Trevor Ross

My research considers how, by end of the eighteenth century, the emergence of a modern category of “literature” had displaced older rhetorical accounts of verbal art. My first book, The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century, deals with the changing ways in which the English valued their own literature. My second, Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain, shifts the focus from the value of literature to its public uses and its legal regulation. I argue that the liberalization of public expression, and the gradual ascendancy of democratic norms, necessitated a redefinition of literature's social functions.

I am currently at work on a third book, entitled Interpreting English Literature: Origins of an Idea, which tells yet another side of the story of the emergence of “literature” as a distinct discursive category. In it, I present a history of how writers, commentators, and educators from the early modern period to the beginning of the nineteenth century defined the nature of literary meaning. Prevailing assumptions about this meaning, I contend, were significantly revised during the eighteenth century. Formerly, poetry and other forms of verbal art were valued for giving beauty and force to universal truths, which were unchanging, determinable, and relevant to all ethical, political, and spiritual occasions. Yet by the early nineteenth century literary works were being prized as inexhaustibly rich in signification and marked as much by a universal meaningfulness as by an insuperable otherness.

Selected Publications

Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2018)

The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (1998)

“Canon and Classic.” The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Literary Theory. Ed. John Frow et al. (2019)

“Censorship.” The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship. Ed. Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens and Marysa Demoor (2019)

"The Fate of Style in an Age of Intellectual Property," ELH 80 (2013): 747-782.

“The Author.” Encyclopedia of Law and Literature. Ed. Thomas Gutmann and Klaus Stierstorfer (forthcoming 2022)