Adam Smyth
In the Beginning was the Word
Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities
By James Turner
Princeton University Press 550pp £24.95 order from our bookshop
The prospect of nearly six hundred pages on the history of philology may not quicken everyone’s pulse: philology ‘comes coated with the dust of the library’, James Turner admits, ‘and totters along with arthritic creakiness’. But this is a swashbuckling book that vaults across two thousand years of intellectual history to offer a genealogy of modern academic disciplines. Philology means, literally, a love of words and of learning – in Turner’s more precise definition, ‘the multifaceted study of texts, languages, and the phenomenon of language itself’ – and this book tells the life story of the modern humanities. It also makes an impassioned case for the fact that scholars need to remember these origins in order for their subjects to survive.
Turner’s Philology reads like a caffeine-fuelled love letter to the great polymaths of the past: flawed heroes of wide-ranging erudition such as the scholar of ancient India Sir William ‘Oriental’ Jones (1746–94), or the American Charles
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Things began to go wrong between Mr and Mrs Eliot almost immediately. Ostensibly the problem was Vivien’s mysteriously fluctuating health. It would be easy to reduce the Eliot marriage simply to a catalogue of Viv’s medical crises.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/marriage-made-in-hell
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions