loading
Click here to shop the Bartleby Bookstore.
Shakespeare · Bible · Saints · Anatomy · Harvard Classics · Lit. History · Quotations · Poetry
© 1993–2013 Bartleby.com · [Top 150]