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ELEP forms one part of the special research project on national literatures in international contexts at the University of Göttingen (SFB 529 'Internationalität nationaler Literaturen'). Work in this research group is centred mainly on interreactions between different literatures: How do authors - or, implicitly, cultures - react to other authors or cultures? What modes of reactions are used, and how can they be classified?
The English literature project is concerned mainly with English texts published between 1660 and about 1750, that is between the Restoration of the Stuarts and the middle of the 18th century. It is in that period of time that English authors attempt to establish and define a national literature of their own. The aim of the project lies in analysing the various modes and arguments used by English authors to define their own literary position in contrast to those of the culturally dominant French writers, as also in contrast to classical models. Thus, it is a process of literary emancipation first from French - and later from classical - cultural hegemony that forms the centre of interest.
In accordance with general procedures in the research project, work was focussed on analysing literary criticism of the time. John Dryden, John Dennis, Thomas Rymer, to name only a few, are therefore among the prominent authors. In addition, other genres - such as itineraries, medical tracts, plays, poems, novels, sermons, moral weeklies - were analysed, so that the overall picture of English literary emancipation does not rest on the somewhat eclectic literary criticism alone.
The texts in question were scanned for all arguments expressing an opinion on literary culture, whether English, French or other; these arguments were collected and grouped, and, according to their basic structures, classified. As the repetition of arguments plays an important role in this process of emancipation, the term "topos" was adopted, following E. R. Curtius' use of the word.
It soon became apparent that the huge numbers of excerpts and quotations could hardly be analysed adequately by using a conventional card index. The clippings were therefore transferred to a computer database; the programme used was Microsoft Access 97. Access 97 is part of the Microsoft Office suite and contains a number of export/import facilities that enable its communication with other MS programmes such as Excel and Word; thus, both the retrieval of the clippings and the analyses were made easier and more reliable.
Through the navigation bar at the top of the page,
several sub-pages can be accessed, among them
a description of the project, its aims and the methods used
("Projekt"); an extract of the database, together with
some introductory remarks on its form and contents
("Datenbank"); and two essays ("Auswertung"),
one containing a work-in-progress analysis of the project's
findings after two years of research, and the other describing
and evaluating the suitability of MS Access 97 for literary databases.
All the dependant sites are in German - as yet, there is no full
English version available. If you are interested in further
information, please contact us by
mail.
Imprint / Copyright information
Last modified: February 2002.