Daniel H. Wells

The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay. And that's certainly not something I realized when I started writing this. Notes [1] I'm thinking of Oresme (c. 1323-82). But it's hard to pick a date, because there was a sudden drop-off in scholarship just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science. The cause may have been the plague of 1347; the trend in scientific progress matches the population curve. [2] Parker, William R. "Where Do College English Departments Come From?" College English 28 (1966-67), pp. 339-351. Reprinted in Gray, Donald J. (ed). The Department of English at Indiana University Bloomington 1868-1970. Indiana University Publications. Daniels, Robert V. The University of Vermont: The First Two Hundred Years. University of Vermont, 1991. Mueller, Friedrich M. Letter to the Pall Mall Gazette. 1886/87. Reprinted in Bacon, Alan (ed). The Nineteenth-Century History of English Studies. Ashgate, 1998. [3] I'm compressing the story a bit. At first literature took a back seat to philology, which (a) seemed more serious and (b) was popular in Germany, where many of the leading scholars of that generation had been trained ...»