At the Traverse of the Wall: Archaeological transformations in Thomas Percy and David Jones
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-16

By comparing the uses of archaeology in [1] Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and [2] David Jones’s Anathemata (1952), this paper will offer examples of the particular modes in which archaeology is permitted to enter and transform poetic texts under different cultural conditions and generic expectations. The hybrid genre of philological poetry, which is applicable to both texts, enables an account of negotiations between poetry, philology, and archaeology across time periods and institutional contexts. 

The historical study of philological poetry is intrinsically multi-temporal and alert to the archaeological layering of textual objects. Between the periods of the two texts in question here, the concept of archaeology moves from a general sense roughly correspondent to ‘all history’ towards the specialist recovery and study of ancient monuments and artefacts. This paper is less interested in interpreting the content of particular archaeological moments in the two works than it is in how their different conditions enable and inflect those moments formally, paratextually, and in terms of the selection of specific material for inclusion, and how these processes are affected by changing notions of archaeological knowledge.  

Luke McMullan (New York University)